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Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

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Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#231

Post by tsax »

smsm42 wrote: post #229
bluecalm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it surely looks like it seeing level of argument he presents and lack of logical consistency in his writing. Even in this article he claims SD doesn't model real world as well as MAD and then as arguments ask you what would you do if you were asked to calculate... MAD, you would clearly see it's not SD :-) His latest book is worse than the article and my conclusion about him being and idiot is based mainly on i…

He does not say aging comes from too few stressors. He says maladjustment (which is just one component of aging) is. >>> Aging comes from misunderstanding ? This is just random babbling, You are trying very hard to not understand. The thought is simple - comfort has side effects (think obesity, bad nutrition, lack of movement, overuse of pharmaceuticals like antibiotics or mood adjusters, etc.) which are not properly…

This is what I get too. I've read all his books except the technical one (Dynamic Hedging) and this conclusion of 'nonsense' about a pretty clearly written paragraph is baffling. I too read the paragraph and came to the conclusion you did. Maybe the above commenter has a hard-on for bullet points and power point presentations but Taleb has repeatedly said that he writes essays for pleasurable consumption and not business books (regardless of how the publisher markets them).

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#232

Post by latk »

beloch wrote: post #187

I'm a physicist, so I'm one of the people this guy says standard deviation is still good for. However, despite some "oddities" (pointed out by others here) in his article, I'm more than willing to admit a simpler, easier to understand term would be helpful for explaining many things to the general public. Hell, it would be helpful for explaining things to journalists , who we then trust to explain things to the publi…

Maybe a solution would be to only communicate the bounds of a value rather than the value itself. E.g. Instead of “party A has 35% with sigma=2%” something like “we expect party A to have 33%–37%”. Providing a range is shorter than explaining the SD, and can be visualized easily, e.g. in a bar chart.

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#233

Post by tsax »

avenger123 wrote: post #165
bluecalm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it surely looks like it seeing level of argument he presents and lack of logical consistency in his writing. Even in this article he claims SD doesn't model real world as well as MAD and then as arguments ask you what would you do if you were asked to calculate... MAD, you would clearly see it's not SD :-) His latest book is worse than the article and my conclusion about him being and idiot is based mainly on i…

Although its unfair to nitpick one paragraph since its out of context from the rest of the chapter/book, reading the aging paragraph makes me see where you are coming from with all this. The guy can't help himself. It's like reading a stock ticker (except its Taleb's stream of thought), flashing across with all the different thoughts that don't necessarily correlate with each other. You think there's some relevancy t…

Infact his goal is to alienate readers like the commenter above by writing in the old literary style. We are so accustomed to modern non-fiction following Malcolm Gladwell like structure for 10 year olds that we've lost the art of appreciating the meandering, scattershot expression of ideas in a literary style. In short, his filtering works.

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#234

Post by dwd »

bluecalm wrote: post #29
tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment was great fun to read, and I suspect that I share some of your opinions about Taleb (although mine are decaying with each day that passes since I last finished reading any of his books), but it would have been stronger as an argument if you had left off the part about him being a "vile idiot".

I just can't pass it. I gave my best at reading his book. The guy is unable to write one paragraph which doesn't contain some nonsense or serious misuse of established terms. He is insulting whole groups of people and institutions without giving any examples or research. I am pretty sure that if his stuff were posted without his name the conclusion would be obvious: it's just nonsense and very offensive at that. I re…

Taleb's books are full of stories, random ideas, non-sequitur thoughts and a quite a few rants about things that bother him. This essay was clearly an invitation to rant about something and the more controversial the better.

Sure, he comes across as arrogant, confrontational and uncompromising and he is unapologetic on top of that; yet dismissing the bulk of his writing based on his personality and style of writing is a shame as the recurring theme throughout all his books are worth the time spent reading. To paraphrase: We believe and accept a lot of things without question and let fallacious thinking and cognitive biases lead us into making decisions and actions that do us harm.

Also, his books are that rare type that you can pick up, read a few pages and have set off a train of thinking for the rest of the day.

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#235

Post by thaumasiotes »

dimatura wrote: post #227
thaumasiotes wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The STD is far more easy to analyze in a mathematical way. That is the huge value it brings This is also what I have read (I have essentially no experience with statistics). > squaring is an operation you can take the derivative of, but absolute value you cannot We can talk without wild, obviously false hyperbole. It's trivial to take the derivative of the absolute value function. Working with it is more difficult,…

"Easy as anything in math"? Now that's "obviously false hyperbole". You can't just brush away that discontinuity, specially when it's on the minimum (which is what people most often care about). Anyway, this is formalized in the notion of subderivative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subderivative

You'll learn to take the derivative of |x| in high school calculus, shortly after learning how to take derivatives in general. It's not complex, and the fact that it's not defined at the origin doesn't mean there's a problem in taking it; it just means the function behaves "badly" there. I don't understand the focus on the discontinuity anyway; in working with the function, I'd be more concerned about the fact that it's piecewise defined.

Consider a variant on the absolute value function:

    f(x) = x (when x >= 0); sin x (when x
It and its first and second derivatives are all continuous (after which it comes apart at the origin), but if you were working with the derivative, even though it's differentiable everywhere, you'd have to constantly be aware of whether the origin was in your domain. The great advantage of working with x^2 instead is that it behaves the same way everywhere, not that its derivative is continuous.

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#236

Post by coldtea »

tptacek wrote: post #160
coldtea wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand calling him a "vile idiot" is so terrible. Then you are a vile idiot.

Super helpful comment. Thanks. Definitely, the transition from calling public figures "vile idiots" to calling individual commenters on HN threads "vile idiots" is sure to produce a productive discussion. I started this subthread by pointing out that 'bluecalm had weakened his argument by using the words "vile idiot". But 'bluecalm also made a bunch of testable and non-obvious observations in his comment; his writing…

>Super helpful comment. Thanks. Definitely, the transition from calling public figures "vile idiots" to calling individual commenters on HN threads "vile idiots" is sure to produce a productive discussion.

The point I wanted to make was that "vile idiot" is problematic in itself, and by my meta-use of it, I hoped the parent would obviously see why.

How calling public figures "vile idiots" is any better than calling individual HN commenters the same?

>Whereas you just jumped in to call someone you disagreed with a name, and nothing else; your writing had no value.

Did it really seem like a called him a name just for the fun of it? Wasn't the meta-context obvious?

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#237

Post by bluecalm »

tsax wrote: post #137
bluecalm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your comment is a bit irritating. I don't know the author of this blog post but I think he has a couple of valid points. You seem to dislike him for some other reasons. Feel free to share them. The blog post is still perfectly reasonable. Really ? You think call for substituting one of the most common use measures in science, finance, gambling etc. with some other measure which doesn't have the same crucial properti…

Why this attitude? Simply because it's 'insulting'? Is it true? Should you not be far more concerned if it's true? That lots of scientists are misusing statistical tools? What does it say about you that you are posting angry vitriolic comments online because someone called out scientists misusing statistical tools but that you are not as alarmed that such a thing could be happening?

>Simply because it's 'insulting'?

Because he makes a lot of bold/insulting claims and then fails to give one argument most of the time. When he does provide an argument it's very often nonsense (like with his analogy of someone being asked to calculate MAD).

>Should you not be far more concerned if it's true?

I am. I am also concerned about discrediting scientists without providing reasons. Creationism, anti-vaccination and climate change denial are all based on people not trusting scientists and following guys who just tell them scienc is nonsense. Taleb is very close to that line.

> What does it say about you that you are posting angry vitriolic comments online because someone called out scientists misusing statistical tools but that you are not as alarmed that such a thing could be happening?

He didn't call out anybody. He just threw plain insults without reasons. When you call out someone you say what is wrong with what they are doing, like this: "Hey, bankers, it's unfair that you make huge bets and don't pay out when you lose!", "Hey, investing firms, it's stupid that you treat a lucky few as celebrities while you can't have any confidence in their performance". Here is didn't called out people. He just asserted they are using one of the most used mathematical tools incorrectly, that it's because confusion in naming and that it should be disposed of. He didn't give one example of mistakes happening because of it. Now, people who follow him and believe that he is some kind of authority may start distrusting science or academia (as he is actively hostile vs both) exactly the same way anti-vaccination people do: just because some celebrity told them so. There is value in calling people like him out on their nonsense.

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#238

Post by aredington »

The way I read it he's proposing two things:

1) Refer to the analysis of Root Mean Square Error always by that name. (RMS is already often used in certain jargon instead of stddev).

2) Stop treating RMS as a default measure of variance. Treat Mean Absolute Deviation as the default measure of variance, because the figure it provides is more consistent with people's psychological interpretation.

It's not really retiring RMS, just retiring the idea that it is a good default statistical analysis.

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#239

Post by james1071 »

elipsey wrote: post #113
azakai wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists > What an assertion! It also proved to be very useful for hordes of scientists... what about some examples of confused scientists ? He is exaggerating, for sure. But the point is valid: the mean average deviation (MAD) is often very different than the standard deviation (STD), and the MAD is more intuitive, it has a natural geometrical interpretati…

I'm relieved to hear from others who didn't love his book, now I don't feel so left out. I checked out Black Swan from the library a while back. It seemed like Taleb's smug prose and mudslinging were writing a check his evidence couldn't cash, but I couldn't stand more then the first 50 pages, so I never got to find out. My girlfriend read it all of it and sort of gave me the cliff notes; she thought I wasn't missing…

I think his books are a good holiday read. The targets are people in finance (many of whom are charlatans) and economists.

Re: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

#240

Post by james1071 »

corresation wrote: post #81
marvin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Taleb's own black swan?

After being assigned to a currency desk, he was sitting on a lot of Eurodollar options when black Monday happened in October, 1987. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987) That unpredicted event made him and his organization loads of money, and made him a sudden seer of markets. Which is humorous because his book Fooled By Randomness is primarily a bit of a bitter tirade about how we declare people savants b…

I understand that he made a lot of money in 2008 from betting on 'Black Swans'.
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