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Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

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Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#111

Post by scott_s »

wglb wrote: post #109
scott_s wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own academic papers have a decent number of self references, too. But there is an enormous difference between referencing your own work, and telling the reader that the author is brilliant and those other people over there are stupid.

Ok, so what your call be about Benoit pointing out how smart he is making me feel non-brilliant?

I am honestly not sure what you are saying. I never brought up Mandelbrot, only Taleb. (Although this is a curious example, since Taleb brings up Mandelbrot a lot.)

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#112

Post by wglb »

scott_s wrote: post #111
wglb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so what your call be about Benoit pointing out how smart he is making me feel non-brilliant?

I am honestly not sure what you are saying. I never brought up Mandelbrot, only Taleb. (Although this is a curious example, since Taleb brings up Mandelbrot a lot.)

My clumsy attempt was to draw a parallel between to authors who do a comparable amount of self congratulation.

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#113

Post by justin66 »

mseebach wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Fooled and Black Swan and I'm just going to admit it: I don't get it. I mean, I think I understood both books. But can someone explain why they're supposed to be so revelatory? I found them to be... something else. Many, many smart people seem to swear by Fooled. Why? What am I missing?

I think Black Swan was mostly propelled forward by its extremely poignant timing: It was published just before the financial crash, an event it seemed to describe in pretty high detail. Also, I liked it. I felt it did very a good job of describing some important concepts in statistics and epistemology that weren't obvious to me at the time. YMMV, especially if you (unlike me) paid much attention in college maths and…

> I think Black Swan was mostly propelled forward by its extremely poignant timing: It was published just before the financial crash, an event it seemed to describe in pretty high detail.

If true that's ironic, since Taleb is the first to say that the mortgage crisis and the associated problems were not black swans (they were predictable).

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#114

Post by Houshalter »

ikeboy wrote: post #35
Houshalter wrote: post #11

The chapter about minorities ruling majorities was really insightful. He mentioned how if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out. A scary thing to keep in mind with the whole "label it" debate that was on here a few days ago.

That only works if GMOs don't have a significant advantage over non GMOs. And if they don't (in terms of price, properties, etc) then there's really not much point to them, no reason to get excited.

They don't have a significant advantage. The price of non GMO food is only slightly higher. Most of the cost of food is from processing and transportation, not at the agricultural level.

But to the farmer, GMO yields are significantly higher, and can be the difference between making a profit or a loss. It also means less use of pesticides, and safer pesticides, among other possible advantages like disease resistance. On a world scale, we produce more food with less land, which is definitely good. And especially important for the third world.

The future of GMOs also has a lot of potential. We could engineer plants with many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost, etc.

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#115

Post by ikeboy »

Houshalter wrote: post #114
ikeboy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only works if GMOs don't have a significant advantage over non GMOs. And if they don't (in terms of price, properties, etc) then there's really not much point to them, no reason to get excited.

They don't have a significant advantage. The price of non GMO food is only slightly higher. Most of the cost of food is from processing and transportation, not at the agricultural level. But to the farmer, GMO yields are significantly higher, and can be the difference between making a profit or a loss. It also means less use of pesticides, and safer pesticides, among other possible advantages like disease resistance.…

If all the factors you mentioned don't lead to a big price difference, then that's the market telling us that they don't really matter. If production is cheap, then there's a lot of supply, and there's little to be gained by optimizing supply.

I stand by what I said. You cannot simultaneously have GMOs that are a significant improvement overall without them negating the "minority" argument, and ones small enough to be undermined by a vocal minority shouldn't matter.

"many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost"

If any of those were a real problem, then production would be a greater percent of the final cost. If changing those doesn't really change the final product price, then they're not important.

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#116

Post by Houshalter »

ThomPete wrote: post #29
golergka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a good way to fight that is to form a stubborn minority that only eats GMO food.

that won't work in the EU which have have a much more sceptic view on these things. Their principle is the direct opposite of the US. If there is just the slightest risk that something is dangerous they forbid it. In the US they only forbid things if there is overwhelmingly evidence that points towards it being dangerous.

This discussion is about whether GMOs will naturally be phased out of the market because of a minority that refuses to eat them. Just like it's hard to find non kosher food, because there's a minority that won't eat it.

If the government just outright mandates how food has to be produced, then no one has a choice, and of course that won't work. That's a different situation entirely.

Anyway your generalization is overly broad. The US also is restrictive of new things. Especially in e.g. the medical world. See all the startups running into trouble with the FDA. But also things like drones were banned commercially until recently. Even GMOs did have to get FDA approval, so your statement is simply wrong. You can't just go out and make your own GMOs and sell them.

I think it's just a general trend, that richer countries become more conservative, and more afraid of new things (and able to afford such policies.) Many technologies we take for granted would never be legally viable if they were invented today. Early automakers would have been sued out of existence for all the traffic accidents they caused.

Or, speaking of GMOs, traditional crop breeding literally involves letting the crops randomly mutate in unknown ways (sometimes artificially through irradiation!) No way that would have been approved by modern regulators.

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#117

Post by Houshalter »

ikeboy wrote: post #115
Houshalter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have a significant advantage. The price of non GMO food is only slightly higher. Most of the cost of food is from processing and transportation, not at the agricultural level. But to the farmer, GMO yields are significantly higher, and can be the difference between making a profit or a loss. It also means less use of pesticides, and safer pesticides, among other possible advantages like disease resistance.…

If all the factors you mentioned don't lead to a big price difference, then that's the market telling us that they don't really matter. If production is cheap, then there's a lot of supply, and there's little to be gained by optimizing supply. I stand by what I said. You cannot simultaneously have GMOs that are a significant improvement overall without them negating the "minority" argument, and ones small enough to b…

Just because something is only a small portion of the final product, doesn't mean it's negligible overall. If say it raises the price of food by 10%, that's 200 billion dollars lost in just the US. Probably the price increase is smaller than that, but it would still be a non trivial amount of lost value.

And again, the real issue is with third world countries, where the price of food can mean life or death. These countries depend on the first world to innovate in things like GMOs. If we stop doing that, because people won't buy them, we hurt the world's poor disproportionately.

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#118

Post by ikeboy »

Houshalter wrote: post #117
ikeboy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the factors you mentioned don't lead to a big price difference, then that's the market telling us that they don't really matter. If production is cheap, then there's a lot of supply, and there's little to be gained by optimizing supply. I stand by what I said. You cannot simultaneously have GMOs that are a significant improvement overall without them negating the "minority" argument, and ones small enough to b…

Just because something is only a small portion of the final product, doesn't mean it's negligible overall. If say it raises the price of food by 10%, that's 200 billion dollars lost in just the US. Probably the price increase is smaller than that, but it would still be a non trivial amount of lost value. And again, the real issue is with third world countries, where the price of food can mean life or death. These cou…

10% of the price is enough to prevent a vocal minority from blocking it, I think.

Re: Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb

#120

Post by cossatot »

tptacek wrote: post #45
mayukh wrote: post #4

For somebody who wrote 'Fooled by ..' one of my favorite books of all time, he certainly doesn't seem to suffer from self-doubt when it comes to stating his personal hypotheses. I can look past his condescending tone (especially towards the wealthy and 'pseudo' intellectuals), but his certitude in his own ideas -- especially after pressing home the point that we are surrounded by randomness -- tarnishes his punditry…

I read Fooled and Black Swan and I'm just going to admit it: I don't get it. I mean, I think I understood both books. But can someone explain why they're supposed to be so revelatory? I found them to be... something else. Many, many smart people seem to swear by Fooled. Why? What am I missing?

I learned from Black Swan about how pervasive power laws and fractals were in social/financial phenomena, and how the important the framing (i.e. the prior expectations) of 'black swan' events are (black swan event for the turkey who gets beheaded, not for the farmer that does it every Thanksgiving). I'm a geophysicist and this stuff is our bread and butter, as a ton of risk and complexity theory applies to earthquakes (self-similarity, power laws, etc.) but I had never really made the connection to the human side of things, which I still thought about on a more atomic/psychological level than a systems level at that point. Since then I've read more widely in complexity, econ, etc., and while Taleb wasn't an introduction per se, or even that influential, I did learn some important things from him by virtue of reading him early on. Your friends might be in the same position.

The book itself was fairly repugnant. The few interviews I've read since have been interesting in that you can watch him self-destruct. For example the Edge.org interview where he answers the question of 'what scientific idea needs to be retired' with 'standard deviation'.

However, by far the best part of reading Black Swan (or some interview?) was his discussion about how he believed the body adjusted to regular but not random exercise, and therefore the best fitness strategy was to randomly break into a sprint when walking. I haven't been to NY since and would prefer not to but if I do go I really want to see him pinballing through bewildered pedestrians.

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