21–30 of 69 posts
Is anyone surprised by the notion that ratcheting is critical for consolidating gains made from chance events? I thought that was a trivial observation (maybe my biologist bias is showing here).
The writing style of this article strikes a tone that seems overly eager to place an eloquent vocabulary on display. Hey guys! Look at all the big, big words I can use! Don’t I sound smart??? Seriously. It’s like they wrote, and proof read the original draft, then performed a search/replace for any polysyllabic synonym they could opportunistically inject. Why do they need to sound smart? Is it really because they kno…
I saw Taleb's name at the top and stopped reading. Can we start a thing that we put Taleb's name in brackets at the end of a post title (Like NSFW) so I don't have to be sick in my mouth? It is statistically provable that Taleb has the world's biggest ego. I have no time for his rampant mysogyny. I know he might say clever stuff, but it's not worth feeling unclean for.
Correct. We live in a world where sentient intelligence persists upon a substrate of inert, newtonian determinism. Life, itself, stands bound by gravity, upon a rock floating in space. So where’s the investment tactics?
Meanwhile, mysogyny as a personality flaw of the author would not invalidate the merit of any ideas expressed into a vacuum devoid of mysogyny. As adults, individuals should be capable of reading and digesting a non-inflamatory article, if its ideas have merit, and it doesn’t seek emotional agitation.
You should be able to read an article, and ignore the name of the author. Ask yourself: If it were the same article written under a pseudonym, could it still be found valuable?
"The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress." This is an extrem…
Yeah, it's badly written in a way to provoke controversy, but fundamentally, I'm not sure there's any real disagreement here? In simple terms, he's just saying that it needs to be safe to take chances in order for it to be worthwhile to take chances. As you say, science is an example of a system where it's often safe to take chances, because you don't risk losing any knowledge from a failed experiment. (But that does…
I’m not sure it is worth my time to read something that is badly written to provoke controversy, even if it does make good clickbait.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No experiment could ever possibly hurt scientific knowledge what about one with a falsified result? fwiw I think convexity and understanding are relatively orthogonal, but how could one employ the former without the latter? However the author's position seems to be more that gaming systems works better than exploring their contexts. Sometimes you might make more money in less time, but the money is all you'll get o…
Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data. Experiments that Aristotle performed to demonstrate classical elemental theory are still valid and useful, his incorrect interpretation of the underlying mechanisms notwithstanding
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No experiment could ever possibly hurt scientific knowledge what about one with a falsified result? fwiw I think convexity and understanding are relatively orthogonal, but how could one employ the former without the latter? However the author's position seems to be more that gaming systems works better than exploring their contexts. Sometimes you might make more money in less time, but the money is all you'll get o…
Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data. Experiments that Aristotle performed to demonstrate classical elemental theory are still valid and useful, his incorrect interpretation of the underlying mechanisms notwithstanding
"The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress." This is an extrem…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's badly written in a way to provoke controversy, but fundamentally, I'm not sure there's any real disagreement here? In simple terms, he's just saying that it needs to be safe to take chances in order for it to be worthwhile to take chances. As you say, science is an example of a system where it's often safe to take chances, because you don't risk losing any knowledge from a failed experiment. (But that does…
> Yeah, it's badly written in a way to provoke controversy I’m not sure it is worth my time to read something that is badly written to provoke controversy, even if it does make good clickbait.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The expected value of an infinite series of coin flips centers on 0. Sure, you might get lucky, but you can't leverage that as a strategy to ratchet up value. That's the point about luck in the non convex case. To your mining example, that's where prospecting comes in. Use your knowledge to make checking candidate locations cheaper (increasing convexity) - knowledge of geology to approximate likelihood, improvements…
If heads is 1 and tails is 0 then the expected value is 0.5. The expectation really depends on what values your random variable can take.
The writing style of this article strikes a tone that seems overly eager to place an eloquent vocabulary on display. Hey guys! Look at all the big, big words I can use! Don’t I sound smart??? Seriously. It’s like they wrote, and proof read the original draft, then performed a search/replace for any polysyllabic synonym they could opportunistically inject. Why do they need to sound smart? Is it really because they kno…
I saw Taleb's name at the top and stopped reading. Can we start a thing that we put Taleb's name in brackets at the end of a post title (Like NSFW) so I don't have to be sick in my mouth? It is statistically provable that Taleb has the world's biggest ego. I have no time for his rampant mysogyny. I know he might say clever stuff, but it's not worth feeling unclean for.