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A Better Crystal Ball?

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Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#41

Post by civilized »

trishankkarthik wrote: post #28
civilized wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be right, but I've people-watched on Twitter long enough to know that "person who insults those he disagrees with while name-dropping @nntaleb" is an entire PERSONALITY, one that I take approximately 0% seriously.

Not a criticism if the worst you can say about someone is that he is "mean," not that he is wrong.

Taleb has deep insights about some things, is laughably ignorant on other things, and doesn't seem to know which is which. His followers definitely don't.

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#42

Post by tim333 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #19

A travesty that the U.S. pays over a trillion dollars a year while hosting soldiers in 70 countries... You would think with that much planning we would have paid attention to experts decades ago warning that we needed more charged fiber (N95) in storage in case of a pandemic at a cost of ~0.0001 trillion ...

The US used to have pandemic planning... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1244995102818304000

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#43

Post by dang »

trishankkarthik wrote: post #3

This is the most dangerously stupid thing I've ever heard. Tetlock is a known academic charlatan pushing his absolutely useless "superforecasting" nonsense which @nntaleb keeps debunking on Twitter. If Tetlock and friends are so good about forecasting the future, why didn't they predict and warn us about COVID-19 BEFORE @nntaleb and friends (including myself) did? P.S. I have been downvoted for saying this.

If you're being downvoted it's probably for fulminating, which the site guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may not owe authors whom you feel are charlatans better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#44

Post by trishankkarthik »

dang wrote: post #43
trishankkarthik wrote: post #3

This is the most dangerously stupid thing I've ever heard. Tetlock is a known academic charlatan pushing his absolutely useless "superforecasting" nonsense which @nntaleb keeps debunking on Twitter. If Tetlock and friends are so good about forecasting the future, why didn't they predict and warn us about COVID-19 BEFORE @nntaleb and friends (including myself) did? P.S. I have been downvoted for saying this.

If you're being downvoted it's probably for fulminating, which the site guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html You may not owe authors whom you feel are charlatans better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

I don't owe the community anything.

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#45

Post by [deleted] »

trishankkarthik wrote: post #44
dang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're being downvoted it's probably for fulminating, which the site guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html You may not owe authors whom you feel are charlatans better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

I don't owe the community anything.

[deleted]

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#46

Post by dang »

trishankkarthik wrote: post #44
dang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're being downvoted it's probably for fulminating, which the site guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html You may not owe authors whom you feel are charlatans better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

I don't owe the community anything.

You do if you want to keep posting here.

Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772993 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772982 are not ok. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? I don't want to ban you, but we can't have people throwing their weight around and attacking others like this.

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#47

Post by vosper »

jessriedel wrote: post #37
vosper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But presumably you don't know how good they are at predicting topic D until topic D actually occurs at least once? Unless the prediction is "this won't happen" and then it continuing to not happen makes the predictor look accurate... (slightly joking here) The article seems to claim that a specific event, which has never happened, can be estimated accurately. Is that really possible? How can the accuracy be assessed?

> But presumably you don't know how good they are at predicting topic D until topic D actually occurs at least once? No, that's not right. The general idea is that you have forecasters who make predictions on multiple topics A, B, C, and D that have all not happened at the time of the prediction. Then, by looking at the outcomes of A, B, and C you can judge the ability of the forecaster to make prediction on topics w…

> The general idea is that you have forecasters who make predictions on multiple topics A, B, C, and D that have all not happened at the time of the prediction. Then, by looking at the outcomes of A, B, and C you can judge the ability of the forecaster to make prediction on topics what have not yet occurred at the time of prediction. You can then become confident on their ability to predict topic D before it occurs.

Thanks, that really clarified the idea for me :)

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#48

Post by trishankkarthik »

dang wrote: post #46
trishankkarthik wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't owe the community anything.

You do if you want to keep posting here. Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772993 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772982 are not ok. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? I don't want to ban you, but we can't have people throwing their weight around and at…

How was I "attacking" others, when they were allowed to put words in my mouth? Go ahead and ban me: @paulgraham and @sama were right about the intolerance of free speech in Silicon Valley.

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#49

Post by tomhoward »

trishankkarthik wrote: post #48
dang wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do if you want to keep posting here. Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772993 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772982 are not ok. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? I don't want to ban you, but we can't have people throwing their weight around and at…

How was I "attacking" others, when they were allowed to put words in my mouth? Go ahead and ban me: @paulgraham and @sama were right about the intolerance of free speech in Silicon Valley.

Hey there, I’m a longtime Taleb follower (Antifragile was life-changing for me), and I watched him and you and others in your crew commentate on the pandemic and found it highly beneficial for understanding the scenario. I’d consider it a great shame if there were no place for you here.

But this attack on dang misses the mark badly.

pg and sama have always been fully supportive of the way he runs HN (pg hand-picked him to take it over, sama was YC CEO for most of the time since, and they've both repeatedly endorsed him and his HN work publicly [1], including recently in pg's case [2]).

dang’s approach to moderation makes it more conducive to free speech, as, unlike on Twitter, it allows difficult/complex topics to be discussed without being derailed by personal insults.

We don’t need to attack people here; we have the downvote arrow and flag link for when people are being assholes, otherwise we can just focus on presenting persuasive arguments.

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/

[2] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1282055086433284103

Re: A Better Crystal Ball?

#50

Post by aaron695 »

civilized wrote: post #41
trishankkarthik wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a criticism if the worst you can say about someone is that he is "mean," not that he is wrong.

Taleb has deep insights about some things, is laughably ignorant on other things, and doesn't seem to know which is which. His followers definitely don't.

> Taleb has deep insights about some things

I'll bite, what?

I know he's rich and successful, so he has deeper insights than most.

But it doesn't mean he teaches them, as far I can see he just uses them. For instance he's very good at doublespeak.

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