
Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - ArtWomb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488
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throwaway41968
While Taleb himself is kind of an asshole an endearing thing about him (to me
at least) is that he pisses off bigger assholes and doesn't pull his punches
when calling them out on their quackery. See e.g. the whole IQ debacle.
Regardless of what you may think about him, his problematic views and his
personality, call him abrasive, inflammatory, full of himself, whatever, but
he's not ignorant, he's not a charlatan, he's not pretending to be someone
that he's not.

In a way NNT reflects the original _hacker ethos_ in all of its pristine and
glorious ugliness.

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frenchpress1234
“Quackery” [https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-
taleb-o...](https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/)

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throwaway41968
A few things:

-It's basically a HBD blog. HBD proponents love to pretend they're doing "science" by posting huge walls of texts that masquerade as papers but would be thrown out of any respectable peer-reviewed popgen journal. ( _popgen_ , not psychology.). Here's an example of titles on this blog: "The Catholic Church and Western Genetics", "Racial Ancestry and IQ", "Population Differences in IQ-Related Genes", "Expert Surveys on Race and IQ". Note that at no point in any of those posts, any _actual geneticist_ is mentioned, only "intelligence researchers". Many of these, like Lynn, Rushton and Kanazawa were found to be guilty of conducting absolute trash science or outright fraud ([https://medium.com/@evopsychgoogle/a-critique-of-rushton-and...](https://medium.com/@evopsychgoogle/a-critique-of-rushton-and-templers-2012-paper-b334ed8db5ae), [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3332228/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3332228/), [http://risk-resilience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/jour...](http://risk-resilience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/journal-articles/files/psychopathic_personality_and_racial-ethnic_differences_reconsidered_-_a_reply_to_lynn_2003.pdf)). Many of these researchers also get funding from very shady sources like the Pioneer Fund. This alone should send all kinds of warnings about the motivated agenda of the people putting forward arguments here.

-It does nothing to address any of the points raised by Taleb, such as nonlinearity and convexity. This sentence right here shows how mathematically illiterate the author is: >I’ll say more about this below, but here note in passing that Taleb never explains why a non-linear trend would invalidate IQ in the first place. The author also doesn't seem to understand that covariance between a fat-tailed distribution and a gaussian one _isn 't well-defined in the first place_ and as such measuring samples' covariance makes no sense. You don't need "a study" to prove it, it's just math.

-It basically parrots the same points over and over again, distorting the word "predict" to the point of meaninglessness: IQ predicts this, IQ predicts that. Well of course when we live in a society where many of your life outcomes are somehow tied to your ability to sit down and take a pen and paper test, IQ is going to correlate well with these! "An artifact number that drives a bunch of correlates" is not what normal people (read, people outside the Pioneer Fund buddies) mean by intelligence! In fact, nobody really agrees what is meant by intelligence, which is why AI isn't a thing and likely won't be within our lifetimes.

-You're basically a one-reply account, who posted just so that challenges to your debunked notion of IQ wouldn't get the last word. Again, let me doubt good faith is involved here.

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SkyMarshal
When evaluating Taleb’s work you have to force yourself into a mindset of
ignoring the messenger and focusing on the message. Load the content into your
right-brain analytical mind and then firewall it off from your other
reactions. Don’t let his personality induce bias into your analysis and
judgement of his work.

Maybe you’ll ultimately find value in it, or maybe not. But you won’t know for
sure if you’re spending most of your CPU cycles on hating the messenger.

It’s annoying to have to do, but a useful skill to work out and keep fit from
time to time, not just for dealing with Taleb but plenty of other irksome
sources in life.

~~~
freepor
Have to do this with Wolfram too. There’s a good mind and a good man behind
all the puffery.

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lidHanteyk
Is there? What is it, exactly? Could you show us? All I see is an Etonian, a
work-stealer and plagiarist, a slapper of his own name onto things built by
groups of people. His lone interesting contribution, the idea of cellular
automata for quantum theories, failed Bell's requirements and had to be
rescued by others.

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bernardv
Thanks for the link. Just ‘flipped’ through the first few pages and my blood
pressure is already way up.. the guy just can’t help himself antagonize his
readers. It’s going to be a tough read..

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Swizec
Reading Antifragile always felt like he's got some interesting insights, some
of which feel quite quackery ... and the constant pot shots are unnecessary to
the point of distraction.

We get it, you don't like academics and The Establishment. But do you have to
mention it every other paragraph like a teenage boy?

Guess nobody gave him the Kill Your Darlings writing advice.

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40acres
I just bought Antifragile and can't believe this guy gets away with the
constant petty swipes. There are enough interesting ideas to keep you going
but there is so much petty noise in these books. If he has an editor they are
doing a terrible job.

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machawinka
Yes, his prose is terrible. Initially I thought he never took any english
composition class. But then I realized that perhaps he thinks he is too smart
for such things. That is, he writes the way he think, the way he speaks.

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rdlecler1
He is so unnecessarily pedantic it comes out as great insecurity. He is so
difficult to read. I would love it if a great copy editor just rewrote his
work because the ideas are important. You could probably cut it half and make
it accessible to more people. A shame.

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huffmsa
It's not supposed to be accessible to everyone. I think he says as much in one
of the books. He's not interested in being liked or broadly read, so much as
saying what he wants to say.

