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Comment by gopher2 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this and loved Fooled By Randomness. Taleb clearly thinks a lot about these types of things and usually has very interesting ideas. He also has fun analogies and presents things in a way that makes you think differently (partly because he doesn't state things with a lot of nuance).

However, he also comes off as quite arrogant to me with criticism of just about all others in society except for himself for one reason or another. Criticism of 'pseudo' intellectuals is especially ironic -- as at this point in his career he is probably best described as a pseudo-intellectual book author.

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https://arxiv.org/a/taleb_n_1.html

If that is pseudo intellectual for you, you are too rich. Lets not forget his success as bond trader and his fund making massive sums of money in market volatility.

His fund lost massive amount of other people's money over the long term. (Guess he didn't have enough skin in the game.)

Have you got more info on that? I'd be interested in following it up.

Where are you getting those numbers from? The most reliable numbers I could find where in this WSJ article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118429436433665637

which claims that while his fund may have under-performed other funds over its lifetime and suffered a couple of years of modest losses during a period of stable growth, it did make massive returns during the dot.com crash which was kind of the funds raison d'etre.

Only LPs have true access to fund returns but there are a lot of examples of falsehoods being claimed by Taleb et al;

http://www.businessinsider.com/wait-before-you-invest-in-nas...

Plus the fact that he started an new fund in 2009 that essentially was relying on hyperinflation to make their returns;

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124380234786770027#mod=testMod

It is actually not Taleb's fund but Mark Spitznagel's an it is doing phenominally well

That seems to be an error on GQ's part, not Taleb's.

See http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/30/the-taleb-g...

I suspect people who've read Talib make a lot of money in prediction markets this year from people who just read Nate Silver

> The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)

That article is a prime example of pseudo intellectualism, mostly because he lumps all GMOs in one big bucket, there's no general characteristic yet he and co-authors forces one. No wonder it's "only" on arxiv and hasn't made it anywhere else (look at the endorsers: https://arxiv.org/auth/show-endorsers/1410.5787 )

A rebuttal did however make it into a journal: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v33/n9/full/nbt.3333.html

Ha! Love the understated tone there.

Nature is "a journal" like the Pyramids are "a stone pile".

Nature Biotechnology is in fact only "a journal", there is Nature proper and then lots of spin-offs that have to be evaluated on their own merit.

Nature Biotech is a pretty prestigious journal in its own right.

FWIW, I read Antifragile, and this GMO position seems to go against the general principles he espoused there. Having read it, I expected he would think the status quo is already optimal for addressing GMOs: some regions go full forward with it, some heavily restrict it, some ban it entirely. This will then give a great dataset for long term effects while also hedging against it being a catastrophe.

But Taleb's current position is way more conservative than that stance!

Edit: I think this commenter gave a more "Talebian" response to GMOs (despite not having read the book): basically, let them exist, but make it easy for people to opt out in favor of foods with a longer track record. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506599

Part of the current problem with "opting out" (at least in America) is that companies producing GMOs have fought huge legal battles to avoid labeling requirements.

Without accurate information, you can't know if your corn flakes were made with GMOs or not.

He is involved in a long-standing feud with Steven Pinker which basically goes like this:

Pinker: Descriptively, there is less violence in the world today than at any time in recorded human history.

Taleb: How can you claim that we are in a "Long Peace"? There could be a huge terrorist attack tomorrow!

Pinker: I'm not making predictions, I am describing the world as it currently is. The "Long Peace" is a term used by historians to describe post-1945, not a predictive one to describe what will happen in the future.

Taleb: Violence is fat-tailed, nuclear bombs could kill millions of people instantly tomorrow, if you say violence is down you are statistically incompetent. See for example: https://www.facebook.com/13012333374/posts/10151641931853375

According to Taleb, a descriptive book of hundreds of pages of data is insufficient conclusion to say, descriptively, that violence is lower than in the past.

Hard to criticize yourself while simultaneously presenting your new ideas

Perhaps. But you can certainly display modesty.

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