
Taleb: The Only Man Who Has a Clue - imartin2k
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/taleb-the-only-man-who-has-a-clue.html
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chkaloon
The problem I see with Taleb is that people see him as the kid who cries
'wolf' too much, unfortunately. Other people see him as someone, like a
stopped clock, is right twice a day.

It's unfortunate, because he probably has valid contributions to make now that
we are in the exact scenario he was built for. But he has lost a lot of
credibility in the years leading up to it, rightly or wrongly.

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deanebarker
Taleb has to be one of the most narcissistic people in the world.

I remember reading "The Art of Thinking Clearly" by Rolf Dobelli, and there's
a sentence in one of the chapters where says something like "no one could have
predicted to 2007 housing crash (except Nassim Taleb)." Well, turns out that
Dobelli is a "protege" of Taleb, and I can just see Taleb editing this
manuscript and cajoling Dobelli into adding the parenthetical.

As such, I break out in hives whenever Taleb's name comes up. Even if he's
right some of the time, I still can't listen to a thing he says.

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frank2
(I don't know Taleb personally.)

One of my parents is narcissistic. I believe that Trump is narcissistic, er,
more narcissistic than .97 of the population -- let us say the US population
since that is the only country I've lived in. William Shatner is more
narcissistic than .99 of the US population.

Taleb strikes me as not particularly narcissistic.

He does strike me as very low (02 percentile or lower) in trait agreeableness.

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nabla9
The point about GMO is itself clueless.

Breeding, crop hybrid breeding, other natural recombination techniques,
directed evolution and different types of GMO are just generic techniques for
the same result.

The risk is in specific organisms and regulating them. How you achieve it does
not matter. If you produce harmful organism using natural recombination
techniques it's just as scary.

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gumby
TL;DR: “Epidemiologists don’t understand epistemology so listen to me instead”

