
Nassim Taleb: How to React to Pandemics (Coronavirus) - tosh
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1221486205847646208
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kqr2
Direct link to Nassim's Taleb paper:
[https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_...](https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_via_Novel_Pathogens_-
_Coronavirus_A_Note)

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arvinaminpour
His argument is to reduce mobility in the short term to combat the uncertainty
and unknowns associated with the Coronavirus. The R0 (reproductive ratio) of
the virus is increasing and it’ll probably take longer to know how much havoc
it’ll reap.

It’s unclear to what level the paper is referring (reduce flights on a global
level, between cities in China or people leaving areas where the contagion
started)

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thecleaner
5 references and no quantitative treatment of a very very serious topic like
nCoV. Taleb can publish whatever, but why is this grabbing HN front-page ?

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curiousgal
His writing style is the most vexing thing ever!

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SomeHacker44
Try reading _A New Kind of Science_. But only if you like many "sentences"
starting with conjunctions. :)

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aazaa
I never understood this guy's following. Everything I've seen from him is
intellectual bro-flexing, physical bro-flexing, or buzzword bingo.

Here's the bottom line, from the conclusion:

> Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary
> approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include
> constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak,
> especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.

In other words, isolate the infected. This is not new, nor is the idea of
today's highly connected world causing diseases to spread faster than in the
last century.

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remus
Call me cynical, but this seems like little more than an attention grabbing
paper aiming to leverage press coverage to increase the authors' fame.

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buzzkillington
Yes, that's why it's from Nassim Taleb.

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arkitaip
This is scary: "We estimated that the mean R0 ranges from 3.30 (95%CI:
2.73-3.96) to 5.47 (95%CI: 4.16-7.10) associated with 0-fold to 2-fold
increase in the reporting rate."

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sdinsn
MERS had a small R0 and yet killed more than SARS, which had a R0 range of
2-5.

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cortesi
Taleb's prominence is baffling to me. I've read all his books, and tried hard
to figure out why people I respect believe he's an important thinker. I just
can't see it. Almost everything he says sets off my bullshit alarm.

Here we have him in typical form. The point of the paper seems to be to argue
that we can reduce transmission by reducing contact (obvious), and concludes
that we should do this pre-emptively at large scale worldwide (never going to
happen, only good for alarmist headlines). This is exactly his formula when
treating risk: start with a total platitude (rare events happen), and spin it
out through huge over-reach into a headline-grabbing book (black swan! boo!).

The other thing about Taleb is that he's frequently way out over his skis on
on the facts. Here, he states that the "selective dominance of increasingly
worse pathogens" makes "extinction certain" as if he's stating an undisputed
fact. But instead of citing a virology paper, he cites an interesting but not
very relevant evolutionary dynamics paper that draws on a particular
mathematical model. In fact, the real world is complicated, and if anything
virology tells us the opposite: zoonotic viruses tend to become less virulent
over time, as the tradeoff between transmission and lethality is optimised.
Almost nobody working in the area of virology would agree with the alarmist
nonsense that this paper takes as axiomatic.

If anyone is interested in hearing how actual virologists talk about this
outbreak, the superb This Week In Virology podcast has just released an
episode that dives into this in depth:

[http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/](http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/)

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buzzkillington
He is wrong in just about every case, yet he is right in the aggregate. We are
terrible at predicting high impact low probability events and waste our time
worrying about low impact high probability events.

Put another way, if we were Turkeys our risk analysis would be modelling how
much food the farmer is bringing us every day. And we don't know about Thanks
Giving.

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pillefitz
With a basic world model + scenario analysis they should have become aware of
the possibility of a Thanksgiving Event

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buzzkillington
I am very interested in seeing the research about teaching Turkeys English,
time keeping and American colonial history.

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nemoniac
Is the paper available without signing up for academia.edu?

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nootropicat
tl;dr This old Pandemic II meme fluffed in scientific jargon:
[https://files.catbox.moe/lenadr.jpg](https://files.catbox.moe/lenadr.jpg)

The only actual purpose of this paper is to advertise Taleb (and his books):
Wuhan virus worse than current predictions? He's definitely going to remind
people about his "genius" prediction that it could be worse. Turns out to be
not such a big deal? Nobody is even going to remember he wrote this.

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armitron
That’s not what I got from it at all. The precautionary principle and fat-
tailed processes that come with extinction-level risks are real. He makes
valid and salient points.

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salty_biscuits
Valid points that are hand wavey, non specific and non quantitative.
Basically, you can't estimate parameters because of fat tails so what people
are doing is inadequate. Seems trite to me

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mieses
the search for novelty above all else killed the cat

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aaron695
Since there literally nothing of substance here, just awesome sounding words,
normal Taleb, lets go meta.

The new cool of 2020 seems to be is to make things look like journal articles
and blog them. I almost wish for the days of peer review.

I have no idea what a "general" or "non native" "precautionary principle" is.
I assume a Markov chain suggested it to them.

But if you believe the precautionary principle then you are pretty much anti-
science. Anti-Vaxxers are precautionary principle enthusiasts for instance.

You could go all philosophical and say the precautionary principle is a new
science, but that just sounds off alarm bells to me.

