The Mathiness of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Further, at this moment at least, the genes that are being transferred artificially are in general not genes that would cause havoc if they somehow became mobilized from the species into which they were introduced"

You are assuming that we have sufficient comprehension of these genes and their effects to make such claims definitively. And while we may have a very high degree of confidence in that, say enough confidence to entrust my life, your life, or hundreds of individual lives - entrusting the wellbeing of the entire planet requires a different scale of rigor.

And that, I think, is the essence of Taleb's argument. 99.99% sure might be enough to get a drug approved, and it well should be, because only some fraction of the population is at risk. But because DNA is inherently self-propagating, a mistake can have extremely far-reaching consequences, and as such the tolerable level of risk must be orders of magnitude lower.

This has been Taleb's essential, consistent thesis throughout his career. That humans are bad at assessing the probability of relatively unlikely events, and that when those events are extremely catastrophic, that cognitive deficiency can be disastrous.

> but serious enough that it would be good for a few people to be thinking about it right now.

Of course, GM-technology is a huge area of tools, tools which are being used in all kinds of situations and outcomes: modifying bacteria to create insulin or washing powder ingredients (both of these have been done on an industrial scale for decades now); modifying plants to have a better defense against various pests (being done with Bt cotton and soy IIRC), or just to glow in the dark (there's a kickstarter), etc.

These are all more or less "good" outcomes of GM, but you could also use GM for "bad" - you could make maize express a human neurotoxin and spread that plant in order to attack a country (a not very directed attack). The only thing that's stopping you is that it's still very hard, expensive and time-consuming to do so.

There is also the whole regulatory capture side of GMO. The ownership of all plants on Earth by a few corporations. That part is also worrying because it brings all food under the control of a few corporations under the patents regime.

  > No, as the article notes, the measurement of magnitude (in 
  > the Richter scale) is proportional to the base-32 logarithm 
  > of energy released (its defined as proportional the base-10 
  > logarithm of seismic wave amplitude.)

Yes, "magnitude" here is a logarithmic rather than linear measure of energy, but the critique is wrong (or underhanded) to suggest that Taleb doesn't realize this. Taleb may have been wrong to assume his audience would know the same, but never suggested that we should be surprised that 6 Magnitude 1 earthquakes do no harm to a coffee cup whereas a single Magnitude 6 might break it. To the contrary, quoting from the appendix that the critique refers to:

  There are close to 8,000 micro-earthquakes daily
  on planet earth, that is, those below 2 on the Richter
  scale —about 3 million a year. These are totally harmless,
  and, with 3 million per year, you would need them to
  be so. But shocks of intensity 6 and higher on the scale
  make the newspapers. Accordingly, we are necessarily
  immune to the cumulative effect of small deviations, or
  shocks of very small magnitude, which implies that these
  affect us disproportionally less (that is, nonlinearly
  less) than larger ones.

So when the critique describes adding the numbers together and says "this is what Taleb means", it is either poor reading or actively disingenuous:

  Even though the sum of the magnitudes of the smaller 
  earthquakes is equal to the magnitude of the larger one, 
  the coffee cup is damaged much more by the big quake than 
  by the small ones. This is what Taleb means when he 
  describes the coffee cup as fragile.

No, this is not what Taleb means!

  > suggesting that the real relative impact of a magnitude 6 
  > quake compared to a magnitude 1 quake is disproportionately 
  > greater than their size because one magnitude six quake 
  > does more damage than six magnitude one quakes

I'm pretty sure that Taleb never suggests this, and that the "6 times the damage" concept is simply a strawman constructed for the critique. Taleb may have erred by taking for granted that his audience understands that earthquakes are measured by a logarithmic scale, but since it is a scientific paper rather than an Op Ed, this doesn't seem unreasonable.

Now, I will grant you that Taleb may well have mistakenly assumed that the measure of earthquakes went up 10^{1} per number of magnitude rather than 10^{1.5}, as this would explain why he chose to use the specific numbers he did. It would be a fair critique to point out this out to him, and I'd be interested to see his response. As you say, 10^{9} would require hundreds of years of earthquakes, and thus is not a particularly compelling example.

  > Taleb makes a comparison that sounds significant because 
  > most people don't know what the numbers involved mean.

If you take a look in the linked document at that the actual Appendix C that defines Taleb's concept of fragility, I think you'll agree that it is not targeted at people who don't know what the numbers mean. I've only skimmed it, and it may not apply to GMO's, but it seems like a reasonable definition. Rather than trying to confuse people who don't understand logarithmic measures, I don't think he much cares what they think.

(Separately, this is my opportunity to ask: Who are you? What's your background? You consistently impress me with the quality of your comments on HN.)

LHC's website states: "Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies."

This case is not analogous because in this planet's history there have been 6 different extinction events. So in order for it to be analogous, they would have to say that we know a few times in the past this has caused a black hole, but this is totally different.

Passing genes from one thing into another can very easily have unintended consequences as they do in nature. The link above is an example of what can happen. By the time you figure it out, perhaps it will be too late. The effects might be local or they might be global, there is no way to predict these things and we can not say with certainty that they don't happen, because we have more than one example of where they do. In fact human intelligence may be an accident of horizontal gene transfer. These are not games that are worth playing in my opinion. You are what you eat. If that stuff it in your food supply, it just might end up in you and the bacteria and other life that lives in you.

Another really big problem is dependence. Once you come to depend on these things, just like we are now with carbon producing technology, you can not pull the plug. Even if you know that it's causing harm, the social mechanism needed to pull the plug don't exist in free society and if they do they are very slow moving. That's another big reason to not go down this road, because it's impossible to turn back because of all the people that will die because you can't produce the expected crop yields.