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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

I happened on to this article of Taleb's, but I did not find it compelling in the least. It's full of attitude and cocky dismissals of strawman characters -- people who place too much faith in the New Yorker and TED videos.

Well, of course there are wannabe intellectuals out there.

Taleb's alternative to a reliance on expert judgement? That:

"People are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers ... with a better track record than these policymaking goons."

So, "go with your gut"? This is ridiculous.

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Well you took a portion out of context.

" With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons. "

Ideally our experts should reform their practices and regain lost faith in them.

I assure you, I read the whole piece, and only responded to your earlier comment because the piece is so dreadfully shallow and one-sided.

Sure, the experts fail. And at the periphery of hard science -- psychology, diet -- we're starting to learn how little behavioral guidance limited studies can provide. No argument.

But this is such a shallow indictment. What about the numerous examples of successful expertise all around -- civil engineering, aircraft safety, weather forecasting, novel drug therapies, market interventions like cap-and-trade? All these sorts of expert-based interventions have social policy implications, and they have been generally very successful. I might owe my continued existence to one of them.

Yet, Taleb's indictment gives no way to separate this kind of "good" expertise from the "bad" ones. So it's vacuous as a critique, and the article is an embarrassment.

Note: Taleb has some good ideas. His notion of "skin in the game" in markets and policy, and his awareness of heavy tails, for example.

>Yet, Taleb's indictment gives no way to separate this kind of "good" expertise from the "bad" ones.

I can give you an extremely simple and effective heuristic. But it would probably be against posting rules here.

What was the point in posting this comment?

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