This comment was great fun to read, and I suspect that I share some of your opinions about Taleb (although mine are decaying with each day that passes since I last finished reading any of his books), but it would have been stronger as an argument if you had left off the part about him being a "vile idiot".
I just can't pass it. I gave my best at reading his book. The guy is unable to write one paragraph which doesn't contain some nonsense or serious misuse of established terms. He is insulting whole groups of people and institutions without giving any examples or research.
I am pretty sure that if his stuff were posted without his name the conclusion would be obvious: it's just nonsense and very offensive at that.
I realize calling people idiots are frown upon here but I am ready to defend it. There isn't one other author which infuriates me with his ignorance and inability to make specific point without throwing condescending remarks.
If there is anybody who deserve the term it's him. I mean "we should retire standard deviation because everybody misues it and it's not useful for real life" without any examples ? He just called out thousands of scientist, risk managers and statisticians without giving one single argument. His suggestion to just use mean deviation is laughable and obviously doesn't work for many purposes which he didn't address while being condescending in the process.
It's worse than saying: "we should retire Java and just use Python because it has dynamic typing and seemingly developers at even serious companies fail to see this!". Remark of this kind would gain me "idiot" badge pretty quickly.
This article is on this level (well, actually lower as remark about Python actually contains an argument) and his book is worse. If that doesn't qualify him as an idiot I don't know what else could.
The guy is clearly not an idiot in the general sense; I bet he is of, at least, average intelligence. I also have my doubts that he is 'vile' for the majority of connotations and denotations of that word. Because of this, just shouting 'he's an idiot!' is vulnerable to being dismissed as hyperbole, and your baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.
You seem exasperated at his condescending attitude, but make no effort to hold higher ground. That said, even dismissing him as a 'crank' would add more substance to your argument than calling him a 'vile idiot.'
I'm not saying you have to play softball, and there are plenty of targets for your rage. Call his condescension vile, and his poorly-thought out conclusions laughable. Instead of saying he's an idiot, you can say that he's being lazy and should know better exactly because he's NOT an idiot.
I don't understand calling him a "vile idiot" is so terrible. Vile is a subjective assessment in the eye of the beholder. Bluecalm began with a few paragraphs making the case that Taleb has pretensions of being an expert where he doesn't know what he is talking about, and that his statements are unsupported.
Calling him a crank is a more objective statement, and to me seems to impute an unknowable motive to what Taleb is doing in these types of articles. Is it an egotistical attempt to feel important, a strategy to sell books, or does he believe all the stuff he says?
What I personally find so unpleasant and objectionable about Taleb is probably unfair, but he seems to fit the archetype of an entire group of people who make loud statements that are wrong or unsupported, but take a long and nuanced discussion to explain why.
For example he seems to be terrible at economic analysis, but portrays himself as an excellent trader so he asserts that scientific study of the economy is bunk. Let's say that he really is an outlier in finance, operating with localized phenomena is different than having a comprehensive view of the economy and refining models.
I think his idea of Black Swans is incredibly useful, and it is interesting to explore the psychology of underestimating the likelihood of rare events. His contributions are less useful when he sounds like the people who say "economics is not a science", before making a bold assertion about the economy that has no rigorous models to support it. Such situations are analogous to saying meteorology is not a science when it comes to forecasting whether or not it will rain in ten days. "A science" is a field where everything is known? "A science" is not a field where models are refined through research and experimentation? The science part of meteorology is the process of understanding the mechanisms behind how air masses interact and improving models, not predicting weather at a future date when a good deal of what will determine whether or not it rains has not yet occurred.
Super helpful comment. Thanks. Definitely, the transition from calling public figures "vile idiots" to calling individual commenters on HN threads "vile idiots" is sure to produce a productive discussion.
I started this subthread by pointing out that 'bluecalm had weakened his argument by using the words "vile idiot". But 'bluecalm also made a bunch of testable and non-obvious observations in his comment; his writing had value. Whereas you just jumped in to call someone you disagreed with a name, and nothing else; your writing had no value.
Did you really understand that comment to be addressed to the writer rather than what was written? Frankly I found it to be a rather more convincing condemnation of the phrase "vile idiot" than your own. FWIW, I don't think anyone here (nor NNT even) is a vile idiot.
>Super helpful comment. Thanks. Definitely, the transition from calling public figures "vile idiots" to calling individual commenters on HN threads "vile idiots" is sure to produce a productive discussion.
The point I wanted to make was that "vile idiot" is problematic in itself, and by my meta-use of it, I hoped the parent would obviously see why.
How calling public figures "vile idiots" is any better than calling individual HN commenters the same?
>Whereas you just jumped in to call someone you disagreed with a name, and nothing else; your writing had no value.
Did it really seem like a called him a name just for the fun of it? Wasn't the meta-context obvious?
Let's say it was worded instead: "... these are some reasons that he was wrong, and his style of argumentation leads me to feel actual antipathy toward him."
Maybe it is because "vile" doesn't sound like a very extreme word to me—almost like Daffy Duck saying "despicable". I suppose I would have had the same reaction, if instead bluecalm had denigrated him with a word that sounds more serious to me like "worthless".
>That said, even dismissing him as a 'crank' would add more substance to your argument than calling him a 'vile idiot.'
Neither "crank" or "vile idiot" would add substance to bluecalm's argument. "Vile idiot" isn't even part of the argument, it's part of the conclusion.
I disagree with bluecalm on the "vile idiot" conclusion - I think that he's either vile or an idiot. If he's really communicating how he sees the world, he's an idiot. If he's just cynically trying to come up with another Gladwell/Taleb style thesis that will catch fire with the NYT and TED crowd and bring in buckets of money, then he's vile.
Well, it surely looks like it seeing level of argument he presents and lack of logical consistency in his writing. Even in this article he claims SD doesn't model real world as well as MAD and then as arguments ask you what would you do if you were asked to calculate... MAD, you would clearly see it's not SD :-)
His latest book is worse than the article and my conclusion about him being and idiot is based mainly on it.
Here is one gem from his book:
>>True, while humans self-repair, they eventually wear out (hopefully leaving their
genes, books, or some other information behind—another discussion). But the
phenomenon of aging is misunderstood, largely fraught with mental biases and logical
flaws. We observe old people and see them age, so we associate aging with their loss
of muscle mass, bone weakness, loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music,
and similar degenerative effects. But these failures to self-repair come largely from
maladjustment—either too few stressors or too little time for recovery between them—
and maladjustment for this author is the mismatch between one’s design and the
structure of the randomness of the environment (what I call more technically its
“distributional or statistical properties”). What we observe in “aging” is a combination
of maladjustment and senescence, and it appears that the two are separable—
senescence might not be avoidable, and should not be avoided (it would contradict the
logic of life, as we will see in the next chapter); maladjustment is avoidable. Much of
aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of
civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a
natural environment, people die without aging—or after a very short period of aging.
For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for
moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gatherers until the very end.
And this artificial aging comes from stifling internal antifragility.
In which he claims aging is misunderstood and proposes his new theory that it comes from too few stressors or too little recovery. Then he says that "Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort - a disease of civilization".
Really ? Aging comes from misunderstanding ?
This is just random babbling, there is no sense in it. Reasonable people don't write or talk like this and those who do with such conviction as him are called... well, idiots.
>polyglot who writes classical Greek, Arabic, French, English and can do advanced statistical modeling is clearly an idiot right?
If he is in fact a polyglot and in fact can do advanced statistical modelling (the latter I very much doubt, the former I have no idea about) maybe he is not an idiot but some mental illness is taking a toll on him which makes him write and talk like one.
The thing is there is no continuity, what he sees as arguments don't even address the point. It's just stream of words without any essence or meaning. I mean again, read the paragraph I quoted.. it's not even cherry picked. There are worse (like the one about depression or academia). The whole book is like that and article from OP just continues the trend.
He does not say aging comes from too few stressors. He says maladjustment (which is just one component of aging) is.
>>> Aging comes from misunderstanding ? This is just random babbling,
You are trying very hard to not understand. The thought is simple - comfort has side effects (think obesity, bad nutrition, lack of movement, overuse of pharmaceuticals like antibiotics or mood adjusters, etc.) which are not properly appreciated (they are starting to be, but we are still far from proper realization (understanding) of what and how much we pay for it and doing something about it). Not understanding those effects influences behaviors in such ways that people harm themselves. These effects accumulate and contribute to what is called "aging" - you can eat random junk when you are 20 and be fine, but keep doing it till you're 50 and you'll be the best client of your local healthcare facilities for the rest of your life. And so on and so forth. I won't say it is the deepest of observations - actually, it's pretty rapidly becoming a commonplace and sometimes even a fashion - but it definitely not a "random babbling".
I get an impression that you just came to a hard conclusion that Taleb literally writes nonsense and you are hard set on not allowing any sense that is contained in his writing - and can be easily seen - to get to you. Your right of course, but I personally fail to find any utility in such a behavior.
This is what I get too. I've read all his books except the technical one (Dynamic Hedging) and this conclusion of 'nonsense' about a pretty clearly written paragraph is baffling. I too read the paragraph and came to the conclusion you did.
Maybe the above commenter has a hard-on for bullet points and power point presentations but Taleb has repeatedly said that he writes essays for pleasurable consumption and not business books (regardless of how the publisher markets them).
I don't see a problem with the sentence "Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort - a disease of civilization". I read it like this: people think comfort is good and healthy and prolongs life, so they seek comfort and get fragile/sick - they misunderstand the effect of comfort.
Although its unfair to nitpick one paragraph since its out of context from the rest of the chapter/book, reading the aging paragraph makes me see where you are coming from with all this.
The guy can't help himself. It's like reading a stock ticker (except its Taleb's stream of thought), flashing across with all the different thoughts that don't necessarily correlate with each other. You think there's some relevancy there but its hard to pick it out in the moment.
I will say though, Taleb reader's are surely great Words with Friends or Scrabble players. You just can't help picking up a few new words.
I don't agree with your 'vile idiot' statement but I mostly concur with your thoughts. I hope that you don't let Taleb affect your senescence.
Infact his goal is to alienate readers like the commenter above by writing in the old literary style. We are so accustomed to modern non-fiction following Malcolm Gladwell like structure for 10 year olds that we've lost the art of appreciating the meandering, scattershot expression of ideas in a literary style. In short, his filtering works.
no, it's just bad writing. meandering nonsense is never good writing, though perhaps it boosts your ego to feel like you are part of a special club (of millions) that understands his ramblings.
Funny I find your comments to be doing exactly what they are critiquing. And I think you are letting your hate to him cloud your ability to want to understand what he is trying to say.
I personally find his books mostly valid critiques of established "truths", probably because I agree with much of it. If that makes me a vile idiot I am fine with that. Each to their own.
Too bad no upvote button. I agree with you. I find the comment also a little too worked up with a little useful counter argument. I agree STD has its uses in situations. Nassim is not saying to get rid of the concept, but more like saying a lot of people are not using it correctly. I don't know why so worked up about that... Quite a lot of pointless insults.
> Funny I find your comments to be doing exactly what they are critiquing.
I am really not doing it. I gave specific examples of what is wrong with his article and in what areas standard deviation works. I am not defending a view that "standard deviation describes reality better" or anything like that. I am saying why his article is bad and in what areas his solution of just using MAD doesn't work. Those are quite specific things. How can you tell I am doing the same thing I am accusing him of ?
While I didn't mention any specific fragment in his book I thought it's a useful view to add it as I've spent a lot of time developing it (I've read 3 books of him and listened to many talks). There is limited space in internet forum post and proving my point would require quoting the entire book as I claimed there is barely any paragraph without nonsense or term misuse. Also my claim is easily verifiable: just start reading "Antifragile" and see for yourself.
That can't be said about his claims.
> Nassim is not saying to get rid of the concept, but more like saying a lot of people are not using it correctly.
Really? That's the vibe you get from the article ? Let's see:
>it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation
>Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer
>as it does more harm than good
>It is all due to a historical accident: in 1893
He is not saying that some people in some situations misuse the concept. He is saying the concept is dangerous and should be disposed of. I get that he is easy to like as he picks on groups not generally liked but let's stick to what he is actually claiming instead of softening it for him.
Again, he doesn't give one simple example of a situation which could be handled better by using MAD instead of now used standard deviation.
>>> I am pretty sure that if his stuff were posted without his name the conclusion would be obvious: it's just nonsense and very offensive at that.
This is not true, at least for me. When I first read Taleb's ideas, I had no idea who he was and what is his credentials, but his ideas were interesting enough and challenging enough to look him up and find out what else he wrote. Yes, his style is abrasive and sometimes outright combative. So what. His ideas are interesting, that's what matters. I'd rather have an abrasive person who has interesting ideas than a polite one who has nothing.
And speaking of Python vs. Java things, I'm reading those kind of things literally every day, frequently including here on HN. If idiot badges were distributed for each such occasions, there would be a very sizeable majority wearing them. But I am not convinced calling each other idiots is actually adds anything to the discussion.
Taleb's books are full of stories, random ideas, non-sequitur thoughts and a quite a few rants about things that bother him. This essay was clearly an invitation to rant about something and the more controversial the better.
Sure, he comes across as arrogant, confrontational and uncompromising and he is unapologetic on top of that; yet dismissing the bulk of his writing based on his personality and style of writing is a shame as the recurring theme throughout all his books are worth the time spent reading. To paraphrase: We believe and accept a lot of things without question and let fallacious thinking and cognitive biases lead us into making decisions and actions that do us harm.
Also, his books are that rare type that you can pick up, read a few pages and have set off a train of thinking for the rest of the day.
No. He draws no conclusions from Gladwell's analysis; he brings Gladwell into the discussion only to show a well-publicized comparison between what Gladwell believed to be two opposing views of how risk works in the markets. He then tries to demonstrate that Niederhoffer's approach outperformed Taleb's, not because Gladwell said so, but because the empirically available facts of how the funds operated appear to demonstrate it.
Gladwell plays into the comparison about as much as the editors of Cosmopolitan would play into it if Niederhoffer and Taleb had shared the cover of an issue of Cosmo.
"Nassim Taleb is a vulgar bombastic windbag, and I like him a lot. His books do a good job of explaining some deep, important finance ideas for a general audience. He has helped popularize the notion of "skin in the game". His trolling of economists is also good for some lulz (I particularly enjoyed his coinage of the term "macrobullshitters")."
