I’m not completely convinced that Taleb isn’t an elaborate hoax designed to win the Turing test.
Look, I don’t like being so harsh. But the guy gets really fundamental things really really wrong. He makes me angrier than Gladwell combined with the Freakonomics guys. Which is a lot.
There’s a genre of pop-statistics that is genuinely bad for people. And it all follows the same pattern. Science says x is true, but if you think about it, surprising y thing is true. Because I’m a special snowflake, and so are you.
It’s absolute garbage.
And I don’t even know that much about stats. I dropped out of a violin performance and music theory degree. I just read a few stats textbooks and had some good professional mentors because some of this is relevant to my work as a data engineer.
This is basic level stuff that’s going wrong. The guy is clueless about everything he writes. But I’ll give it to him that he’s a genius at marketing.
He publishes books and makes money off of them. I do not. So he wins that way. But if I ever write a book, it won’t be in the fiction section where his belongs.
> He can’t tell the difference between a bad model and a broken system for creating models. He proudly claims that probability is broken because the models that people create to estimate outcomes are bad. And he uses the worst possible collection of models for the most complex systems that we know of as proof that the system is broken.
> And I don’t even know that much about stats. I dropped out of a violin performance and music theory degree. I just read a few stats textbooks and had some good professional mentors because some of this is relevant to my work as a data engineer.
eye roll
> What Taleb does here (again) is conflate a legitimate criticism of frequentist statistical models with a critique of incomplete decision models.
double take
..bullshit?
His critique:
* E[f(x)] is different from E[x] ~ X
* Jensen's inequality => use a convex decision/utility function/behavior whenever you are exposed to events out of your control
* Things like coin flip outcomes or binary true/false observations ( i.e. not simply just probabilities! ) depend on their zeroth-moment; no dependency on magnitude of the moment, such as in outcomes that are made complex by outcome-dependency upon higher-order moments
* Bet on processes whose payoff f(x) has a stochastic first moment, but don't do so stupidly, and bet rarely
* Any uncertainty about the generating process concerning higher-order moments of very small probability outcomes makes the payoff more attractive for this class of complex outcomes
If you care at all, the preprint of Silent Risk will more than satisfy for a collection of proofs. Hell even the page I just happened to be looking at would [0]
And translating into plain English means that if you bet your life or your life saving on the outcome of a coin toss, you're an idiot.
That's not an effective critique of frequentist statistical theory. That's obvious.
The absolute best and most courteous interpretation of this is, "Don't be an idiot." Thanks, Taleb, for that most insightful piece of advice.
The problem here is that this series of thoughts ascribes an attribute to statistical theory that is absolutely non-existent: that there is any weight given to any individual trial of an outcome. No one thinks that. He, and now you, are arguing against a completely non-existent point.
Look, if you have anything approaching a decent model, you know the range of possible outcomes.
If you want to understand flipping a fair coin, the outcomes are that there's a heads and a tails and it has to land on one of them.
What Taleb and you are arguing is that there's a third possibility you didn't think of where the coin lands in an alternative universe, and Margaret Thatcher is the queen of the United States, and all the puppies die.
And if that's the real set of possibilities, I want to play that game. Because I would trade all of the puppies for Queen Thatcher right now. (No offense to you if you are actually a puppy. I just really don't like Trump.)
Saying that statistics is broken because infinity doesn't exist is like saying that basic arithmetic is broken if 1 equals 0.
No shit. Yeah, when you change the basic rules of how things work, things get broken really quickly.
I'm sorry if I'm being obtuse here, but I don't see anything even remotely worthwhile in his article, your post, or your link.
Trying to work backwards from a stochastic model to the outcome of an individual event will never work. And no one thinks that it will. If you want certainty, you have to use an entirely different model of logic.
Taleb is criticizing inductive logic for not being deductive, and then claiming that you'll get just as good a result by limiting the inductive model and using only a portion of what makes it work.
It's utter and complete bullshit, as far as I can tell.
Happy to be corrected, if you think I'm wrong.
Can we agree that a charitable plain english version of what he's trying to say is this:
Don't play the long odds if you aren't playing the long game. If you're playing the short game, don't risk more than you can afford to lose.
If he's saying more than that, please enlighten me. In my first post on this topic I said that he wasn't entirely wrong, but he is entirely useless. If you've made it past the age of 5 and haven't figured this out already, well, reading his book won't help you because you won't understand a goddamn word in it.
I will read his next book because it's unfair to criticize something you haven't exposed yourself to. But I can't imagine any possible way that it could comprise a collection of proofs.
Again, what is there to prove? That probability doesn't work good when you change the rules about how it works? That you can't take a distribution and apply it to a single point in time? That you can't take a collection of inductive data and use it to prove a universal truth?
No sane person has ever claimed that you can do any of those things. All I can tell is that Taleb is claiming to be both interesting and original by writing a book that says you can't do any of those things.
Welcome to the grown-up world, Taleb. We already knew that.
P.S. Santa Clause isn't real.
Maybe I should write a book about how not real Santa is. I bet Murray Gell-Mann would immediately grasp this concept.
