Probability and Risk in the Real World [pdf]

Probability and Risk in the Real World [pdf]
dl.dropboxusercontent.com

Taleb: "Genetically Modified Organisms, GMOs. Top-down modifications to the system (through GMOs) are categorically and statistically different from bottom up ones (regular farming, progressive tinkering with crops, etc.) To borrow from Rupert Read, there is no comparison between the tinkering of selective breeding and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from a fish and putting it into a tomato. Saying that such a product is natural misses the statistical process by which things become “natural”.

What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and exports the error from the local to the global. I do not wish to pay —or have my descendants pay — for errors by executives of Monsanto. We should exert the precautionary principle there —our non-naive version — simply because we would discover errors after considerable damage."

http://blog.longnow.org/02013/07/08/the-artangel-longplayer-...

What I think he is doing, he is basically taking his philosophical musings, finds concepts from very high level mathematics that seem corresponding, buries it all under a mountain of formalism introduced for no particular reason and then... does absolutely nothing with it. He will plug in some numbers or show some trivial (except for the mountain of formalism) inequality as a supposed mathematical "proof" of his revelations. I don't think he himself understands the mathematics he attempts to write about.

If you would like, for a change, to look at a "probability in the real world" book that would make any actual sense, and by someone who has used probability theory successfully in practice, have a look at "The Art of Probability" by Richard Hamming, the inventor of coding theory. He treats things like robustness of models to violation of assumptions that are not often found in other books, and he uses only calculus, although as opposed to Mr Taleb he actually is able to do derivations.

If you are gonna criticize someone, it would be better to criticize something that person has said rather than calling him a crank.

That aside, the book you posted seems interesting indeed.

http://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Hedging-Managing-Vanilla-Optio...

Definition 1.

A rule is a decision-making heuristic that operates under a broad set of circumstances. Unlike a theorem, which depends on a specific (and closed) set of assumptions, it holds across a broad range of environments which is precisely the point. In that sense it is stronger than a theorem for decision-making.

This is outright nonsense, if he doesn't understand what a theorem is, how can he possibly understand Lebesgue integration and functional analysis?