I've never felt more conflicted over a public person than I am about Nassim Taleb. He's clearly brilliant, and makes bold statements that he stands behind- that takes guts and is to be applauded. On the other hand, he can be an outright prick and I don't understand some of the fights he picks. Dude is polarizing and fascinating.
I used to be thrown off by the fights he picked but then I had a thought. The fact that's it's considered rude to criticize people with influence means it's difficult to gauge their performance. If anything public figures should be harshly criticized because they make tons of money when things go well and don't seem to be taking on any risk from their bad decisions.
boy do I feel the same. He recently tweeted something to the effect that 'all employees should worship entrepreneurs for taking the risk of starting a business'. Now apart from the fact that only a minority of people can afford to take such a risk, have the right personality for business, the right connections, education....just...what a condescending thing to say and coming from a man who has no 'skin in the game' himself.
On the other hand his work on unveiling the myth of IQ is laudable.
His writing is hard to read and his acrobatic algebraic manipulations are impossible to follow. He's a dick but I like him.
One of the reasons for the replication crisis in science is the lack of more people like Taleb who are not afraid to say "this study is bullshit" instead of being ultra-polite and never daring to put into doubt the integrity of the authors (p-hacking, data falsification, ...)
I've read quite a number of blog posts about scientists who were certain a paper was p-hacked (and proven right later) but who said they would never dare raise their voice publicly because it would kill their career.
I don't know what the equivalent to Taleb would be in the hard sciences, but it wouldn't be an antidote to bullshit research. The answer to a bad paper is generally a better paper, not loud whining.
Funny, I'm a postdoc (in biomedical research), and I and my boss, a PI, had this exact debate last night.
I took the side of 781, and he was justin66. My perspective is that you cannot take data, or a concept, that is fundamentally broken, add a little effort, and fix it.
For example, if a collaborator sends data for analysis where the sample size was too small for the effect, or worse, asked to find statistical differences between 1-2 samples per group, you can't fix that with any amount of algorithmic mumbo-jumbo. You can only fix it by redoing the experiment properly. Although we are asked to do this sort of thing almost daily (not always this blatantly).
His perspective is, and maybe I'm being a bit uncharitable, you take what you're given, do your best, clearly describe what you did and honestly note the limitations, and move on. Even if the result is something highly dubious, that is for the reviewers to decide.
But I personally think a little loud whining is called for in the sciences to discourage totally half-baked ideas and data from ever seeing the light of day. But the trouble is the pressures are so intense and funding is so tight, people feel compelled to halfass many things, which is the real problem.
EDIT: I should add I am not talking about data falsification or major ethical breaches like that. I'm talking about things that more amount to a form of pressure-induced willful stupidity, no dishonesty involved. I would speculate this is much more of a cause of the replication crisis than outright dishonesty.
People don't like to outright lie because it could cost them their careers. But they certainly can conveniently forget some basic scientific principles at times if it suits them and they can't get a decent story while being rigorous. And their excuse will be -- well, we clearly documented everything we did in the paper, and the reviewers thought it was OK (because the reviewers do the same sorts of thing). And this, folks, is how you get a lot of shitty papers.
> I'm talking about things that more amount to a form of pressure-induced willful stupidity, no dishonesty involved.
Isn't that still dishonesty though? If you know that you are misapplying statistical techniques to get what you want, how is that different from a pseudo-scientist talking about quantum mumbo-jumbo to get what he wants.
On a bigger scale, this just fuels public anti-science, who is fed up of reading in the news "coffee is good for your heart" and the next day "coffee causes heart attacks". And it's not only because of journalists writing sensational titles, you can actually find meta-analysis pro/against any major food group.
It is honestly hard to tell in these situations when they are lying by omission and when they are plain stupid. I think it is usually a form of apathy whereby what is produced is bullshit (in the technical meaning of the essay, "On Bullshit", whereby people don't care whether a thing is true or false so long as it's published).
> On a bigger scale, this just fuels public anti-science
Yep... But people have careers to maintain and grants to get.
I totally agree with you and take your side on this issue but the systemic issues are huge and I don't know what exactly it would take to fix them.
>For example, if a collaborator sends data for analysis where the sample size was too small for the effect, or worse, asked to find statistical differences between 1-2 samples per group, you can't fix that with any amount of algorithmic mumbo-jumbo.
Au contraire: a few years back my colleagues came to me with an shRNA screen with no replication. I said you can't do this, without an estimate of variability this is meaningless (NOT the first, or last, time i gave this lecture). The reply was, analyze it anyway. I made up some bullshit. The reviewers did nothing. We published in Nature Genetics.
Ha. I have a lot of those papers too, but none that are BS in such a high tier, congrats! (or "congrats")
At this point I am cynical enough to believe people include analysts on their papers as an insurance policy to have the "licensed" person to give the seal of approval, and take the blame if necessary, for their shitty data. Which they will never listen to concerns about before publication.
Just today I am working on a qPCR array (yes people still use those) with one "housekeeping" gene replicated 4 times for ddCt normalization. 80 miRs go up, none go down, out of 400. No one sees any problem with this, the data is the data.
Them: Oh, and can you, cgiles, also tell us about the genes regulated by these miRs?
Me: Not really in any principled way, especially when the underlying data is incredibly fishy, and even if I did, we would be saying all the target genes go down. Don't you think people will find that odd? Do you think perhaps there could be a problem with your "housekeeping" gene?
Them: Who cares? Just run the algorithm.
Thank you for this tale. I'm glad I'm not the only one in this situation.
This sort of stuff, the general lack of interest in method in the drive to publish, has really killed a lot of my faith in the idea of a scientific method. It can't work, we can't produce good, useful knowledge if even the best scientists at top flight institutions just regard it as a shell game where the facsimile of a result is as good as a real result, as long as you can sneak it past publishers, who are playing the same game with the public.
This makes me sad. Also it makes me not believe anything "scientists say." So is it a good thing or a bad thing that nobody cares what reasonably educated non-experts like myself think?
It is just like anything else, for example politics. Many politicians have strong convictions and care about the electorate and outcomes (I have several politician friends).
But when push comes to shove, keeping their job and food on the table for their families comes first. So ethical compromises are made.
Similarly, for tech people and privacy. I would wager there are dozens if not hundreds here on HN who have raised concerns with management about the privacy implications of something they're being requested to build. Management says, build it anyway. Programmer reluctantly complies because they like their job.
WRT science it is obvious that it works over the long term. But in the short term it can be quite nasty. So I would say if you are a member of the public, you can safely believe something scientists have said for a long time without controversy, like the helical structure of DNA, but new or controversial findings should be taken with a large grain of salt.
"The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going." - William McChesney Martin, head of the Fed in the 1960s.
His point was that if you don't want a crash, steps have to be taken to stop a boom before it's too late. Politicians hate that, because it means deliberately stopping a boom. But that's the Fed's job, and it's why they have some independence from administration policy.
Weird interview. He starts out angry that someone insulted risk takers who lose money. Then by the end of the interview he says people should just get jobs and make super conservative investments like gold and short term bonds. Waste of 20 minutes.
I think you're comparing apples and oranges here, and leaving out details. He says the entrepreneurs as risk takers are important, because they are doing something that benefits the economy if they win and don't really impact anything but themselves if they lose.
That's completely different from what he's talking about in the second half, which is the focus on financial markets. He's advising that people who don't know how to hedge themselves should stay out of the financial markets. He didn't specifically say it, but I think the rationale for that perspective is that the risk taking in the financial markets takes a very different form than the risk that an entrepreneur faces; the risk taking in financial markets can fail spectacularly and cause a lot more problems than bankrupting a single person. The best example is the LTCM crisis, where a single company's failure was so impactful and sudden that it threatened destabilizing the entire market.
Especially since gold is only actually a conservative "investment" if you store it yourself and that is expensive if you want low risk. Otherwise you don't have a safe asset at all due to counter-party risk on your notional gold holdings.
Can somebody please ELI5 his whole phenomenon? I don't really understand who are the targets (other than Nate Silver) of all his polemic. From my limited exposure, he's basically making age-old conservative points, arguing that the Enlightenment ideal of human knowledge has strong (but unidentified) limits.
Why is he so popular? And how did he get so rich on Wall Street if he just thinks randomness blows all the statistical experts out of the water? I know I'm missing something.
No: he does not say that statistics are useless. He says that the assumption of normality does not hold in real life: fat tails and the absence of means are ubiquitous. That is all the “black swan” means and how he got rich: taking risks which are nonsense under normal distributions but not so under, for instance, the Cauchy distribution.
Taleb's basic claim is that options that are way out of the money are underpriced. So he set up a fund, Empirica, which bought options a long way from the current value. This strategy does extremely well in years of a sudden downturn, and loses money in all other years. He and his investors did really well in 2008. He doesn't talk about the other years. Solid numbers for Empirica are really hard to find. Whether this is a win as an ongoing strategy is a big question. If you'd bought into that strategy in 2009, after it worked once, you'd have lost money for a decade.
Right, Empirica was the first "black swan" fund, which caught the crash of 2000. Universa was the next round, starting in 2007. That caught the 2008 crash.
As a strategy, this depends on a rough prediction of when the next crash will occur.
> this depends on a rough prediction of when the next crash will occur
If you think the tails are mispriced (and you have some kind of alternative distribution), and markets are liquid, can't you just keep on making Kelly bets? Maybe you need to model third-party investors bailing too, though...
Thanks. Ok, so is he creating strawmen everywhere, then? I know people working in government, biotech, climate research, and none of them seem to think that the normal distribution is the only model out there, or that the mean is a very meaningful (no pun intended) statistic.
The problem is: the normal assumption is just an assumption with a very interesting asymptotic property. That makes it good for computations.
However, Nature and more specifically economic events have little asymptotics in them (mainly isolated things like crises, earthquakes, crashes, accidents...).
I tend to agree with him on this.
He is not against science. He is mostly against economic modellers.
Some of his books contain pretty interesting insights, unfortunately his huge ego and his unwavering admiration for other egomaniacs like Trump gets tiring and leads to obvious contradictions that he doesn't explain. One of his main thesis is that people having "skin in the game" leads to a better society, but then somehow being critical of someone who makes horrible bets on real estate & casino using billions of other people's money (bank's) and not suffering any consequences, is sacrilege.
I don't get your last point - I think he is clearly in favor of "if you take the risk, you deserve both the win and the loss" - explicitly calling out that people who risk other people's money and take their cut whether it wins or loses are the worst.
I have great respect for Taleb, but the value of his work is pretty much a linear function of closeness to the statistical math he used to get rich trading derivatives. He has extremely interesting things to say about uncertainty, randomness, fat tails, dynamic systems, and more. And he offers theorems to support his assertions.
At the other extreme, the limit case so far is when he starts tweeting about anthropology: it's utterly cringe-worthy.
He seems to have figured out that hot takes get him more visibility than measured discourse, and he's optimizing for that visibility. There's always value in his ideas, but the presentation seems to have veered toward clickbait.
And if you disagree with him, he'll reach for his ad homonym stash (mostly calling others "imbecile"), which is why I stopped following him in social media. Read his books, but stay away from everything else he produces.
Any discussion about Taleb always leads to questions about why he picks such public fights. I've said this before:
The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes that it would be very good for book sales.
All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them: since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a persona, and he's a very good method actor.
I question that kind of opinion talk, which boils down to (often implicitly) debating the definition of words in a boring way and/or trying to attribute meaningless merits and demerits to whole arbitrary idealized "class" of people.
There is so little information and it is so caricatural and simplistic to come and state in a kind of absolute tone that "entrepreneurs" are good and they build "value" (while basically the "others" are all of the inverse?)
I do not expect to get any insight from somebody with that kind of point of view. I already know that some people have that kind of point of view, and I already know that some people have radically different one, and the philosophical framework in both cases has some validity, with idealistic components and realistic ones, of which both intuitively and descriptively we should strive to get a balance from.
On top of that, postmodern capitalism has taken a turn that very few academics would found merits in (and even fewer have called for), yet it managed to influence the policies in way that are not even widely debated (at least as widely as they should) by the media and the public. So the ever increasing amount of discretionary power that a defacto class (real this time, because having 100000 times more wealth than your "neighbor" is a criteria vastly more useful than being e.g. an Uber driver vs. being salaried in a taxi company) of people already have achieved and are continuing to amass is extremely concerning, even more so given the choice that have been made, the impact that this yield, and the quasi complete lack of action that could show we could have some confidence in their infinite wisdom.
I do not buy that the only thing that is needed is some kind of natural regulation by (re-?)allowing "failure". "Risk takers" can still have a shitload amount of money after they loose some.
If some attempts of political organization in other forms failed, my guess is that postmodern capitalism in the form of unbridled individualism and deathmatch to grab control and dispend resources will fail harder.
And I'm not sold on the concept on "not true capitalism", because of the principle of realism, that I refuses to apply only when it suits my narrative. A far better and hopefully far more actionable way to present things is to state that model X tends to degenerate into concrete situation Y, while model T tends to yield Z. So of course there will be some corrections to give. AND I do not believe we should primarily listen to people who do not recognize some extraordinary value brought by some people in the society (e.g. nurses, they could be on the "sideline collecting their salary"?), to decide of those corrections. I believe that individualism and hubris is a big component in those deviations, regardless of the original ideal.
On the other hand, trying to attribute merit or demerit on abstract mythical "entrepreneurship" without the details is an activity I consider having absolutely no meaning: I'll be more happy that some projects fail so I could consider people achieving success in horrible projects even "worse" than people failing at such projects, and on another dimension failures (on both horrible and wonderful projects) can be attributed on their leaders while other on other factors.
I'm wary this might end up aggravating the subset of Taleb adherents on here but from what I've seen of him (segments of some of his books, tweets, essays) he cultivates a pretty brazenly idealistic / ideological (as opposed to materialistic) worldview that he repackages in academic language in order to bolster his authority.
To be clear this is not to imply that he isn't in control of his subject matter. Just that to say Ray Dalio is "mistaken" about his largely philosophical/ideological claims about capitalism fits into a pattern I observe from Taleb where he uses a deep and nuanced understanding of the status quo as a weapon to beat down normative arguments that the status quo should be changed. It's very similar to how Sam Harris uses his specialist authority to deliver regressive social critiques that he wraps in academic language.
We need to remember that expertise on a subject is a tool, but how you use that tool is always guided by ideologies. I challenge people to think critically about what those like Harris and Taleb's morality and ideological positions are.
