The Global Rebellion Against “No-Skin-In-the-Game” Insiders | Hacker News Reader

The Global Rebellion Against “No-Skin-In-the-Game” Insiders

reason.com

113 pointsMollyR93 comments

I think the best part of the article, and perhaps the best summary why this is happening is this single line:

"who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think...and 5) who to vote for."

People are seeing right through the political class and media, and it's making them extremely worried. They see an elite that seems to utterly hate them, ignore things they consider issues (while attacking anyone who disagrees as 'bigots') and who who seem more interested in lining their own pockets than actually helping society.

It has always been this way for humans for the past 10,000 years since we invented society. In small groups you can actually care about people, in large hierarchical groups you can't possibly care about anyone other than your small tribe. The solution to this is to break countries into much smaller units of representation while at the same time reducing the population significantly, we don't need more than a few hundred million people on this planet, ever. Essentially making a war on hierarchy and massive conglomeration of people.

Without these two moves, things will continue to get worse or perhaps better depending on perspective. It's evident to anyone with a mind that civilization as it exists now is completely and utterly a mad experiment which has at least as much chance in total failure as it does in success... and success might not be something which is positive, i.e. everyone hooked into the Matrix or something akin to that. Robots doing everything and reducing people to something akin to wild animals with no economic purpose.

When you say that "we" (you?) don't need most of the people living today, or their offspring, ever, isn't it the perfect example of inability to care about people?

That does not necessarily mean that no one should have any kids. It means that people should be forced to have at most one child, by probably compulsory sterilization after the first child's birth. Puerto Rico is an example of a place where this policy worked just fine. And it should apply to everyone, not certain groups and classes of people which is where such a policy errors. So no it has nothing to do with caring for people. In fact the geometric population reduction would have the exact impact of reducing the population and therefore creating more appreciation for people.

You are trolling [1] here [2], right?

[1] http://racerelations.about.com/od/historyofracerelations/a/T...

[2] http://stanford.edu/group/womenscourage/cgi-bin/blogs/family...

Not trolling, most of those articles are just whining about how inhumane it is... really more appeals to emotion than any sort of logic. Capitalists simply coerce people not to have children by making their economic lives miserable. So that they are so tied up in work and the economy, with limited pay, that they can not logically think of having children. That only increases misery. All while the Capitalists import people from the third world to increase competition and misery. All of this humaneness at the end does not reduce misery or create happiness, it does the exact opposite while breeders argue about freedom and other things, they deprive their children of any sort of freedom or happiness. Most people simply produce slaves for the economy. People whose lives center around being exploited by other people. To me slavery exists on a spectrum, the more competition and worse the working conditions in terms of the so-called work life balance, the more akin a job becomes to slavery.

So the logical extension where I can't see the link is that cavemen way way back must have either have been slaves, or had better lives than everyone on today's slavery spectrum. Is that right?

When I am out hunting something or in nature, I feel generally much better than while in society. Much like slaves, stress for modern humans is constant and never ending. Stress for primitive human hunter gatherers was acute and they were adapted to it after millions of years of evolution. Humans love coming with with rhetoric to justify how much better off they are, while at the same time knowing they are all miserable and dislike their specialist jobs, but there isn't much to do about that other than create more rhetoric about how much better everything is and how much better it will be in the future. While the constant amount of stress, the feelings of helplessness, lack of balance, etc, simply persist if not increase.

> Much like slaves, stress for modern humans is constant and never ending.

> While the constant amount of stress, the feelings of helplessness, lack of balance, etc, simply persist if not increase.

I think you are projecting. If you have internet access and the depth of knowledge of most people that read HN, then you have the tools to be self-sustaining and carefree. All you've said is you personally have hobbies you find relaxing but are unhappy with niches you've found for spending the rest of your time.

The problem is that the "worse off" parts tend to depend heavily on perception and the "better off" parts are acutely measurable. It's quite difficult to even frame a comparison of living now and living 50 years ago. It's impossible to even explain how food alone has improved in 50 years.

Part of what Anthony Bourdain does is "food archaeology" with traditional dishes that are now coming back into cuisine. So maybe 250 years ago , food was better if you had it.

A thousand tiny torts over status-based "microagressions"* don't add up easily to equal severe food uncertainty.

*lousy word choice if there ever was one... I depend on you as a reader to pick your own replacement.

Part of me thinks people are bloody-minded animals and most of this lives only in their head. But it's based in "is this all there is" and that's quite real.

We should be solving this instead of surrendering to it.

Imagine the world where words like 'brother', 'sister', 'uncle', 'nephew' mean nothing, no longer exist.

Then please go away.

It's not only "no skin in the game", it's also "in the game to lose". For instance, Democratic victories in the US are really great for GOP fundraising. Given the choice between no job in a Trump administration, and a sinecure complaining about the policies a President Clinton enacts, many of the GOP establishment prefer the latter.

This tends to engender some frustration.

A lot of government policy around things like welfare enrollment, security theater, or certain categories of crime follows similar incentives. "Solve the problem", especially in a cost effective way, and you're out of a job.

"Solve the problem", especially in a cost effective way, and you're out of a job.

Or redefine your mission. Which is what happened when there was a vaccine invented for Infantile Paralysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_March_of_Dimes#Change_of_m...

March of Dimes was a almost pure fundraising / fund distribution organization - it's very easy for such organizations to change direction when their putative target changes.

"What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think...and 5) who to vote for."

That's Taleb describing himself.

Especially since he's not going to starve for evidence-less anti-GMO policies. I'd like to see him name who should starve for the precautionary principle--would he?

I'm not up on recent agriculture data but I seem to recall that even before the rise of GMO the US alone produced enough surplus wheat to feed a large portion of the rest of the world. Is GMO necessary to prevent starvation, or is it more a way for agribusiness to patent the food supply?

This doesn't answer your question, but many farmers are happy to plant GMOs because they have a different risk profile than non GMO.

(For instance, Roundup Ready crops get planted because farmers prefer the risk profile, not from lack of other seed)

In Punjab we believe that the much of these farmer suicides and issues are related to genetically modified organisms.

https://www.rt.com/news/206787-monsanto-india-farmers-suicid...

> Monsanto, which has just paid out $2.4 million to US farmers, settling one of many lawsuits it’s been involved in worldwide, is also facing accusations that its seeds are to blame for a spike in suicides by India farmers.

> The accusations have not transformed into legal action so far, but criticism of Monsanto has been mounting, blaming the giant company for contributing to over 290,000 suicides by Indian farmers over the last 20 years.

http://naturalsociety.com/farmers-in-india-reject-gm-crops-a...

> Farmers in India are having doubts that genetically modified cotton is providing much benefit after a whitefly attack ravaged their fields.

> The whitefly attack on the Bt cotton variety in Punjab and Haryana reportedly contributed to the suicides of at least 3 farmers around the city of Bhatinda and tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets to demand state aid. [1]

So no, actually, we are most certainly free to reject genetically modified crops.

So why is there such a strong lobby against GMO labeling laws?

I've seen a few reasons that make sense;

1. GMO is really really hard to define. Figuring out what would need to be labeled would be ripe for manipulation. (i.e. is material genetically inserted from the same species, like doubling up a promoter region, GMO? Or if you discover something through a GM but recreate it 'naturally', is that still considered GM?)

2. The average consumer knows very little science, they'll likely avoid products that are labeled GM, whether or not it makes any sense to do so. Handicapping a potentially important technology to appease the scientifically ignorant seems like pretty bad policy.

From my perspective, opt-in initiatives like the non-GMO project are a better way to handle the labeling requirements.

That's a really good question. Surprisingly, I don't think there's just the one simple explanation - that it's regulatory capture based in the activities of lobbyists.

I think it's also a reaction to the fairly draconian anti-tobacco lobby from say, 1980 until the United States v. Phillip Morris decision. This is part of the Prohibtionist American anti-pattern.

When I first started reading I actually thought the article was about backslash against him.

One can come up with a completely alternative explanation for what's happening with Trump/Sanders, Farage/Corbyn, Modi, etc. based on constructs like 'end of average' and income inequality. These are social consequences of the growing gap between highly skilled and low-skilled workers. The former are more and more important to the economy even as the latter become less so with technological progress and globalization. The tectonic shifts in jobs, wealth, etc. are causing a realignment of electoral coalitions. Low skilled jobs are automated or shifted offshore at an increasingly faster pace. The status quo of the last 40 years is being challenged: in the US with the reshaping of the economic and social landscape of the country, and elsewhere in the world with the emergence of new uncertainly-oriented behemoths in China and India.

A libertarian magazine like Reason would be more than happy to seek and celebrate a libertarian revolution, whether one really exists or not.

The real income inequality has nothing to do with skills, the inequality is between those who work and those who own. Top few percent vs everyone else.

If you think skilled jobs are automation / off-shoring proof, I'll see you in the bread lines in 10-20yrs.

Heh I didn't say that. Automation just means available jobs will get increasingly higher skilled.

It's with mixed-feelings that I anticipate the day when people "work" by by solving sub-problems for weak AI.

For example, being flashed security-images while wearing a skullcap so that a machine "reads" whether (in your judgement) the picture contained something suspicious.

Not that many people don't work as interchangeable parts in machines today, we just call them companies.

Or we'll just find new jobs that were previously impossible, or at least unfeasible to do without the aid of AI. Just like how film photographers complained about digital cameras and related technology like Photoshop. Photographers haven't been put out of business (not even by everyone wielding a camera phone). The people that have been put out of business were those who couldn't figure out how to add value to what machines could now do. There are plenty of photographers doing just fine still, but they all realized they need to offer something that machines can't do, like high quality image manipulation.

The major value photographers add to what the machine can do is social status. People like an identical photograph more if they know it was taken by a famous photographer. Social status is a positional good. It's not possible to have high social status unless others have low social status, and those with low social status are in the majority. They cannot be successful photographers, no matter how good their skills, because technical advances have made skills much less important than status. This kind of change limits social mobility and is bad for society.

I see your point, but I think this kind of meritocratic status increases mobility, at least for talented people. Instead of having say someone give me $50,000 to open a store front studio, I can buy camera equipment for a couple thousand bucks, open a website and start advertising in Instagram, FB whatever (side note, I do some photography on the side, and book most of my paid work from organic marketing there) and be in business. Creative enterprises in particular are fields where talent, not inherited social status, determine ones success.

And yes there are OK photographers (Annie Leibowitz comes to mind) who just cash in on their brand. But I knew one guy who worked as a florist, and built a high-end wedding photography bussines. He was not rich, but had artistic talent and marketing savvy, and now has people working for him.

I would suggest that the growing gap you describe is a symptom of continued application of neoliberal policies. It is not that there was a status quo for the last 40 years, it is that the last 40 years has seen accelerating erosion of the conditions/social contract established in western countries in the post depression/WW2 era.

Placing the rights of capital above all others, particularly giving capital a level of mobility that is not afforded labour, combined with an unquestioning embrace of trade liberalisation results in a race to the bottom for labour.

It is only due to the stranglehold of neoliberal thinking on modern economic thought that globalisation is considered inevitable.

I would suggest that the growing gap comes because government steals from the poor and gives to the rich through inflation.

One ought to have seen a dividend for the working guy due to lowered prices from increased efficiency brought about by technology, but instead the Fed has chosen to favor "stable prices" which is done by lowering interest rates (I.e. making it easier for rich people to access capital)

Deflation, not inflation, steals from the poor and gives to the rich. Deflation depresses wages and increases the value of assets (including outstanding debts! rich people use debt, poor people have debt.)

I'd argue both hurt poor people. Wage growth typically lags behind inflation.

poor people either aren't in debt (because no one will lend to them), or have debt on such short timescales or high interest rates that inflation has a negligible effect on the real value of their indebtedness.

Now there's an interesting thought experiment: what does a country with high internal labor mobility look like?

> These are social consequences of the growing gap between highly skilled and low-skilled workers. The former are more and more important to the economy even as the latter become less so with technological progress and globalization

The thing is though, janitors aren't any less important or in demand than they were a 50 years ago, or retail workers, burger flippers, waiters. Less of the low skill work has been offshored than the high skill frankly because it's all service industry, it requires locality.

But their careers have been cut short by their employers becoming international conglomerates that simply don't promote from the ranks. You start on the shop floor, you die on the shop floor; and wage compression does the rest. The exceptions are very rare (mcdonalds and a few others).

I'm not so sure of that ... what's the upward mobility of a small 20 person factory that's probably owned by a family that has the top three jobs in the company? Vs a large company with 3000 employees?

> "The thing is though, janitors aren't any less important or in demand than they were a 50 years ago, or retail workers, burger flippers, waiters."

I think you might be underestimating the shift towards automation that is occurring in many services industries, and will only accelerate as robotics and other technologies improve [1].

As soon as companies can automate a robot (or outsource remote control of a non-autonomous one to a cheaper country), they will unless they position themselves on the quality of their human-based customer care, which is an increasingly rare thing.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2015/05/10/robots_are_coming_for_your_j...

It doesn't help that not only does the US not adopt free college and other educational programs to ensure its workforce is prepared for the 21st century going forward (as an investment into the country's future, not a "freebie" - just like infrastructure spending), but it actually gives everyone large amounts of life-long debt through the broken tuition loan system it has put in place.

Then, they export all low-skill (or even higher skill) jobs abroad.

So the low-skilled masses are getting screwed from all sides.

Why you believe that a workforce prepared for the 21 century requires at minimum 16 years of education?

This over application of degrees for jobs that should not need a degree at all is one of the problems. Vocational Training should be the path the vast majority of people take, and should be all that is required for the vast majority of even 21 century jobs.

We do not need government provided schools, we need to restructure our very idea of what education is, and employers need to stop over valuing a degree.

No! Honestly, I think it is the exact opposite. You need more than 16 years of education for the jobs of the future. Vocational teaching cannot teach you statistics and linear algebra required for machine learning, which itself again, cannot be taught in vocational training. For each of these you need all the math prerequisites up to and including freshman undergrad!

Hmmm, how about tradies? eg plumbers

They're not unskilled at all, but they also don't go to "college" for the majority of their on-the-job learning.

Regular people do not need to learn machine learning. Vocational training sounds great for all the ambiguous and hard to specify tasks required for essentially every industry.

These fruits of all our machine learning labors will take some time to materialize.

What do you do with the people who are too dumb to go to college?

Serious question; one that seems to get left out among the college educated who are running the place. It's like basketball players assuming everyone is over 6 feet tall and athletic.

Simple: you dumb college down.

If college is the new high school, then college becomes a default path that is more valued for its socialization experience than for academic knowledge imparted. And like AP classes in high school, you have hard majors where the "life of mind" is taught, and push the smart kids to go into those.

Don't know if you're serious, but there's a problem here: an enormous rent, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, is now being extracted from the students sent in for "socialization" -- both in direct costs to the college, and indirectly in the reduction of their earning potential during those years. Furthermore, it is being extracted specifically from a class of people who probably have a hard time laying their hands on that money, and being paid to already upper-class people. We managed to socialize ourselves in the past just fine without doing this.

"Free" college, by the way, does not solve this problem; all it does is slightly improve the lot of the poor by instead spreading the rent over the class of all taxpayers, while making the payouts to an unproductive administrative class even bigger. I suspect the second part explains the popularity of this idea among the administrative class, though.

I'm confused about calling student loans "socializing". This seems like an essence of American capitalism. Elsewhere, in more "socialized" parts of the world, college is free and total costs are nowhere near that of the US, because it's much less profitable for rent-seekers to set up shop where there isn't much money flowing.

Different kind of socializing, I imagine. The sort of training-wheels for life as a real adult that college tends to be. With all the "networking", which usually manifests as getting blackout drunk on cheap alcohol and bad weed three or four nights a week.

OK, put it a different way: if society requires you have an IQ of 115 to make a decent living, what are you going to do with the people with IQ scores below 115? It's pretty much the same statement as above, minus the apparently confusing mention of college.

College is already dumbed down.

IMO, what people with a 100 IQ can do, and what people with 115 can do isn't that significant. 100 IQ people can be better at some things than people with 115 IQ.

We've kind of made a fetish of IQ without really understanding intelligence to begin with.

You just wind up giving dumb people a degree. The better solution is to make it illegal for employers to ask about college/post college education, except for perhaps certain fields like law or medicine (though the relevant licenses should really suffice in those cases).

Colleges will never make dumb people into smart people who can solve problems independently. People who can solve problems and innovate are the only ones who will succeed in the new economy. I know CS grads with shiny new graduate-level degrees who can't even solve problems, they need to be told exactly what to do from a technical perspective to solve a business problem (e.g. if the boss is asking you for data on X, you'll need to write a SQL query into Y and Z databases (which they already knew existed), and then put the results into a graph in Excel).

How would this work in practice? Job seekers would still be allowed to advertise their education, and surely nearly all would. Wouldn't employers just pass over candidates who didn't?

That's a fair point. My knee jerk reaction is to say well, prohibit discussion of education then... Kind of like how parental status, race and in some places criminal history, can only be discussed after a certain stage of the hiring process.

On the other hand maybe it'll weed out things like QSR managers who were asking for degrees at the peek of the recession just because they could.

Of course...

I think everyone should have to spend the first 40 years of their life in some kind of government run institution being learned....

Only then can they be true productive members of society...

This is an insane answer, I know.

When we're at a point in the super far future when automation does everything that a below average intelligence human can do, maybe we could raise the average. Maybe through genetic engineering offspring.

How insane is that I wonder?

First, I'd question the use of the word 'dumb'. That said, I think the question is worth some thought. My thought on the matter is that there are plenty of vital roles that don't depend on college, e.g. plumbers, fire fighters, and many kinds of heath care and service sector roles. College might be best suited for those who deal in abstractions... but there are plenty of necessary concrete jobs as well.

>but there are plenty of necessary concrete jobs as well.

Fewer and fewer of them unfortunately. Just wait until self-driving trucks put 5 million truck drivers out of work...

Very. Long. Wait.

There will have to be more of them than college jobs, as there are more people with "less than college" smarts. Those jobs don't seem to have materialized.

The libertarian worldview obviously exists, but it exists to inform the traditional oppression-based (left) or barbarism-based (right) fear-sets.

It doesn't seem sustainable as a politics. Liberty as a value is not a thing competitive with fear. There are generally much (many?) fewer narratives that illustrate why liberty is important than why oppression or barbarism is. But there will be synthesis of libertarian concepts into those ideas.

One of the reasons I refuse to self identify as a 'skeptic' is because the supposed reverence for science and empiricism is largely just deference to academia. There's also a feigned distaste for personal experience (and really who can or should dismiss their own life experience). Ultimately this isn't about libertarianism, it's about allowing individuals to choose their own standards for evidence, trusted authorities, and process for making their own decisions. The "educated elite" really truly believe that their standards are superior and that it's their duty to help others by making the decisions for them. This is ultimately a religion attempting to impose itself on others, but because it doesn't call itself one people don't recognize it as doing such.

The 'higher standards' are often influenced by large amounts of money coming from corporations. I would not so much think of it as a religion, then, as another means of propaganda from the overall system.

Most of the money in academic research comes from the government.

I feel that this global rebellion against authority will seriously damage us as a civilization. This is mass insanity caused by somewhat justifiable lack of trust, amplified millionfold by the media. It's psychological reactance happening at scale, and we're doing it to one another.

What I mean is - even though probably half of psychology (and definitely more than half of dietetics) is wrong, it gets made wronger 10 times more by journalists. If you, dear "rebel against 'no-skin-in-the-game' insiders" are reading popular media crap and believing it, instead of standing in front of their offices with pichforks, you're responsible for this. If you repeat that bullshit further, you're responsible more, and God forbid you actually make a business from propagating it to people. And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to get it not terribly wrong.

Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?

The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?

"And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to get it not terribly wrong."

I think you misunderstand what he means when he says "listen to your grandmother".

He is talking specifically about time tested heuristics that have survived a for thousands of years - memes that competed, and won.

The best example I can think of is fasting: this is a tradition that appears to be very well preserved among all of the worlds religions and advocated by all of the worlds great thinkers - from the ancient greeks to Christ to Muhammad. And now in 2016 we're figuring out what a great idea it is from the perspective of "science".

Those are the kind of "grandmother was right" insights that he is guiding us towards, as opposed to (for instance) the more modern "eat little snacks all day long" which is probably a disaster from an insulin response / oxidative stress standpoint. That's the junk message from no-skin-in-the-game authorities.

Caveats:

If your grandmother is in the United States, like mine is/was/are, they never followed this heuristic and instead took the eating schedules of the pioneer farmers (three squares a day!) into the urban environment with disastrous health consequences.

This means you still need science to figure out which traditional practices are any good. Unfortunately studying diet is quite hard.

Yes, of course, but you have some guideposts - the more deeply and widely a heuristic is held, the greater attention you should give it.

Another good example is the sabbath - widely adopted and prescribed by all ancient religions, and something that every modern society needs to relearn (and fight for, in the case of urban workers in the industrial age).

Fasting. Remembering the sabbath and keeping it "holy". You could do a lot worse than things like that ...

>Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?

People arrive at this conclusion because people have seen that despite its many flaws, it's still considerably better than the alternatives. All one needs to do is a comparative study involving countries that adopted "capitalism" and other alternatives. It's a no-brainer.

>The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?

maybe because it's practically impossible to have the information needed to optimize at global level at any point in time (primarily because information becomes redundant faster than it travels to the global hierarchy and gets processed there), and because competency and impartiality to do global optimization is near impossible.

Theoretically, a competent global optimization would be better than localized optimizations (just as in greedy algorithms vs globally optimized ones), but practically the closes such entity would be UN - and we have thread running right now about its uselessness.

> People arrive at this conclusion because people have seen that despite its many flaws, it's still considerably better than the alternatives. All one needs to do is a comparative study involving countries that adopted "capitalism" and other alternatives. It's a no-brainer.

I'm not saying capitalism is a problem compared to other economical regime alternatives. I'm saying that we're pretty clear that a lot of our problems - both local and global - come from too much greedy capitalism, and it's sort of obvious the answer to them isn't more greedy capitalism.

> Theoretically, a competent global optimization would be better than localized optimizations (just as in greedy algorithms vs globally optimized ones), but practically the closes such entity would be UN - and we have thread running right now about its uselessness.

True, though again I'm not thinking about black/white distinction and "global" as in "entire world". More like a spectrum (more scope better than less scope; "global" over "local" may just mean not fucking over your neighbours or fellow citizens of your town), and more like a mindset.

> Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?

Why do you equate doing things on the local level with individualism? That's not even remotely the same.

> The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?

And why does it baffle you? Sure, mathematically, global optimization is usually better. And mathematically, producing something at the cheapest place is great for "us all" in the long run - but what about the short term consequences? People without jobs? People who cannot feed their families?

Reality is not one-dimensional, things can be bad on a local level and good at the global level at the same time. And if you tell someone "well, I know that you have nothing to eat right now, but that is okay, because you know globally we are still better off .." then you will probably not get "okay, that's fine." as response.

We no longer have any authority. We no longer have anyone to trust. No politicians, no thinkers, no idealists.

This is a very serious crisis of trust and you can't make it go away by shouting at people; much less by shouting at the wrong people.

Honestly this is why so many people like a person like Donald Trump. They crave an alpha leader: strong, unafraid, confident. Which he definitely is. He's 180 degrees from the thoughtful, intellectual, politically correct yet fundamentally dishonest and self-serving leaders we've had for the past 30 years. It's in our primal pack psychology from when we all lived in tribes.

True. I didn't mean to come off as shouting. I guess that only reflects how powerless I feel in the face of this crisis.

This is very very true. While I don't share his sentiments about GMO, the principle applies to immigration and asylum seekers - where politicans living in their own walled world tell us mere mortals how letting random people into the country is the right thing to do and also beneficial to the economy.

I don't know whether to applaud or cry.

Worrisome trends:

Globally 1. Massive population explosion 2. Declining cross-border trade 3. Declining Pax-Americana

Domestically 1. Declining educational standards leading to a less-skilled middle class 2. Corruption (government) * Greed (corporate) 3. Justifiable distrust of media and political class 4. Revolt against free-trade due to #1 5. Separation between the ultra rich and the rest 6. Political upheaval due to #1-5

It's been almost a decade since the world experienced a major war or epidemic. Means tend to revert, and socio-economic upheaval tends to lead to one or both.

People who feel desperate take desperate measures. It's my belief that people who haven't been in a war are more likely to start them, especially when they can self-reinforce their own bellicosity through like-minded media groups.

I don't know how to solve for all the variables, and I'm not sure we will.

Taleb is an idiot: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/682361866321002496

I'm pretty sure that you comment is down-voted due to choice of words.

Taleb is a snake oil salesman and other than catchy term "black swan" his words should be ignored as much as possible. There are many blog posts on web that go into details to prove this. In addition to the above link, here is another set of links:

http://theweek.com/articles/453558/nassim-taleb-used-hero-bu...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/31386309

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/nassim-taleb-c...

https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/11/03/is-nassim-...

The "Precautionary Principle" nonsense has always been my least favorite aspect of Taleb's shtick. You're asking too much of Taleb, however. It is not his place to be right all the time. Rather, he must always point out how often those in charge are wrong. That is how he can contribute to the progress of humanity.

Taleb is not at all a "snake oil" salesman, he is very great.

) very much cited https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=64BtMdsAAAAJ&hl=en

) http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html <-- Silent Risk

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIR1o1dnk5ZmRaaGs...

) http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf probability theory is the theory for dealing with what we do not know, and that's what his criticism of GMO's and such are based off, it's a rigorous field.

His paper on Pinker's work was accepted into a peer reviewed journal. So it's not by any means "outlandish".

Cirillo P., Taleb N.N., 2015. On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts.

) Daniel Kahneman probably the most celebrated intellectual/scientist of this specific modern era calls for his inclusion among the world's top 100 intellectuals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMBclvY_EMA

Not to mention, you know, actually predicting the financial crisis of 08 in print?

Those were just articles that people get when they're in the limelight and have positions that are hard to follow.

It's just dishonest to criticize him like that.

As much as Taleb's attitude and lack of manners are annoying, he does have a point and the article quoted by Pinker fails to get it.

For instance:

"To a normal person, the statement ‘terrorism kills far fewer people than falls from ladders’ means a purely factual statement about the number of casualties over a specified period in the past. "

No, it really doesn't. The whole point of these statements is to hint at latent properties, not merely to report historical records.

Oh please. There are much better links for showing that.

https://archive.is/7Bjqc

This comment does not pass the principle of charity. You can't just take one isolated comment from twitter and use it as evidence against him. Twitter is supposed to be a place where you're able to share anything quickly.

Here's a good aggregate measure of his influence.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=64BtMdsAAAAJ&hl=en

Below is a linked technical book vol1 of Silent Risk. Which definitely demonstrates his abilities.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIR1o1dnk5ZmRaaGs...

That's a classic motte-and-bailey doctrine right there.

It shows Taleb commenting on a topic he clearly knows nothing about while presenting himself as an expert. Something, if I recall correctly, he often criticises in other people. And it's not merely being imprecise, it's at least halfway between being wrong and not even wrong. If someone's that sloppy on Twitter, why would their research be any better?

It probably isn't. In a series of tweets posted around the same time, Taleb also pointed to a "technical" paper claiming a connection between P versus NP and the effects of GMOs [1]. It's drivel. A series of non-sequiturs. No connection is actually established, only claimed. I credit that paper only with relieving me of the dilemma of whether Taleb is an interesting thinker or just another crackpot. (And I'm not even a GMO enthusiast.)

The tweets are now gone; I only found this archive.is link because it was posted to a mathematics cranks subreddit. Probably because these were too obvious of an embarrassment to him. Fine. Though I think Taleb also likes to talk about "courage" a lot...

Taleb's other "technical" papers are not particularly impressive either. I find them completely inscrutable; Taleb never explains his notation or terminology, and I often have a hard time deciphering equations he writes. While this may be because of my rather modest background in statistics, I'm sure it could be possible to make them more accessible. Take Laszlo Babai's paper on graph isomorphism in quasipolynomial time [2]: all you have to know in advance to understand it is some basic vocabulary of graph theory and algebra, and you can readily find them even on Wikipedia. He lays out definitions clearly and even goes as far as as presenting Latin equivalents of Fraktur letters (I wouldn't bother). Taleb seems more interested in establishing profundity by obscurity (what Charles Seife calls "proofiness"), like some kind of post-modernist philosopher. Come to think of it, Taleb seems very much like one.

(I know I'm being trolled, but...)

[1] http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PPAlgo2.pdf

[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03547v1

Let's stay away from the personal attacks.

> Taleb's other "technical" papers are not particularly impressive either. I find them completely inscrutable; Taleb never explains his notation or terminology, and I often have a hard time deciphering equations he writes. While this may be because of my rather modest background in statistics, I'm sure it could be possible to make them more accessible. Take Laszlo Babai's paper on graph isomorphism in quasipolynomial time [2]: all you have to know in advance to understand it is some basic vocabulary of graph theory and algebra, and you can readily find them even on Wikipedia. He lays out definitions clearly and even goes as far as as presenting Latin equivalents of Fraktur letters (I wouldn't bother). Taleb seems more interested in establishing profundity by obscurity (what Charles Seife calls "proofiness"), like some kind of post-modernist philosopher. Come to think of it, Taleb seems very much like one.

Silent Risk Vol1/Vol2 is enough and is substantial as is dynamic hedging.

> Taleb seems more interested in establishing profundity by obscurity (what Charles Seife calls "proofiness"), like some kind of post-modernist philosopher. Come to think of it, Taleb seems very much like one.

Point me to a part of Silent Risk where he doesn't explain his notation. The pre-requisite to which is papoulis. He is no way shape or form qualifies as a post-modernist at all. Considering his distaste for postmodern philosophy?

> If someone's that sloppy on Twitter, why would their research be any better?

No he criticizes the meat of his opponents work with plenty of charity, and no some isolated comment on twitter doesn't cut it. He's winning his GMO argument because it's well argued.

> Taleb's other "technical" papers are not particularly impressive either.

Silent risk IS impressive, as is predicting a crisis in print beforehand, as is being very wealthy and well of. So he has managed to accomplish all he wants in life. List of all your citations is an objective metric to compare your influence and he clearly has that.

I love how Taleb makes people so angry that they rush to denigrate him. This in itself illustrates many of his points. Most of the links posted here are people with a personal axe to grind or a vested interest in silencing him.

Agreed.

Ehh. Another "libertarian" discussion without any reference to the fact that prior to the mid-late 20th c. in America, and in most of the world even today, "libertarian" is a synonym for "anarchist". Unfortunately, it got mangled along the way.

As always on political terminology, Orwell was most astute:

"Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different."

"It would seem that, as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, youth hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I don't know what else."

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