7 ms·

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “The math comes first, words later.”

71 points by nileshtrivedi 12y ago

Tarrosion 12y ago
Disclaimer: I have not read the paper under discussion. But that paper is not what I want to comment about. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is clearly an intelligent person, and has presumably earned the right to be taken seriously. The more of his writing I experience, the less I want to. I'm really unsure what purpose his aggressive attacks serve. In the linked post he refers to Pinker and Dawkins as science journalists, which is not inaccurate but surely elides their respectable scientific expertise in biology, psychology, evolution, etc. Those two are not scientific (or mathematical) light-weights. Then later in the post: "I view Richard Dawkins with intellectual revulsion as the perfect bullshit artist on the planet." A recent tweet from nntaleb: "The fewer the Gods,the greater the intolerance. n=0 (Dawkins), n= 1(Isis), n=3-24 (Greek Orthodoxy),n flex (Mediterranean Pagan/Baalist)" Compare to Steven Pinker's recent tweets about AI risk: "What's with the technologists and their doomsday predictions about Artificial Intelligence?" "Why I (and others) are not worried. http://is.gd/lROO1B http://is.gd/lROO1B via @edge" - a very different way to note disagreement! My point here is not to attack NN Taleb, though I do think he should be ashamed of himself. Rather, this short note and other similar writing illustrate the importance of not just what you say, but how you say it. In an intellectual disagreement between Pinker and Taleb, I have little to no rational reason to believe one over the other. But perhaps irrationally, I'm much more inclined to listen to Pinker inasmuch as he comes off as thoughtful, not vitriolic. A totally different point: Math can't be misinterpreted? What planet is this guy living on? All models require explanation and interpretation. If you give me 147 numbers, we can't rationally disagree about what the mean of those numbers is, but we can surely disagree or miscommunicate about what that mean means for our life.
Selfcommit 12y ago
Dawkins has never struck me as being particularly intellectual. The stance he takes on his definition of science often comes across as extreme as many religious fundamentalist perspectives.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  Any particular reason why? He holds a PhD and will happily present scientific facts if you wish to debate him in something.
  - msandford 12y ago
    From an article linked elsewhere in the comments, a comment by Dawkins: "I greatly admire EO Wilson & his huge contributions to entomology, ecology, biogeography, conservation, etc. He’s just wrong on kin selection." I get that you can slam someone like that about very, very well established stuff like physics; if someone says F = M * a * v then rip into them all you want (there is no v in the eq.). That stuff is well established, I think in physics you have to get 5 sigma to claim "significance" ( p = 0.0000003 ) which is pretty hard to do on accident. But when you're dealing with biology thus far significance is still a p value of around 0.05 which means there's a 5% chance it could have happened by accident. That's a pretty substantial risk, at least relative to the world of physics. So for someone to proclaim certainty on a subject which is inherently much, much less certain you have to wonder what's going on. How did a person get so confident of something without the data telling them to be that confident? Is it possible that they're choosing to believe something further than what the data show? If they're willing to exaggerate their confidence on one subject, who's to say they aren't doing it elsewhere? Unfortunately in a lot of realms of science people end up with beliefs about how things work that aren't rigorously backed up. That doesn't make said beliefs inherently wrong, but pretending that they're provably correct when they're not smacks of charlatanism.
    - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
      You seem to think that because it's more likely for someone to be wrong in Biology versus Physics that they can't have a strong, confident opinion backed by science. Dawkins holds a PhD and is a really smart guy who has contributed to science in general and, more specifically, the theory of evolution. I don't see the problem here. As far as I can tell they were both being asshats to each other in the media (Wilson calling him a Journalist then Dawkins saying to throw Wilson's book hard). Reading Dawkin's response[1] I think it has merit and it refers to plenty of science (which doesn't come across at charlatanism to me) though I'm not going to say he's right because I don't know. [1] http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/edward-wilson-social-conquest-earth-evolutionary-errors-origin-species http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/edw...
nemo1618 12y ago
Can someone summarize the linked paper? What result does it propose w.r.t altruism, and why are Dawkins/Pinker/others challenging it? EDIT: after some digging, I found this article: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the-professors http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the..., which summarizes the disagreement like so: For lay spectators, the row is a symptom of the long and controversial evolution of the very idea of evolution. At root it is a dispute about whether natural selection, the theory of "the survival of the fittest" first put forward by Charles Darwin in 1859, occurs only to preserve the single gene. Wilson is an advocate of "multi-level selection theory", a development of the idea of "kin selection", which holds that other biological, social and even environmental priorities may be behind the process. But Dawkins is far from convinced: "Wilson now rejects 'kin selection' and replaces it with a revival of 'group selection' – the poorly defined and incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of whole groups of organisms."
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Dawkins [EDIT: remove adjective] believes in kin selection, based on results of inclusive fitness theory, which makes predictions about fitness when interacting organisms are related. (e.g. ant workers share 3/4 of their genes, and ants are remarkably social.) Wilson et al. contend that inclusive fitness theory is a bit of a distraction, since it only applies in rare cases, and in those cases it's just a specialization of direct fitness, which can be calculated without respect to relatedness. Later in the supplement they build a model which has the features discussed by kin selection without relying on relatedness.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Are there accessible lay-person "popular science" type books that contradict Dawkins and are highly regarded? My very limited understanding of evolutionary biology mostly comes from reading Dawkins books, which were highly enjoyable. And the concepts seem pretty solid and playing around with my own toy throwaway simulations, don't seem implausible. I also understood that other math had backed up the general points of Dawkins. If this isn't the case, what's the recommended pop-sci reading to help make me less wrong on all this?
jessaustin 12y ago
Having spoken with Prof. Wilson on numerous occasions (long ago), and thus knowing what a charming gentleman he is, I can't help but suspect that he would have preferred this work escape the attention of combative public intellectuals like Dawkins, Pinker, and Taleb. The actual paper with math in it, rather than this gloss of an abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/bin/NIHMS329641-supplement-Supplementary_Information.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/bin/NIHM...
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Having spoken with Prof. Wilson on numerous occasions (long ago), and thus knowing what a charming gentleman he is, I can't help but suspect that he would have preferred this work escape the attention of combative public intellectuals like Dawkins, Pinker, and Taleb. Dawkins and Wilson have been directly exchanging attacks on this issue for some time [0], and however charming Wilson might be personally, he's hardly been any less combative than Dawkins. [0] e.g., http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawkins-labelled-journalist-by-eo-wilson http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawki...
jtkme 12y ago
Because countering verbal BS with ad hominem attacks is clearly the answer ...
Luc 12y ago
I think this article from last year sums up the context of the situation pretty well: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawkins-labelled-journalist-by-eo-wilson http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawki... To me, the simplest explanation for why Taleb is getting involved is because he can't stand Dawkins. Not exactly pure motives.
- SiVal 12y ago
  Pure motives? Do you imagine that all Dawkins cares about is to find the truth, regardless of what it turns out to be? The reason Dawkins is involved is because he can't stand EO Wilson casting doubt on the ideas for which Dawkins became famous. Pure motives in science are nice to have but aren't necessary. It shouldn't matter why a scientific argument is made as long as opponents are free to counter it. Taleb is saying that instead of just spinning verbal yarns like some social "scientists" do to disguise their political advocacy as actual science, Dawkins (who is a real scientist) needs to show where Wilson's math is either mistaken or incorrectly models the data (by, for example, abstracting away something important). If he can't or won't do so, it doesn't mean he's wrong, but it means his rebuttal is just rhetoric.
  - Luc 12y ago
    > It shouldn't matter why a scientific argument is made as long as opponents are free to counter it. Yeah, sure thing, if we all had unlimited time and brain power to devote to these things. But I can't weigh the issues myself on their scientific merit since I don't have the background (ignoring the fact I might easily fool myself too) and I'm too old to wait 50 years for everything to get sorted out. So on the balance of things, the debate appears to be ongoing and reasonable people reasonably disagree, but I don't think I'm wrong saying that Taleb's 'contribution' to the 'scientific argument' is mainly heckling Dawkins.
    - SiVal 12y ago
      Well, sure, then Dawkins can dispose of it by rebutting the math. If he can't, then this "heckling" is an actual scientific contribution.
mathattack 12y ago
Taleb is pretty heavy duty with these attacks. I'm a big fan of his, but isn't it extreme to demote Dawkins [0] to just a journalist? He's got a Phd in animal decision making (close to the field in question here) and has been on the faculty of Oxford for 45 years. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I'm a big fan of his, but isn't it extreme to demote Dawkins to just a journalist? He's just adopting Wilson's attack on Dawkins [0], when Wilson said: "There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he's a journalist, and journalists are people that report what the scientists have found and the arguments I've had have actually been with scientists doing research." [0] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawkins-labelled-journalist-by-eo-wilson http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawki...
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Interesting. It's clear that this goes way beyond merely the paper in question.
misiti3780 12y ago
Taleb comes of as an asshole here, and a lot of the time really, but after reading all of his books (except dynamic hedging) i find myself agreeing with almost all of his core hypotheses. The Black Swan and Anti-fragile are some amazing reads.
thekemkid 12y ago
Could someone explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old? I feel like it went over my head. How does maths relate to altruism?
- one-more-minute 12y ago
  It's about having theories that explain/predict altruism, in the same way you'd have theories which explain/predict chemical reactions, electrons or the motion of blocks on slopes. You start with some basic assumptions and derive (mathematically/logically) the outcomes. You should check out kin selection for more detail on Dawkin's side of the debate, but basically the idea is that a "gene" for helping out your brother (for example) is likely to spread through the population because your brother probably also has the same "gene". You don't have to survive personally for your genes to live on, so your genes don't focus wholly on your personal wellbeing. If you want to be less hand-wavy you can work out the probabilities based on what we know about genes, and therefore work out how much altruism you expect to show towards members of your family vs. random strangers. For example, your relatedness to your siblings is a half, to your cousins 1/8th; hence the quip: I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins. — J.B.S. Haldane My knowledge of Wilson's argument is limited but I think the crux is that he (or at least someone) believes in selection on the level of groups of individuals (as opposed to just genes) and uses that to explain altruism instead / as well. Dawkins and others disagree. Taleb has basically argued "the maths checks out", but that's pretty much irrelevant when it's the starting assumptions that are under scrutiny, not the logic that follows.
  - thekemkid 12y ago
    Thank you very much.
  - sjg007 12y ago
    Groups of individuals are shared sets of genes anyway.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
stolio 12y ago
If 100 biologists sign a petition saying your model is wrong that should be a sign that it's time to double-check some things. And here we have an economist lecturing scientists about how to properly view and use math? True, biology is on the "softer" side of the scientific spectrum but I'm not convinced economics is even on it. "Math comes first" is a bad strategy. I'd (softly) argue that just like your probability of randomly hitting a rational number on the number line is zero, the probability of a given framework of math describing reality is also zero. You must explain why you think the math is relevant and descriptive of reality. Or you can demonstrate that your framework allows you to make better predictions than anything else. Either way you'll have to use your words.
- one-more-minute 12y ago
  This is exactly the thing. Your mathematics may be absolutely watertight, but if your starting assumptions aren't based in reality then your result isn't going to be either. Garbage in, garbage out – and that's going to be true regardless of how "hard" or "soft" your subject is. You could derive perfectly sound results about the population dynamics of pigs assuming that they can fly, but biologists are going to tell you you're wrong regardless of the maths – and rightly so.
- msandford 12y ago
  Welp, I guess we're going to have to pack up the modern world and go home then. Because many of the major advances in science thus far have been widely rejected by credentialed people at first only to eventually be proven correct. First Semmelweis, then Pasteur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_established_medical_opinions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur Copernicus and Galileo vs a lot of other people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_over_heliocentrism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ove... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus Einstein and relativity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_rela... I could do this for days if you'd like. Credentials are worth something of course, but credentials don't have metaphysical powers that prevent a person from being wrong once they have their credentials. EDIT: That's not to say I necessarily believe that these folks are correct and Dawkins is wrong. Just that the credentials don't mean as much as people think they should. It's not like getting a PhD prevents you from ever having a bias ever again. It'd be great if it was true, but it's not.
mathattack 12y ago
Here's a 2013 Facebook comment from Taleb that highlights the grudge... Richard Dawkins, in his statement about the number of Nobels granted to Moslems, showed a total ignorance of probability. A primitive violation. You never get an idea about the mean from measuring the tail (number of Nobels per capita). https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151694181698375&id=13012333374 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015169418...
macmac 12y ago
As Taleb points out himself it is in fact possible for the Wilson paper to be wrong even if the math is correct. This is exactly what this: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002098 http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour... paper demonstrates to be the case. Quote: "The misleading conclusions all resulted not from incorrect math but from overgeneralizing from narrow assumptions or parameter values. For example, all of their models implicitly assumed high relatedness, but modifying the model to allow lower relatedness shows that relatedness is essential and causal in the evolution of eusociality. Their modeling strategy, properly applied, actually confirms major insights of inclusive fitness studies of kin selection."
shas3 12y ago
I think the principal critique of Nowak et al.'s work is based on how it gets the biology wrong, not the math. Chicago evolutionary biologist (and prolific public intellectual) Jerry Coyne, reviews a recent paper that challenges Nowak et al.'s paper [1]. The answer to Taleb's weird post is within Coyne's review of Liao et al.: > As I (Coyne) noted at the time (of Nowak et al.'s publication), their (Nowak et al.'s) dismissal of relatedness and kin selection from their model seemed bizarre, since they didn’t vary relatedness in their model. If you don’t do that, how can you say it’s unimportant in evolving eusociality? "Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science. On a possibly related note, Taleb has recently been on a strange anti-Dawkins spree on Twitter and elsewhere [2]. Taleb has also done some weird anti-GMO bashing in the past [3]. [1] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/new-paper-shows-that-nowak-et-al-were-wrong-kin-selection-remains-a-valuable-tool-in-evolutionary-biology/ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/new-pape... [2] twitter.com/nntaleb [3] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-18/news/56221829_1_kiran-mazumdar-shaw-gm-crops-gm-technology http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-18/news...
- tensorproduct 12y ago
  //"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science. Very much agree. By this standard, one could put "1+1=2" as an appendix to every article you ever write and then defend them as having valid math, regardless of the content of the rest of the paper. I find this most surprising coming from Taleb, because I thought that one of his principal arguments in the world of finance was that rigourous mathematical models are of limited use in understanding complicated real world systems. Maybe I've misunderstood him, but he seems to have changed his tune.

71 points by nileshtrivedi 12y ago

Disclaimer: I have not read the paper under discussion. But that paper is not what I want to comment about. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is clearly an intelligent person, and has presumably earned the right to be taken seriously. The more of his writing I experience, the less I want to. I'm really unsure what purpose his aggressive attacks serve. In the linked post he refers to Pinker and Dawkins as science journalists, which is not inaccurate but surely elides their respectable scientific expertise in biology, psychology, evolution, etc. Those two are not scientific (or mathematical) light-weights. Then later in the post: "I view Richard Dawkins with intellectual revulsion as the perfect bullshit artist on the planet." A recent tweet from nntaleb: "The fewer the Gods,the greater the intolerance. n=0 (Dawkins), n= 1(Isis), n=3-24 (Greek Orthodoxy),n flex (Mediterranean Pagan/Baalist)" Compare to Steven Pinker's recent tweets about AI risk: "What's with the technologists and their doomsday predictions about Artificial Intelligence?" "Why I (and others) are not worried. http://is.gd/lROO1B http://is.gd/lROO1B via @edge" - a very different way to note disagreement! My point here is not to attack NN Taleb, though I do think he should be ashamed of himself. Rather, this short note and other similar writing illustrate the importance of not just what you say, but how you say it. In an intellectual disagreement between Pinker and Taleb, I have little to no rational reason to believe one over the other. But perhaps irrationally, I'm much more inclined to listen to Pinker inasmuch as he comes off as thoughtful, not vitriolic. A totally different point: Math can't be misinterpreted? What planet is this guy living on? All models require explanation and interpretation. If you give me 147 numbers, we can't rationally disagree about what the mean of those numbers is, but we can surely disagree or miscommunicate about what that mean means for our life.

Selfcommit 12y ago

Dawkins has never struck me as being particularly intellectual. The stance he takes on his definition of science often comes across as extreme as many religious fundamentalist perspectives.

BinaryIdiot 12y ago
Any particular reason why? He holds a PhD and will happily present scientific facts if you wish to debate him in something.
- msandford 12y ago
  From an article linked elsewhere in the comments, a comment by Dawkins: "I greatly admire EO Wilson & his huge contributions to entomology, ecology, biogeography, conservation, etc. He’s just wrong on kin selection." I get that you can slam someone like that about very, very well established stuff like physics; if someone says F = M * a * v then rip into them all you want (there is no v in the eq.). That stuff is well established, I think in physics you have to get 5 sigma to claim "significance" ( p = 0.0000003 ) which is pretty hard to do on accident. But when you're dealing with biology thus far significance is still a p value of around 0.05 which means there's a 5% chance it could have happened by accident. That's a pretty substantial risk, at least relative to the world of physics. So for someone to proclaim certainty on a subject which is inherently much, much less certain you have to wonder what's going on. How did a person get so confident of something without the data telling them to be that confident? Is it possible that they're choosing to believe something further than what the data show? If they're willing to exaggerate their confidence on one subject, who's to say they aren't doing it elsewhere? Unfortunately in a lot of realms of science people end up with beliefs about how things work that aren't rigorously backed up. That doesn't make said beliefs inherently wrong, but pretending that they're provably correct when they're not smacks of charlatanism.
  - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
    You seem to think that because it's more likely for someone to be wrong in Biology versus Physics that they can't have a strong, confident opinion backed by science. Dawkins holds a PhD and is a really smart guy who has contributed to science in general and, more specifically, the theory of evolution. I don't see the problem here. As far as I can tell they were both being asshats to each other in the media (Wilson calling him a Journalist then Dawkins saying to throw Wilson's book hard). Reading Dawkin's response[1] I think it has merit and it refers to plenty of science (which doesn't come across at charlatanism to me) though I'm not going to say he's right because I don't know. [1] http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/edward-wilson-social-conquest-earth-evolutionary-errors-origin-species http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/edw...

nemo1618 12y ago

Can someone summarize the linked paper? What result does it propose w.r.t altruism, and why are Dawkins/Pinker/others challenging it? EDIT: after some digging, I found this article: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the-professors http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the..., which summarizes the disagreement like so: For lay spectators, the row is a symptom of the long and controversial evolution of the very idea of evolution. At root it is a dispute about whether natural selection, the theory of "the survival of the fittest" first put forward by Charles Darwin in 1859, occurs only to preserve the single gene. Wilson is an advocate of "multi-level selection theory", a development of the idea of "kin selection", which holds that other biological, social and even environmental priorities may be behind the process. But Dawkins is far from convinced: "Wilson now rejects 'kin selection' and replaces it with a revival of 'group selection' – the poorly defined and incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of whole groups of organisms."

jessaustin 12y ago
Dawkins [EDIT: remove adjective] believes in kin selection, based on results of inclusive fitness theory, which makes predictions about fitness when interacting organisms are related. (e.g. ant workers share 3/4 of their genes, and ants are remarkably social.) Wilson et al. contend that inclusive fitness theory is a bit of a distraction, since it only applies in rare cases, and in those cases it's just a specialization of direct fitness, which can be calculated without respect to relatedness. Later in the supplement they build a model which has the features discussed by kin selection without relying on relatedness.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Are there accessible lay-person "popular science" type books that contradict Dawkins and are highly regarded? My very limited understanding of evolutionary biology mostly comes from reading Dawkins books, which were highly enjoyable. And the concepts seem pretty solid and playing around with my own toy throwaway simulations, don't seem implausible. I also understood that other math had backed up the general points of Dawkins. If this isn't the case, what's the recommended pop-sci reading to help make me less wrong on all this?

jessaustin 12y ago

Having spoken with Prof. Wilson on numerous occasions (long ago), and thus knowing what a charming gentleman he is, I can't help but suspect that he would have preferred this work escape the attention of combative public intellectuals like Dawkins, Pinker, and Taleb. The actual paper with math in it, rather than this gloss of an abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/bin/NIHMS329641-supplement-Supplementary_Information.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/bin/NIHM...

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Having spoken with Prof. Wilson on numerous occasions (long ago), and thus knowing what a charming gentleman he is, I can't help but suspect that he would have preferred this work escape the attention of combative public intellectuals like Dawkins, Pinker, and Taleb. Dawkins and Wilson have been directly exchanging attacks on this issue for some time [0], and however charming Wilson might be personally, he's hardly been any less combative than Dawkins. [0] e.g., http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawkins-labelled-journalist-by-eo-wilson http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawki...

jtkme 12y ago

Because countering verbal BS with ad hominem attacks is clearly the answer ...

Luc 12y ago

I think this article from last year sums up the context of the situation pretty well: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawkins-labelled-journalist-by-eo-wilson http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawki... To me, the simplest explanation for why Taleb is getting involved is because he can't stand Dawkins. Not exactly pure motives.

SiVal 12y ago
Pure motives? Do you imagine that all Dawkins cares about is to find the truth, regardless of what it turns out to be? The reason Dawkins is involved is because he can't stand EO Wilson casting doubt on the ideas for which Dawkins became famous. Pure motives in science are nice to have but aren't necessary. It shouldn't matter why a scientific argument is made as long as opponents are free to counter it. Taleb is saying that instead of just spinning verbal yarns like some social "scientists" do to disguise their political advocacy as actual science, Dawkins (who is a real scientist) needs to show where Wilson's math is either mistaken or incorrectly models the data (by, for example, abstracting away something important). If he can't or won't do so, it doesn't mean he's wrong, but it means his rebuttal is just rhetoric.
- Luc 12y ago
  > It shouldn't matter why a scientific argument is made as long as opponents are free to counter it. Yeah, sure thing, if we all had unlimited time and brain power to devote to these things. But I can't weigh the issues myself on their scientific merit since I don't have the background (ignoring the fact I might easily fool myself too) and I'm too old to wait 50 years for everything to get sorted out. So on the balance of things, the debate appears to be ongoing and reasonable people reasonably disagree, but I don't think I'm wrong saying that Taleb's 'contribution' to the 'scientific argument' is mainly heckling Dawkins.
  - SiVal 12y ago
    Well, sure, then Dawkins can dispose of it by rebutting the math. If he can't, then this "heckling" is an actual scientific contribution.

mathattack 12y ago

Taleb is pretty heavy duty with these attacks. I'm a big fan of his, but isn't it extreme to demote Dawkins [0] to just a journalist? He's got a Phd in animal decision making (close to the field in question here) and has been on the faculty of Oxford for 45 years. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

dragonwriter 12y ago
> I'm a big fan of his, but isn't it extreme to demote Dawkins to just a journalist? He's just adopting Wilson's attack on Dawkins [0], when Wilson said: "There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he's a journalist, and journalists are people that report what the scientists have found and the arguments I've had have actually been with scientists doing research." [0] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawkins-labelled-journalist-by-eo-wilson http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/richard-dawki...
- mathattack 12y ago
  Interesting. It's clear that this goes way beyond merely the paper in question.

misiti3780 12y ago

Taleb comes of as an asshole here, and a lot of the time really, but after reading all of his books (except dynamic hedging) i find myself agreeing with almost all of his core hypotheses. The Black Swan and Anti-fragile are some amazing reads.

thekemkid 12y ago

Could someone explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old? I feel like it went over my head. How does maths relate to altruism?

one-more-minute 12y ago
It's about having theories that explain/predict altruism, in the same way you'd have theories which explain/predict chemical reactions, electrons or the motion of blocks on slopes. You start with some basic assumptions and derive (mathematically/logically) the outcomes. You should check out kin selection for more detail on Dawkin's side of the debate, but basically the idea is that a "gene" for helping out your brother (for example) is likely to spread through the population because your brother probably also has the same "gene". You don't have to survive personally for your genes to live on, so your genes don't focus wholly on your personal wellbeing. If you want to be less hand-wavy you can work out the probabilities based on what we know about genes, and therefore work out how much altruism you expect to show towards members of your family vs. random strangers. For example, your relatedness to your siblings is a half, to your cousins 1/8th; hence the quip: I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins. — J.B.S. Haldane My knowledge of Wilson's argument is limited but I think the crux is that he (or at least someone) believes in selection on the level of groups of individuals (as opposed to just genes) and uses that to explain altruism instead / as well. Dawkins and others disagree. Taleb has basically argued "the maths checks out", but that's pretty much irrelevant when it's the starting assumptions that are under scrutiny, not the logic that follows.
- thekemkid 12y ago
  Thank you very much.
- sjg007 12y ago
  Groups of individuals are shared sets of genes anyway.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

stolio 12y ago

If 100 biologists sign a petition saying your model is wrong that should be a sign that it's time to double-check some things. And here we have an economist lecturing scientists about how to properly view and use math? True, biology is on the "softer" side of the scientific spectrum but I'm not convinced economics is even on it. "Math comes first" is a bad strategy. I'd (softly) argue that just like your probability of randomly hitting a rational number on the number line is zero, the probability of a given framework of math describing reality is also zero. You must explain why you think the math is relevant and descriptive of reality. Or you can demonstrate that your framework allows you to make better predictions than anything else. Either way you'll have to use your words.

one-more-minute 12y ago
This is exactly the thing. Your mathematics may be absolutely watertight, but if your starting assumptions aren't based in reality then your result isn't going to be either. Garbage in, garbage out – and that's going to be true regardless of how "hard" or "soft" your subject is. You could derive perfectly sound results about the population dynamics of pigs assuming that they can fly, but biologists are going to tell you you're wrong regardless of the maths – and rightly so.
msandford 12y ago
Welp, I guess we're going to have to pack up the modern world and go home then. Because many of the major advances in science thus far have been widely rejected by credentialed people at first only to eventually be proven correct. First Semmelweis, then Pasteur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_established_medical_opinions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur Copernicus and Galileo vs a lot of other people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_over_heliocentrism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ove... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus Einstein and relativity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_rela... I could do this for days if you'd like. Credentials are worth something of course, but credentials don't have metaphysical powers that prevent a person from being wrong once they have their credentials. EDIT: That's not to say I necessarily believe that these folks are correct and Dawkins is wrong. Just that the credentials don't mean as much as people think they should. It's not like getting a PhD prevents you from ever having a bias ever again. It'd be great if it was true, but it's not.

mathattack 12y ago

Here's a 2013 Facebook comment from Taleb that highlights the grudge... Richard Dawkins, in his statement about the number of Nobels granted to Moslems, showed a total ignorance of probability. A primitive violation. You never get an idea about the mean from measuring the tail (number of Nobels per capita). https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151694181698375&id=13012333374 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015169418...

macmac 12y ago

As Taleb points out himself it is in fact possible for the Wilson paper to be wrong even if the math is correct. This is exactly what this: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002098 http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour... paper demonstrates to be the case. Quote: "The misleading conclusions all resulted not from incorrect math but from overgeneralizing from narrow assumptions or parameter values. For example, all of their models implicitly assumed high relatedness, but modifying the model to allow lower relatedness shows that relatedness is essential and causal in the evolution of eusociality. Their modeling strategy, properly applied, actually confirms major insights of inclusive fitness studies of kin selection."

shas3 12y ago

I think the principal critique of Nowak et al.'s work is based on how it gets the biology wrong, not the math. Chicago evolutionary biologist (and prolific public intellectual) Jerry Coyne, reviews a recent paper that challenges Nowak et al.'s paper [1]. The answer to Taleb's weird post is within Coyne's review of Liao et al.: > As I (Coyne) noted at the time (of Nowak et al.'s publication), their (Nowak et al.'s) dismissal of relatedness and kin selection from their model seemed bizarre, since they didn’t vary relatedness in their model. If you don’t do that, how can you say it’s unimportant in evolving eusociality? "Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science. On a possibly related note, Taleb has recently been on a strange anti-Dawkins spree on Twitter and elsewhere [2]. Taleb has also done some weird anti-GMO bashing in the past [3]. [1] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/new-paper-shows-that-nowak-et-al-were-wrong-kin-selection-remains-a-valuable-tool-in-evolutionary-biology/ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/new-pape... [2] twitter.com/nntaleb [3] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-18/news/56221829_1_kiran-mazumdar-shaw-gm-crops-gm-technology http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-18/news...

tensorproduct 12y ago
//"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science. Very much agree. By this standard, one could put "1+1=2" as an appendix to every article you ever write and then defend them as having valid math, regardless of the content of the rest of the paper. I find this most surprising coming from Taleb, because I thought that one of his principal arguments in the world of finance was that rigourous mathematical models are of limited use in understanding complicated real world systems. Maybe I've misunderstood him, but he seems to have changed his tune.