What Nassim Taleb can teach us | Hacker News Reader

What Nassim Taleb can teach us

mises.org

94 pointsyusufp45 comments

I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable.

However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he's been engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in this at an intellectual level (personally, I'm more on his side than not), the tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and unacceptable.

[1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.

Have you read his books (not just the summary but all the chapters)? While he has good points, he is so egotistical, self-absorbed, and full of pseudo-scientific theories (e.g. that one should go between gorging themselves on food and fasting) that it makes it hard to actually extract out the good parts.

Ya, it's really a shame. He's got some very interesting stuff to say, but he's such a completely insufferable jackass. It's really unfortunate. I manage to ignore it and enjoy his books anyway, but he's a pretty easy person to hate.

if you start from a position of disdain instead, you'll be able to move past thinking his works have enough value to suffer the bullshit antics and be well on your way to never thinking about him again except in passing social context.

taleb is ultimately just another LARPer. people get the impression that he's something more for ~4 basic reasons:

1. he's more verbal than them.

2. they don't know stats too good.

so, given a crisis of confidence in all statistical orthodoxy plus a guy who really really seems to talk like he knows about stats a lot, and whom others — who also don't know stats, but want social proof of reading & shit — say knows about stats, they have no choice but to remain agnostic or go along with taleb's dogmatic-sophist-monkey-dance.

3. they fail to appreciate that his depth of extended expertise is never more than ankle-deep, and breadth very agonizingly chosen so as to min-max in terms of knowledge required to signal learnedness to the unlearned.

he'll say some poncy shit like « flâneur » out of context just because his readers are unfamiliar with it. he'll go on seeming deep-dives about language evolution and community segregation in the spinning of statistical fables — and it'll be utter horseshit, but nobody reading him will suspect that, and anyone with the requisite expertise to debunk it line by line doesn't give a shit about him and has no incentive to do so: why debunk a LARPer whose entire shtick is being a cleverer obscurant than most with an institutionally-enabled gish gallop lifestyle?

4. academic culture is so actively pathetic and conflict-avoidant that it's trivial to come across as some sort of masculine breaker-of-chains figure merely by not sucking in the majority mould — sucking differently is sometimes sufficient, at this point.

just look at jordan peterson. i don't intend to imply that he sucks, but look at him, presentation-wise. dude's basically a couple slices of ham held up by suspenders wrapped in a blazer, mouth-hole cut out so wind can blow through, and he's hailed as some kind of triumphant anti-establishment figure simply because culture wars shit has gotten so farcical.

wonks are thrown off by taleb's eagerness to be crass in the middle of otherwise frou-frou discourse, and that's the only thing that gives it any influence — because he discards all epistemic norms in the process. he won't circle back for them if they wait it out, or otherwise re-engage like a good lad. he doesn't choose to be vulgar for shits and giggles while nevertheless maintaining soundness of argumentation, he does it simply as a short-circuiting mechanism.

the posturing is slumming to him: he's aping a working class affectation without the life experience of having an epistemic peer+ interrupt the ritual to physically dickslap him and then resume reasoned discussion.

you see it with the powerlifting posturing as well.

i mean, nobody gives a shit what some physically unremarkable old man lifts. not young girls who don't wanna fuck unremarkable old men, nor young powerlifting guys who don't wanna have their sets interrupted by some old poseur pretending to do a 2016 election exit poll so he can inevitably find that

  HIGH T ⇒ TRUMP VOTER
  LOW T ⇒ HILLURRY
  
  LUK, A BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT
  BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT ⇒ IMRITE
  AND IT'S A PICTURE SOOOOO…
  YOU CAN'T USE IT W/O TRANSCRIBING IT
  DESPITE ALREADY KNOWING IT'S BULLSHIT
  HEE HAW AREN'T I SUCH TROLE
  
  GLOBALIST CUCKS BTFO BY #BLACKSWAN

(yeah, this refers to an actual thing⁽¹⁾ he did on twitter)

in fact, the only possible audience for such effete anti-intellectual snobbery is Young Male Scholars™, pencilneck NYU Stern dandies who can project aspirations onto such a transparently less-than-nothing caricature as taleb in the same way that lots of young guys get really into BEING LIBERTARIAN as a social posture & gender identity.

so taleb, then: a brand for dullwits, a statistician who squandered nigh-unsquanderably fortuitous career timing to shitpost about things he just read a single wikipedia entry on, a guy who needed to be spanked a lot more as a kid, gist him however you like.

it doesn't really matter how you do it, because he doesn't matter

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¹ https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984

I don't disagree with your assessment of his character. But I do think that his insights about risk are, while not novel per se, are interesting. Particularly his concept of 'antifragility'. Now, is that a new idea? No. And it's likely not his idea, either, and he also thinks that it applies way more broadly than it actually does. He's a jackass. But the mental model supposed by Antifragile is an interesting and useful one, and I don't regret having waded through his idiocy to obtain it.

Thing is that he picks an organizing principle⁽¹⁾ and rides it into the ground, through the center of the earth, and back out the other side until eventually de-emphasizing it in favor of some new organizing principle more attractive to current audiences.

That is: there are geological layers of taleb based entirely in reader-response. He can't make his subject matter audience-invariant, because how it plays determines its significance to him: it's a feedback loop of bullshit by design. Right now all his acolytes can manage to sputter forth is acronymized slogans like SITG (skin in the game), so that's what he plays up. Formerly it was stuff like antifragility, etc. It just keeps devolving.

____________________

¹ http://enwp.org/organizing_principle

> Thing is that he picks an organizing principle⁽¹⁾ and rides it into the ground, through the center of the earth, and back out the other side until eventually de-emphasizing it in favor of some new organizing principle more attractive to current audiences.

I don't disagree, but I think that the organizing principles he's settled upon (by whatever process) are interesting.

the poetics of successful sophistry is a potential research topic in its own right, so sure

It is possible to find a man to be a jackass, and have a few interesting ideas simultaneously. You haven't attempted to criticize any of his actual ideas, just his presentation of them. A criticism I agree with, though in so doing you're really committing his own primary sin: Trying to defeat substance by criticizing style. If you've got specific gripes with his math, i'd be curious to hear that, or criticisms of his actual ideas i'd be curious to hear those too.

Trouble there is simple: academically, he hasn't really innovated anything substantial enough to bother discussing in isolation. I mean that in a purely descriptive sense.

Just take a look at his google scholar⁽¹⁾ or crossref search⁽²⁾ hits and gloss over the books, republications of books, translations of books. What remains are miscellaneous vagaries about tail risk etc. In particular, lots of reviews / position papers that amount to him just setting up strawmen to tear down.

That contrarian browbeating is what drove him to prominence. And in sole-author article form, the attendant research laziness manifests itself as junk like this⁽³⁾ thing that's lower quality discussion of the subject matter than a lot of replication forum posts.

____________________

¹ https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=64BtMdsAAAAJ

² https://search.crossref.org/?q=%2BNassim+%2BTaleb&type=Journ...

³ Taleb, N.N., 2016. The Meta-Distribution of Standard P-Values. SSRN. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2834266

So I guess you must have lots of examples of things he has said where he was dead wrong because he was out of his depth...

Yes, I read The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and Antifragile. I read all the way through them, I hail from a non-skimming age.

To be fair, many many authors have posted books of their own aphorisms while still alive. For exmaple Nietzsche, Cioran, de La Rochefoucauld, et al.

See this wikipedia page for a list of all such authors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphorism

Nietzsche's aphoristic style was actually pretty effective. Taleb has this tendency to throw aphorisms out there and wait for his followers to get confused by them, at which point he revises them (or just explains them). It's hard to imagine most authors operating that way.

> At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive.

He did, it's called "The Bed of Procrustes". I quite enjoyed it, there's quite a few brilliant thoughts there, even though they're sprinkled between countless cheap shots against his enemies.

I found this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/21/bed-of-procrus...

Does he go into detail about these in his book? Some of these are clever but did he write some substance behind these quips? Asking, not accusing.

I believe that review is actually not quoting the book, but rather pretending to be in character as Taleb and making things up to mock him.

He has gone a bit off the deep end recently. I guess too much arguing with opponents radicalised him, similar to Dawkins.

IMHO his best book is his first mass market one: "Fooled by Randomness". It contains all the big ideas of his subsequent books and is an easy, entertaining read.

> IMHO his best book is his first mass market one: "Fooled by Randomness". It contains all the big ideas of his subsequent books and is an east, entertaining read.

Let me second this suggestion. "Fooled by Randomness" is great and I enjoyed it a lot. I've read it multiple times. I read the "The Black Swan" once and thought it was good. I did not finish "Antifragile".

Not really. I think he's starting to converge on "skin in the game" as a unifying thread for much of the other work. I could be wrong, but having read FBR and TBS, I don't recall seeing it put this simply ("skin in the game") until at least Antifragile, if not later. I view it as more of a progression.

Also, the style of the books is quite different. FBR is closer to a personal essay, whereas TBS is more of a mainstream nonfiction book, and Antifragile is the most philosophical/abstract.

I've read _The Black Swan_ and was disappointed. He repeats the same concept (that could have been easily expressed in a short article) again and again, while bragging about how clever, cool and refined he is.

One of the most obnoxious writers I know of.

>>though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books

True, he has, but his thoughts on randomness and such are very important. Yet, they don't seem to get through to the zeitgeist. In my view, he needs to publish a few more books on the subject to emphasise the point even more.

He reminds me of a professor that's always looking down on everyone because no one is smart enough. But, I'm a fan of his work and many of his views.

Taleb's approach is to put BS-vendors on full blast, especially if he sees them prominently spreading bad ideas and acting in bad faith. It's a service to all of us. The intellectual sphere is crowded enough already without the pundit class spreading misinformation.

There's something to be said for maintaining at least a semblance of decorum whilst going about his self-assigned mission to patrol the global marketplace of ideas. Sadly he just rants and raves like a ’jackass’ (as somebody else on this thread quite aptly noted).

And really, what gives him the right to act as the ultimate arbiter of what is, and what is not, ’bullshit’? What of his ongoing stream of pro-Flynn, pro-Scaramucci invective? What of the manner in which he flamed that historian?

I don't think 'rants and raves' is an accurate characterization. His declared modus operandi is to treat the spread of BS as an act of harm to the public which should be met with hostility when the offender is someone with a platform/megaphone. His attacks are usually pretty focussed on what he considers important issues. Is it more noble to keep quiet so that you get invited to more celebrity dinner parties?

Not sure what your complaint is exactly regarding Flynn/Scaramucci, can you elaborate? I recall him expressing appreciation for Flynn's opposition to the 'moderate rebels' of Syria, and saying something about Scaramucci being a 'doer' based on his personal interactions.

With Beard, he caught her spreading/supporting obvious BS, and presented her with the genetic counter-evidence. She didn't seem to understand this, and instead of admitting that or accepting/considering the evidence, she attempted a series of high-brow dismissal manoeuvres, back-pedalling, deferring to another blog... Taleb didn't get too insulting until she referred to his "pop risk" books, at which point he hit back harder.

I mean, you could say Taleb should be more respectful, but the fact is, these people will not stop spreading their BS unless someone calls them out on it in this manner, and that's a far bigger problem. I suppose what gives him the "right" to do this is that in many domains even the experts simply do not understand statistics and probability.

> With Beard, he caught her spreading/supporting obvious BS

She wasn't spreading bullshit. That example - a black roman soldier in roman Britain - actually happened.

> His declared modus operandi is to treat the spread of BS as an act of harm to the public which should be met with hostility

You make it sound like he never spreads bullshit, but he does, frequently. In this example he used bullshit of "we don't see the genes" - a point that got nicely debunked in a few places.

> Taleb didn't get too insulting until she referred to his "pop risk" books, at which point he hit back harder.

But those books are pop books. Why did he become unhinged after she called his pop books pop?

He's a fucking pompous blowhard.

> She wasn't spreading bullshit. That example - a black roman soldier in roman Britain - actually happened.

It was featured along with a caption describing it is a 'typical' family, making it ripe for mockery. A responsible historian might weigh in with something like "the scene depicted in the cartoon was improbable and definitely not typical, but not not completely outside the realm of possibility." Instead she weighed in with "pretty accurate, actually". Total BS.

> In this example he used bullshit of "we don't see the genes" - a point that got nicely debunked in a few places.

Did it? Link?

> But those books are pop books. Why did he become unhinged after she called his pop books pop?

In the context of the conversation "pop" is clearly a slur, inviting the sort of response it got.

Taleb holds that essentially all journalists are fools, and the articles they publish are "noise". He says "to cure yourself of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers". There's wisdom in this: the importance of the news of the day can't be immediately apprehended. What seems important at the time can quickly fade into irrelevance. Larger stories are often completely missed or gotten totally wrong.

Buuuuuut apparently what Taleb means is that no one but him can figure out the importance of things immediately. The guy tweets, apparently believing that he understands the lasting importance of what he's tweeting about. And hey, maybe he does... except, among other things, he's in (or was in) a twitter war with JK Rowling!

The guy is a loon who has figured a lot of things out, and now believes he knows everything.

He totally lost me when he started talking about Michael Flynn being one of the great military minds or praising The Mooch's rant and "being direct, natural, and nononsense".

Seems like a smart guy but...

I love Nassim Taleb as an academic and philosopher. I think he has a Peter Thiel like quality of being able to thinking differently, but in a very applicable way.

Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's had so much success that this is probably my fault.

If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of his pieces are written in easily digestible formats.

https://medium.com/@nntaleb

I've re-started trying to read the Black Swan about 10 times and IMHO if you just read the first 3 chapters then you'll get about 95% of what you would if you had read the entire book.

I think the problem with his books that I have is that he considers himself not just an author but a modern day philosopher, and with that comes a level of rigor in his writing that brings me back to my measure theory and real analysis courses.

If you really want to read his books, then start backwards.

Antifragile is awesome, but still very wordy, and builds on top of all his other works. It almost seems to be the culmination of the idea's he's been writing about since the black Swan.

As a side note, for anyone who wants to learn about options trading with a focus on how a trader would view them, ie from a mathematical perspective, then check out one of his first books...... Dynamic Hedging of Options.

http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803...

As a second side note........

His latest concept of “Skin in the game” is the best form of risk control that we've found for reigning in traders. Once traders are required to

1) keep the vast majority of their bonus in the fund for a few years

2) take part of their bonus in the form of non liquid securities if they want to hold more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in non liquid assets

we have found they pay alot more attention to the liquidity of their portfolio and the long term profitability of their portfolio, both of which are good for the long term success of the fund.

Or bonuses should be based on what happens during a long period of time. Say you lead a company from 2015 to 2020, but your bonus is based on how well the company does from 2020 through 2025. And if the company fails before you get your bonus, too bad for you.

I haven't read his books but find his ideas as presented in videos and podcasts to be valuable.

That's precisely what points 1 and 2 do, for a trader.

That's exactly the idea. Your bonuses 2015-2020 are invested in the company every year, and you can only cash them out after five years, in 2020-2025. If the company tanks in 2020 your bonuses for 2015-2020 are retroactively zero.

I think companies should be rated by how much skin in the game its leaders have.

Companies run by founders that still have a substantial percentage of their wealth in the company would get the highest rating. And professional managers getting stock-based short term incentives would be on the low end.

I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I couldn't help reply to your comment about starting backwards: I completely disagree. Fooled by Randomness, in my opinion, is Taleb's seminal work. Reading it changed the course of career (I work in finance), much more so than Antifragile or Black Swan (even though both books are excellent).

Couldn't agree more. Little-mentioned relative to the others because it wasn't connected with the narrative of the financial crisis, but most of the others seems like repetition of ideas from FbR.

Jeff Deist, the author of this article is a crypto white nationalist. You can pick up a hint of this from the article above,

"He understands that globalism is not liberalism, that identity and culture matter"

A quote from another article,

"Jeff Deist, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a right-libertarian think tank for promoting Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and the Austrian School of economics, said of the Alt-right that he found their writings "interesting...and somewhat refreshing".[20] In 2017, Deist concluded a speech at the Mises Institute titled 'For a New Libertarian' with the words, "In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."[21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_Sta...

Note that "blood and soil" refers to the nazi phrase "blut and boden".

Why is he a 'white nationalist' and not just a 'nationalist'?

Do you have any indication that, so long as people conform to his idea of what his country's culture should be, that he wouldn't accept black, asian, etc people?

I just brought up his use of the nazi slogan "blood and soil".

Also, listen to this. It's Jeff Deist's take on Richard Spencer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6kJNHZvanI&t=1s

Within the video Deist advocates for what he calls a "Benedict Option" whereby a white ethnostate would secede from the US.

Overall the tone of the video is that Deist disagrees with Richard Spencer's economic stance, but that he doesn't take issue with Spencer's views on race.

Thanks for bringing that up, the idea of questioning the objectives and leanings of the ”Mises Institute” in general, and the author in particular, didn't occur to me (doh!).

(N.B. I'm not the original poster of the article.)

The Black Swan has a good point to make about reliance on over-simplified mathematical models, but Taleb's macho anti-intellectualism is ultimately nihilistic since he denies even the possibility of achieving a deeper mathematical understanding of risk. But what I really have a problem with is that he has created a band of idiot Twitter acolytes who can be counted on to heap brainless abuse at anyone who Taleb chooses to disagree with, which these days seems to be almost everyone with even slightly diverging views to his. He will not attempt reasonable debate, especially when he is faced with superior erudition: in this regard Mary Beard is only the latest of his many victims. The guy is a pure and simple thug.

I followed the drama around it and my end conclusion (to paraphrase somebody's tweet)

Mary Beard is respectable, well educated and gracious. Taleb is right.

How to be a blowhard...

I see more people are now against hims since he stopped virtue signalling.

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