7 ms·

The Mathiness of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

51 points by chewxy 11y ago

newtrader 11y ago
Has been debunked https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249
- takasc2 11y ago
  Taleb does not accept/understand the criticism, and has posted some more mathiness and crude insults as a "response" would be another interpretation
  - newtrader 11y ago
    Taleb response is not rude unlike Merberg https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 reply
    - dvanduzer 11y ago
      If you're going to create an account just to stan for Taleb, then please offer a little bit more substance in your comments. Deconstructing the Precautionary Principle is not "misinterpreting" PP. The entire notion of "mathiness" put forth by the author is that PP is too wiggly, and thus open to whatever vague interpretation is convenient. That is the meat of what Merberg is saying, and handwaving it away isn't an argument.
      - pointeroffact 11y ago
        the person you are talking to is taleb himself. he pops up all over the internet when he is criticized and gives these very... terse responses.
        dvanduzer 11y ago
        says... another account created just to comment on this issue. I put my foot in my mouth all the time, but I put my name to it. Taleb is interesting. Are you saying that the other account is literally Taleb, and that he's known for astroturfing campaigns? I wouldn't discard such a proposition, but I'd prefer hearing it from someone non-anonymous. (For all I know, you're just an account created to extend the thread.)
- JackFr 11y ago
  That's hardly debunking. I would call it further obfuscation and and an appeal to motive. Taleb is a noble truth seeker and the GMO proponents are out to silence him. Hardly. Having read his books, he's a bright guy often with compelling ideas. If he would leave them as thought experiments and appeals to common sense honestly I think his arguments would be more effective. His need to formalize everything mathematically, for a reader with a moderately sophisticated mathematical background, ends up undermining his argument.
  - dvanduzer 11y ago
    All I can grok out of Taleb's rebuttal is that he and his team might be conflating "rare events with predictable frequency" and "events with unknown frequency" but I don't know if this is accurate either. Any help?
  - bluecalm 11y ago
    That's most of his writing though: throw a lot of complicated words at the reader and hope some naive ones start seeing mystique depth in his thought. His writing is incoherent though. Even reading abstract of his paper [1]: >>We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans", unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence. We formalize PP, placing it within the statistical and probabilistic structure of ruin problems, in which a system is at risk of total failure, and in place of risk we use a formal fragility based approach. We make a central distinction between 1) thin and fat tails, 2) Local and systemic risks and place PP in the joint Fat Tails and systemic cases. We discuss the implications for GMOs (compared to Nuclear energy) and show that GMOs represent a public risk of global harm (while harm from nuclear energy is comparatively limited and better characterized). PP should be used to prescribe severe limits on GMOs. Leaves little doubt. You can't call him a truth seeker - he is a quack with some talent for wooing people. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787 http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
    - 11y ago
evanpw 11y ago
I like the term "mathiness" for this, because it seems like exactly the same kind of thing that's complained about in economics under that name. Namely, you claim (necessarily without proof) that a real-world phenomenon is analogous to a certain mathematical model. Then you prove some things about the model. Finally, you claim that the things you've proved about the model are also true about the real world. It doesn't matter how rigorous the mathematical steps in the middle are, the strength of this kind of argument is determined by the first step: how strong is the analogy between the mathematical system and real life? In physics, we can build models where the analogy is very strong: when we try out new situations in both the model and in real life, we get the same answer in both. In (macro-)economics, we typically do something weaker, where we start with a set of models determined by intuition, and then choose the one that gives results most similar to real life in the situations we've already seen. Prediction of future events is really difficult. It seems like the approach in Taleb's paper is even weaker. We choose a model based on pure analogy, explicitly disclaim the usefulness of evidence ("While evidentiary approaches are often considered to reflect adherence to the scientific method in its purest form, it is apparent that these approaches do not apply to ruin problems"), and then attack anyone who says that we've done something other than prove a mathematical theorem about the real world. It's too bad, because underneath all of the "mathiness" is one of the strongest arguments against GMOs that I've heard (and I say that as a GMO-eater). It just should have been an opinion piece in the NYT rather than a research article on the arxiv.
- pcrh 11y ago
  From the point pf view of a biologist, his argument against GMO is pretty weak. He is essentially saying that we don't know, therefore there could be a large negative consequence. However, he has failed to grasp, or educate himself sufficiently, that gene transfer between organisms is in fact a common occurrence in natural ecosystems [0]. Further, at this moment at least, the genes that are being transferred artificially are in general not genes that would cause havoc if they somehow became mobilized from the species into which they were introduced. By way of example, the protein Bt confers resistance to insect predation,it is originally derived from a bacterium that killed insects in a parasitic cycle [1]. Plants, generally, have hundreds or thousands of ways of resisting insect predation, and adding one more to the mix is not going to devastate any ecosystem, at least not in the long term. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis
newtrader 11y ago
The "mathematician" who call Taleb mathiness has made a critical mistake. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 reply
nkurz 11y ago
I'm not sure if Taleb's precautionary principle should be applied to GMO's or not, but I found this critique to be somewhere between uncharitable and misguided. For example, Taleb is already measuring earthquakes by the energy released. This is how "magnitude" is defined for earthquakes. Thus statements like "For instance, in the coffee cup example, Taleb measures the intensity of an earthquake by its magnitude. What happens if we measure an earthquake instead by the amount of energy it releases?" make me conclude that the author of the critique understands neither earthquakes nor Taleb. As for the overall claim of fuzziness, it's probably best to let readers make their own judgement. Appendix C here is Taleb's "Mathematical Derivations of Fragility". While one can dispute where it should be applied, it's far from devoid of detail: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
- jacalata 11y ago
  Isn't magnitude in the Richter scale the logarithm of the energy released? So everyone knows the difference between 5 and 6 is smaller than the difference between 6 and 7?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > For example, Taleb is already measuring earthquakes by the energy released. This is how "magnitude" is defined for earthquakes. No, as the article notes, the measurement of magnitude (in the Richter scale) is proportional to the base-32 logarithm of energy released (its defined as proportional the base-10 logarithm of seismic wave amplitude.) Taleb's use of the coffee cup example to suggest a disproportionate impact of large events vs. small events -- suggesting that the real relative impact of a magnitude 6 quake compared to a magnitude 1 quake is disproportionately greater than their size because one magnitude six quake does more damage than six magnitude one quakes -- is vacuous from its structure because you can arbitrarily choose scales of measurement to make the impact proportional or disproportional in either direction, and ludicrous in its particular choice of measurement scales since, well, I mean, who would expect an earthquake releasing 1 billion times as much energy to do only 6 times the damage? Taleb makes a comparison that sounds significant because most people don't know what the numbers involved mean.
wiwiw 11y ago
The GMO argument like so many things now seems to be divided into "Best thing since sliced bread" or "Bringer of the end of the world" camps. Not understanding the deep details I would like to see more nuanced debate. What are the actual and potential risk, and what are the actual and potential benefits. On the risk side, GMO proponents like to argue that the technology is safe because we haven't found any ill effects. But what they are really saying is that we haven't found any so far. I remember studying genetics and being told about junk DNA, even Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helical structure, suspected it was “little better than junk.” Since then this opinion has changed. We find out new things about DNA all the time, it is now thought that previous generations experiences can change decedents. Reading the recent articles about Chinese scientists using CRISPR to modifying embryos they started with 86, 71 survived, and 28 were successfully spliced, not really a precise operation. With this in mind I find anyone who says there is no risk is not being intellectually honest. The question that comes up is what are the chances that we are Marie Curie working with something that ultimately harms us? In terms of assessing benefits I like to take the example of X-ray technology. From the 1920s to the 1970s a machine known as a shoe-fitting fluoroscope was used to see if shoes fit feet (especially children's feet). With the growing understanding of the harmful effects of radiation these machines were phased out, although never banned. That doesn't mean we don't x-ray people, we do, if you break a bone or go to the dentist the benefit of diagnosing the injury or cavity is considered to outweigh the damage from the radiation. For people in Western nations with plentiful food supplies the macro scale benefits of GMO seem limited, we weren't starving to death or going blind before GMOs. However if my family and friends were going blind due to Vitamin A deficiency the benefits would weigh more heavily on my opinion. I don't claim to be an expert in this area but am interested in being provided with a more neutral analysis to help me form an opinion.
- x5n1 11y ago
  There is also the whole regulatory capture side of GMO. The ownership of all plants on Earth by a few corporations. That part is also worrying because it brings all food under the control of a few corporations under the patents regime.
  - 11y ago

51 points by chewxy 11y ago

Has been debunked https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249

takasc2 11y ago
Taleb does not accept/understand the criticism, and has posted some more mathiness and crude insults as a "response" would be another interpretation
- newtrader 11y ago
  Taleb response is not rude unlike Merberg https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 reply
  - dvanduzer 11y ago
    If you're going to create an account just to stan for Taleb, then please offer a little bit more substance in your comments. Deconstructing the Precautionary Principle is not "misinterpreting" PP. The entire notion of "mathiness" put forth by the author is that PP is too wiggly, and thus open to whatever vague interpretation is convenient. That is the meat of what Merberg is saying, and handwaving it away isn't an argument.
    - pointeroffact 11y ago
      the person you are talking to is taleb himself. he pops up all over the internet when he is criticized and gives these very... terse responses.
      - dvanduzer 11y ago
        says... another account created just to comment on this issue. I put my foot in my mouth all the time, but I put my name to it. Taleb is interesting. Are you saying that the other account is literally Taleb, and that he's known for astroturfing campaigns? I wouldn't discard such a proposition, but I'd prefer hearing it from someone non-anonymous. (For all I know, you're just an account created to extend the thread.)
JackFr 11y ago
That's hardly debunking. I would call it further obfuscation and and an appeal to motive. Taleb is a noble truth seeker and the GMO proponents are out to silence him. Hardly. Having read his books, he's a bright guy often with compelling ideas. If he would leave them as thought experiments and appeals to common sense honestly I think his arguments would be more effective. His need to formalize everything mathematically, for a reader with a moderately sophisticated mathematical background, ends up undermining his argument.
- dvanduzer 11y ago
  All I can grok out of Taleb's rebuttal is that he and his team might be conflating "rare events with predictable frequency" and "events with unknown frequency" but I don't know if this is accurate either. Any help?
- bluecalm 11y ago
  That's most of his writing though: throw a lot of complicated words at the reader and hope some naive ones start seeing mystique depth in his thought. His writing is incoherent though. Even reading abstract of his paper [1]: >>We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans", unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence. We formalize PP, placing it within the statistical and probabilistic structure of ruin problems, in which a system is at risk of total failure, and in place of risk we use a formal fragility based approach. We make a central distinction between 1) thin and fat tails, 2) Local and systemic risks and place PP in the joint Fat Tails and systemic cases. We discuss the implications for GMOs (compared to Nuclear energy) and show that GMOs represent a public risk of global harm (while harm from nuclear energy is comparatively limited and better characterized). PP should be used to prescribe severe limits on GMOs. Leaves little doubt. You can't call him a truth seeker - he is a quack with some talent for wooing people. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787 http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
  - 11y ago

evanpw 11y ago

I like the term "mathiness" for this, because it seems like exactly the same kind of thing that's complained about in economics under that name. Namely, you claim (necessarily without proof) that a real-world phenomenon is analogous to a certain mathematical model. Then you prove some things about the model. Finally, you claim that the things you've proved about the model are also true about the real world. It doesn't matter how rigorous the mathematical steps in the middle are, the strength of this kind of argument is determined by the first step: how strong is the analogy between the mathematical system and real life? In physics, we can build models where the analogy is very strong: when we try out new situations in both the model and in real life, we get the same answer in both. In (macro-)economics, we typically do something weaker, where we start with a set of models determined by intuition, and then choose the one that gives results most similar to real life in the situations we've already seen. Prediction of future events is really difficult. It seems like the approach in Taleb's paper is even weaker. We choose a model based on pure analogy, explicitly disclaim the usefulness of evidence ("While evidentiary approaches are often considered to reflect adherence to the scientific method in its purest form, it is apparent that these approaches do not apply to ruin problems"), and then attack anyone who says that we've done something other than prove a mathematical theorem about the real world. It's too bad, because underneath all of the "mathiness" is one of the strongest arguments against GMOs that I've heard (and I say that as a GMO-eater). It just should have been an opinion piece in the NYT rather than a research article on the arxiv.

pcrh 11y ago
From the point pf view of a biologist, his argument against GMO is pretty weak. He is essentially saying that we don't know, therefore there could be a large negative consequence. However, he has failed to grasp, or educate himself sufficiently, that gene transfer between organisms is in fact a common occurrence in natural ecosystems [0]. Further, at this moment at least, the genes that are being transferred artificially are in general not genes that would cause havoc if they somehow became mobilized from the species into which they were introduced. By way of example, the protein Bt confers resistance to insect predation,it is originally derived from a bacterium that killed insects in a parasitic cycle [1]. Plants, generally, have hundreds or thousands of ways of resisting insect predation, and adding one more to the mix is not going to devastate any ecosystem, at least not in the long term. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis

newtrader 11y ago

The "mathematician" who call Taleb mathiness has made a critical mistake. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/624767423049269249 reply

nkurz 11y ago

I'm not sure if Taleb's precautionary principle should be applied to GMO's or not, but I found this critique to be somewhere between uncharitable and misguided. For example, Taleb is already measuring earthquakes by the energy released. This is how "magnitude" is defined for earthquakes. Thus statements like "For instance, in the coffee cup example, Taleb measures the intensity of an earthquake by its magnitude. What happens if we measure an earthquake instead by the amount of energy it releases?" make me conclude that the author of the critique understands neither earthquakes nor Taleb. As for the overall claim of fuzziness, it's probably best to let readers make their own judgement. Appendix C here is Taleb's "Mathematical Derivations of Fragility". While one can dispute where it should be applied, it's far from devoid of detail: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf

jacalata 11y ago
Isn't magnitude in the Richter scale the logarithm of the energy released? So everyone knows the difference between 5 and 6 is smaller than the difference between 6 and 7?
dragonwriter 11y ago
> For example, Taleb is already measuring earthquakes by the energy released. This is how "magnitude" is defined for earthquakes. No, as the article notes, the measurement of magnitude (in the Richter scale) is proportional to the base-32 logarithm of energy released (its defined as proportional the base-10 logarithm of seismic wave amplitude.) Taleb's use of the coffee cup example to suggest a disproportionate impact of large events vs. small events -- suggesting that the real relative impact of a magnitude 6 quake compared to a magnitude 1 quake is disproportionately greater than their size because one magnitude six quake does more damage than six magnitude one quakes -- is vacuous from its structure because you can arbitrarily choose scales of measurement to make the impact proportional or disproportional in either direction, and ludicrous in its particular choice of measurement scales since, well, I mean, who would expect an earthquake releasing 1 billion times as much energy to do only 6 times the damage? Taleb makes a comparison that sounds significant because most people don't know what the numbers involved mean.

wiwiw 11y ago

The GMO argument like so many things now seems to be divided into "Best thing since sliced bread" or "Bringer of the end of the world" camps. Not understanding the deep details I would like to see more nuanced debate. What are the actual and potential risk, and what are the actual and potential benefits. On the risk side, GMO proponents like to argue that the technology is safe because we haven't found any ill effects. But what they are really saying is that we haven't found any so far. I remember studying genetics and being told about junk DNA, even Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helical structure, suspected it was “little better than junk.” Since then this opinion has changed. We find out new things about DNA all the time, it is now thought that previous generations experiences can change decedents. Reading the recent articles about Chinese scientists using CRISPR to modifying embryos they started with 86, 71 survived, and 28 were successfully spliced, not really a precise operation. With this in mind I find anyone who says there is no risk is not being intellectually honest. The question that comes up is what are the chances that we are Marie Curie working with something that ultimately harms us? In terms of assessing benefits I like to take the example of X-ray technology. From the 1920s to the 1970s a machine known as a shoe-fitting fluoroscope was used to see if shoes fit feet (especially children's feet). With the growing understanding of the harmful effects of radiation these machines were phased out, although never banned. That doesn't mean we don't x-ray people, we do, if you break a bone or go to the dentist the benefit of diagnosing the injury or cavity is considered to outweigh the damage from the radiation. For people in Western nations with plentiful food supplies the macro scale benefits of GMO seem limited, we weren't starving to death or going blind before GMOs. However if my family and friends were going blind due to Vitamin A deficiency the benefits would weigh more heavily on my opinion. I don't claim to be an expert in this area but am interested in being provided with a more neutral analysis to help me form an opinion.

x5n1 11y ago
There is also the whole regulatory capture side of GMO. The ownership of all plants on Earth by a few corporations. That part is also worrying because it brings all food under the control of a few corporations under the patents regime.
- 11y ago