41–50 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).
And he's saying you can't just keep the model as is, but you need to make certain adjustments to the incentive structures.
It's becoming blindly obvious that this is the case in psychology at least with the replication crisis and the "publish or perish" mentality. We can see these things playing out.
Does the economics of the scientific machine need to be revisited and tweaked? I'd say there is a good conversation to be had about that. I can already see a little evidence of a minor self-correction, but given economics drives absolutely everything then yeah I'd say it's likely there are some changes that would produce different results that might be better than what the current system is producing. Though it's not easy to compute ahead of time whether changes themselves would have unintended consequences.
He probably needs to spend more time trying to explain things to 5 year olds to offset his "I am so smrt" persona.
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.
"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…
The thesis of the rest of the article contradicts the initial premise.
Your scenario of ramdomly digging holes are a perfect example of what the author is explaining: “Critically, convex payoffs benefit from uncertainty and disorder.“
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have a look out for his appalling attack on renowned clacissist Dame Mary Beard. Actually I suggest you don't.
I just read Pagliucci's summary of the exchange [1]. Taleb's disdain for academics is well known, particularly the humanities, and that seems on full display here. I don't see anything specifically misogynistic though. Did Pagliucci simply not quote what you're referring to? Edit: by which I mean, what definitively demonstrates his misogyny as opposed to a gender neutral disdain for historians in general? He's defini…
I acknowledge that there is a chance I am remembering it incorrectly. Lots of people who joined in his appalling baiting were certainly openly misogynist in their language, and maybe I am accusing him of being guilty-by-association. However perhaps joint-enterprise is a fair stick to beat him with, he certainly and very deliberately tries to get his fan club to wade in on social media. Maybe people who do this bear some responsibility for what their followers inevitably say?
The further complication is that Dame Professor Mary Beard is an outspoken feminist, and this has caused her to receive more than her fair share of misogynist abuse both on social and mainstream media (incidentally her book Women and Power is very readable and I see now in paper-back). Therefore it could be that I was showing my prejudice in assuming that a man attacking Mary Beard was automatically misogynist. Then I think to myself that a man who has no credentials at all in that field attacking a renowned person in that field (from one of the worlds great institutions) in such a vile way must have some special reason to do so.
I guess the final thing is that he did indeed accuse her of having "used feminist cover" (Damn I said I wasn't going to look up quotes). What he seemed to be saying is that she was trying to be exempt from criticism because she was a feminist. I would actually say that that was very misogynist thing to say. It reminds me of the people who try and perpetuate racial slurs an say things like, 'you can't even criticise them for (insert racist trope) for fear of being called racist'.
What is worse, is I came out thinking that he was wrong, and badly wrong at that, but was trying to bully his view to the forefront. But as you can see from reading what I wrote, I am not a scholar of the humanities at all. It is still my personal opinion that he is a misogynist bully, and his ego is so big that it compromises his objectivity.
> Did Pagliucci simply not quote what you're referring to?
Before I finally posted I read the article you linked, I think you have missed this bit
"It isn’t because of the not-so-subtle sexist undertone (not just of Taleb’s, but of many of his Twitter-based supporters)"
So indeed Pagliucci does mention it.
BTW, I predicted the financial crisis of 2008 too. I say that as it seems to be Taleb's main claim to fame. I was wrong about what the trigger would be, but what I identified as a potential cause certainly helped it spread (mind you I could have changed that around when I wrote my book). But then so did my dad, and a plumber I remember talking to at the time. I heard mainstream radio shows about it. In fact it only seemed to be people who were in the financial game who couldn't see it. So what? We could just have easily been wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Yeah, I used to go out of my way to follow links to Taleb’s writing, but then I kept running into pieces like this one, where it wasn’t clear if he knew he was fundamentally (if not subtly) wrong. He seems to welcome controversy, and his recent childish attack on guy from 538 means I won’t give him more than a paragragh to convince me the rest of the piece is worth my time.
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…
Could you please not create accounts to break the guidelines with?
So, I expected some more general point about theoretical understanding of a thing being distinct from the actual computation of that thing, and that theoretical understanding does not necessarily lead to optimal outcomes.
I wish he’d made that point instead.
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
Nonsense. Falsification of data happens all the time. But more importantly, falsification as applied to hypotheses and falsification as applied to data are two completely different concepts.
Falsification in the sense "we tried this, and got unexpected results, disconfirming our hypothesis" is something you do to hypotheses. This is Popperian falsification.
In the sense of what happens to data, falsification is "we tried this, and got data that disconfirmed our hypothesis. But instead of recording that data, we recorded spurious data which confirms our hypothesis". (Or, of course, "we didn't try anything, but here are some numbers that we feel reflect what would have happened if we had".) This is falsification in the same sense you'd see it applied to, say, accounting records.
"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…
> This is an extremely flawed initial assumption. that was not an initial assumption but (presumably) the subject of the essay. its not clearly stated in the text though > you can certainly win on chance in the long run No you can't ; both casinos and insurance companies make choices that give them an assymetry in gains, and thus they benefit from the randomness of events. Chance is by definition centered around the…
It's similar to why betting $1 to make $1 million at million to one odds is a smart bet, but betting $1 million to make $1 at the equivalent odds isn't, unless you have an unlimited bankroll.
[1] If they use the Kelly criterion they won't bust hard, but they'll still lose most of their bankroll.