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Comment by jdpigeon | Hacker News Reader

This guy's writing style is insufferable. Basically, 'let me introduce an abstract, technical concept, criticize the reader for not knowing it, and then not define it until halfway through the article'

Dropping words like 'Markov Chain' in a Medium post without any context or explanation just makes the author seem like he wants us to think he's smart.

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For me as a French reader, Taleb's writing style feels familiar, just like French sentences translated in English: long and constructed sentences with articulations, and some soft punch inside.

Maybe it is not the proper style for English native speakers, but it feels a clear and well organised writing style to me. On a higher level, Taleb's thought may have weaknesses, some contradictions, some unmomtivated leitmotives. But still interesting and thought provoquing.

Interesting. Taleb was educated at the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais, a French school in Beirut, Lebanon [1], then at the University of Paris [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#Early_li...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#Educatio...

I was introduced to Markov Chains in high school - it's not that strange of a concept. And yeah, Taleb has some rough edges, is unapologetic about his arguments, and enjoys calling people out. But it's refreshing to find that someone isn't dumbing a topic down so that it can covered at an "8th grade" reading level like the NYT.

It's excerpted from a book. I do think that it would be better if he altered it a bit for this article.

Markov chains are exactly what I thought of when he started on the topic of dynamic vs static in inequality. It's not really that a high-brow concept.

But it is one that you need to already have been educated about. The author seems to be assuming that all their readers have CS degrees or have read a certain narrow slice of technical content elsewhere. It's bad writing for a generalist platform like Medium.

How so? The Markov chain reference is only used in a reformulation of the same statement already said in layman terms.

CS degree? I was completely sure Markov chains were high school material

Anecdotally, they were at my high school in the US.

Looks like ~1% of US high school students had stats in 1990 and only ~11% in 2009. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=97

I'd be shocked if more than 5% (and even that's a stretch) of fresh high school graduates in the US knew what a Markov chain is.

So? General population is an abysmally low benchmark in any country. People from 5% of top high schools sounds about right for an article like this.

Markov Chain is a pretty elementary concept. Anyone interested in having a serious discussion of economics should at least have a passing familiarity with it.

Good to know. I'm only familiar with it in a computing context.

If anything I find his writing more sympathetic to a layperson.

He consistently likes to disparage those he thinks portray false intellectualism and academia (whenever you see IYI in his writing it means Intellectual Yet Idiot).

That's another thing I was hoping he'd define sooner or later in the article.

However, if this was extracted from a book it makes a little more sense.

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