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Isn't it better to have one idea that is insightful and correct, than to have many ideas which are wrong, like most commentators?
by cia_plant 17y ago
Isn't it better to have one idea that is insightful and correct, than to have many ideas which are wrong, like most commentators?
- katamole 17y agoNot when it keeps being rehashed ad nauseum.
- tc 17y agoMaybe he intends to keep rehashing it until people understand. Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated.
- biohacker42 17y agoIt wasn't that great of an idea: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html
- katamole 17y agoGood ideas, it seems, need to be repeated. Absolutely not. Ideas that are diffuse and unoriginal, on the other hand, are often repeated because they are uncompelling. I've read The Black Swan, and although it was entertaining, I didn't feel like I learned anything of value.
- tc 17y agoAbsolutely not. Bastiat articulated the Broken Window Fallacy in 1850, and here we are 159 years later shredding perfectly good cars to 'create jobs.' It certainly seems like some good ideas can't be repeated often enough.
- omouse 17y agoThe only good idea that he has is to repeat and rehash in order to sell more books.
- jacobolus 17y agoIsn’t being better than most commentators an awfully unambitious goal?
- huntse 17y agoWell perhaps. So let's think about it. Black swans are not rare, they were thought to be completely impossible, and then people found them not to be impossible. So far maybe not so correct. Secondly, regarding insight. This idea which everyone credits to Taleb is of course described all over the place. For example, as "the impossibility of inductive reasoning in the natural sciences" in The Mathematical Experience. As far as fat tails are concerned, every textbook on financial maths I own talks about fat tails the corrections that must be made to account for them, and they were all published before either of Taleb's books.