Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

What so you think of this one star review of success and luck (from Aaron):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/0691167400/?filterByStar=one_...

I did not analyze it carefully, but he tears the book to bits.

FWIW, I read Antifragile, and this GMO position seems to go against the general principles he espoused there. Having read it, I expected he would think the status quo is already optimal for addressing GMOs: some regions go full forward with it, some heavily restrict it, some ban it entirely. This will then give a great dataset for long term effects while also hedging against it being a catastrophe.

But Taleb's current position is way more conservative than that stance!

Edit: I think this commenter gave a more "Talebian" response to GMOs (despite not having read the book): basically, let them exist, but make it easy for people to opt out in favor of foods with a longer track record. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506599

I look forward to reading his book. His writing style is good but not great.

I'm surprised about a lot of accusation of arrogance,etc...

From what I have read his arrogance, might be misconceived as he is willingness to call out anybody on what he perceived as their BS. We need more people to call others out on their BS. (US elections, MSM, cnbc, Mosanto, wall street...)

Anybody that open comes out and says Saudi Arabia is a barbaric / terrorist state, (which the US Gov, seems to over look for years) questions the Federal Reserve, teaches at community college. Constantly, open sources his books and math. Probably isn't part of the establishment and hence might be driving peoples dislike.

Of course most people on Wall St. don't like him because they don't understand his theories or his thoughts.

He has great twitter feed. (He retweeted me once!)

It's a legitimate criticism, but he's arguing a strawman.

First off, the reviewer's coinflip analogy is deeply flawed. If you take a million draws from a binomial distribution, it's not going to end up the same as a million draws from an exponential distribution. That has an even deeper meaning when you, as an individual, are one random draw from said distribution, especially if you want to live in a society that considers itself "fair" (whatever that may mean).

Now Frank is not arguing against inequality. Frank is an economist, and almost no serious economist is against inequality as a whole concept (though many are against extreme inequality and, importantly, social immobility) because inequality is what you'd call "incentive compatible".

Frank's policy proposal is consistent and sane, but it will rub some the wrong way, as any policy proposal does. I'm certainly in favor of it; consumption is a better target for progressive taxation than most of what has been proposed this election season. That's the part that got the reviewer so riled up. I'm guessing the reviewer is not a professional economist.

The idea of a progressive consumption tax is consistent with microeconomic theory, too. People value things in an ordinal (not cardinal) manner, and at a sufficiently high level of income this means consumption has to be conspicuous to some degree (that's Veblen's whole insight).

Of course, political feasibility of the policy proposal is one thing, and certainly many worse policies are more politically feasible, as exemplified by how rubbed that reviewer has been by Frank's book.

The main difference between this book and Taleb's book is that Franks book is "Successful people are lucky, here's a policy proposal" and Taleb's book is "Successful people are lucky and also everyone is dumb and I'm so smart"

We are surrounded by some amount of randomness, but quite a bit of complexity and chaotic/nonlinear behavior that can look like randomness but does in fact contain information.

A PRNG function is an extreme example; if you know its state and the function you can predict its output precisely. A PRNG is 'pseudo' because it is not in fact random at all.

Evolution is a learning (information transfer) process. If most of our inputs and data were random, evolution would have nothing to "grab onto" and complex stable genomes and phenotypes would never have developed. Life would never have risen above the level of archaebacteria, if at all.

E.g. : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6844/abs/412331a0...

I've never been impressed by Taleb. I think his popularity comes from providing a pseudo-intellectual gloss for the popular "hater" prejudice that success is random and thus wholly undeserved.

(I do support the existence of a welfare state, but for reasons that differ dramatically from Taleb's. I do not support the precautionary principle, which is absurd and dangerous and reduces to an argument against any form of innovation or action.)