Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

A different discussion concerns the fact that Taleb's possible luck in 1987 makes him a prescient seer for things like the financial crisis. But he isn't, and a tremendous number of things he has said have simply been wrong (most notably, and importantly, everything he said about government intervention. He was 100% wrong in every way).

People ask why people get the heckles up about Taleb, and it isn't actually about Taleb at all. It's about the, for lack of a better phrase, Taleb "fan boys". Bizarre that such a thing exists, but people like having their prophet.

Here's Taleb on Mandelbrot: "[He] had perhaps more cumulative influence than any other single scientist in history, with the only close second, Isaac Newton."

That quote really says it all.

FWIW, I'm from the west coast, but have spent the last several years in New York working with natural sciences students and post-docs. I might be what you would call an "ideas" person. Abstraction appeals to me. People in our department seem happier when their work is closer to physical observerations. Measuring stuff with yard sticks and radar: good. Getting big piles of data from other people, and doing stats: OK. Fitting a parematerized model to someone else's data: healthy skepticism. Of course healthy skepticism is generally cultivated.

It wouldn't be surprising if our friends reading lists (and reactions) depend on what they do for living. Did you meet a lot of people in finance or economics on the east coast? Maybe people's professions are spatially correlated.

My peers seem to treat models cautiously (including their own), and have tended to respond to abstract economic ideas with measured skepticism. I can't speak for them, but I sometimes perceive that economic arguments are suspected of being insufficiently empirical and subject to ulterior motives. Which, it seems, is at least a part of what Taleb is complaining about. Obviously these things can be true of any kind of argument, I'm just reporting my impression. Anyhow, it would be easier to listen Taleb if his tone was more restrained.

Most of the economists I have paid attention to (which are not near as many as I would like) seemed inclined to provocation. Sowell in "Basic Economics", and Friedman in his speeches (I haven't read his papers) tend to poke fun at their fellow citizens, for example. I think they sometimes alienate those outside their discipline because of this. It makes reading fun though. I find Friedman very amusing, and I think so does he.

I guess I share Taleb's problems with models. Even before I read Taleb I would say to myself "the map is not the territory", particularly with regard to software abstractions. I think the space between the model and reality is where you find a lot of interesting things (including the ability to make a lot of money).

I also share Taleb's skepticism with economics. The core problem is that it's not really a predictive science. It's a lot of people talking about stuff. Did those ideas help anyone? You can make a good case that they hurt a lot of people. If they are so smart, why aren't they rich? The Scholes case is a great example of that.

I'm currently reading "The Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver, which is actually a fantastic complement to Taleb's books. They say very much the same things, in very different ways. The good part is that you will not be turned off by Silver's prose -- he's humble and very readable. I didn't follow 538 at all, and didn't pay all that much attention to the 2012 election, but I can tell that his writing skill was a big reason he became so popular.

To give an example, Taleb talks over and over about "negative knowledge" -- what not to do, what things don't work, etc. And Nate Silver says the same thing. To make accurate predictions and models, you have to be aware of known classes of mistakes, cognitive biases, etc. and not fall into those traps. People often think that they need to improve themselves by learning more. But for a reasonably smart people, the bottleneck to your effectiveness is actually thinking that you know something you don't.

I am also an "ideas" person but I share the utilitarianism and empiricism of Taleb. There has to be "skin in the game", as he says. There are so many ideas out there, and generally most philosophical arguments (and journalism, advocacy, etc.) boil down to confused semantics. So the way to find truth is through actions and experiments. Economics fails these tests for truth.

EDIT: Nate Silver talks about this paper: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal... This would resonate with Taleb quite a bit. Most ideas are false, including published ones. It would actually violate economic theory if that weren't the case -- if most science was true -- because scientists have bad incentives (something I know from direct experience).