Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

This quote is so very true, and it drives me nuts:

> “Society likes black and white,” he answers. But answers in science are not always so cleanly resolved. “We have to be careful because if we give the impression that science never says yes or no, says always maybe, then people say, ‘Well, then I should not trust science.’ It is very delicate how to give this message.”

It reminded me of some of the polls before the 2016 US Presidential Election. Nate Silver at the time gave Trump about a 30% chance of winning, and when Trump won, there were lots of "Even Nate Silver got it wrong!" comments. Most people really don't understand the difference between anything less than 50/50 and 0, and it becomes a real challenge to explain things when reality works in probabilities at a fundamental level.

View on HN

Same for 20% chance of rain. People are surprised when it actually rains.

I'm not sure that's the best example. Probability of precipitation (PoP) is simply a misleading measure by itself. It has a threshold of >0.01 in for what is considered "rain". So if there's only a 20% chance that you'll get a minimum 0.01 in of rain, you'd naturally expect a low chance for it to be be much higher, and hence would expect not to get wet that day. The problem here is that a guaranteed 10 inches of rain over 20% of the area would still give you a 20% "chance of rain", which would still result in a 20% PoP, which is not what you would want for a useful measure of rain.

Reality appears to work in probabilities, and practically does, because the complexities of reality's mechanics are transcendent.

Yes sometimes I wonder if we’re not 4-d “fuzzy” objects. The fuzz being the range of probabilities (and very small realistically).

Yeah, and then those same people conflate predictions with polls: "urgh are these polls that gave Clinton a 95% chance of winning? I'll just ignore it then".

No, /u/MAGATrumpforever96, no they are not.

Nate Silver is a terrible example.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/762032883414556674

The math: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06351

Explained for everybody: https://www.quora.com/Whats-Nassim-Talebs-best-argument-that...

As pointed out in the replies to Nassim's tweet, he chose a more volatile Silver model from 538 (NowCast) to suit his argument as opposed to Polls+Plus. While his thesis may be correct he chose to represent it in a biased fashion causing me to question his entire motivation in attacking Nate Silver.

It doesn't seem like "I'm trying to raise awareness about this" but more "I could do that too, but it's wrong, so you should ignore him." Given Nate's success during the previous election cycles I can't help but suspect that Nassim's ego is at play here.

Nate Silver himself admited that his early Trump "probabilities" were just gut numbers with nothing scientific behind them:

"Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight — including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned — our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we “subjective odds” — which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates."

"When Trump came around, I’d turn out to be the overconfident expert, making pretty much exactly the mistakes I’d accused my critics of four years earlier."

"There’s a danger in hindsight bias, and in overcorrecting after an unexpected event such as Trump’s nomination."

Unexpected event. Hmm, I think someone wrote a book on that, and called them black swans...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...

> "our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model."

The Polls+Plus model that Taleb criticized wasn't an early estimate and it seems kind of strange that you'd conflate the two. Trump receiving the nomination can be argued as a 'black swan' event (although whether it was is debatable because it was observed as a possible, if unlikely, outcome before it happened), however Trump winning the election was not.

Your original post linked to a straw man attack by Taleb against Nate Silver based on paper Taleb wrote that is explicitly constrained to binary systems. When I pointed out this problem with Taleb's argument you created your own straw man citing Nate's words about a related, but different, statistical problem involving more than two choices. That is not a result that Taleb claimed and seems to be wholly outside of the scope of our original discussion.

Ultimately I think this is an ego thing for Taleb, he makes a habit of critically attacking [0] people who have fame in related fields without actually contributing anything to the discussion. Again, it's hard to see this as anything but Taleb's ego at work. By calling out the famous 'smart' people as wrong using arguments that are impregnable to people without highly advanced mathematic training he effectively increases his media clout without actually contributing anything to society.

Serous question: Has Nassim Taleb ever admitted he was wrong?

Edit: I just read about how poorly Nassim Taleb did with Empirica Capital, [1] it seems very surprising that Nassim Taleb has such confidence undermining the work of others given that, objectively, his work during that period was a failure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#Praise_a...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirica_Capital

As Taleb would say, debate the best possible version of your opponents argument, not the one most convenient to attack:

"Take for instance the great Karl Popper: he always started with an unerring representation of the opponents positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceededing to systematically destroy them"

What I was saying was in the spirit of GP, which mentioned that he is sick of hearing people attack "science", and mentioned Nate Silver.

I was pointing out that Nate Silver himself admitted of not doing "science" with respect with Trump, at least in part.

Sure, Taleb has an ego, just like Wolfram. Taleb can also be a jerk, just like Linus. Everyone knows that. Dismissing him because of that is just an easy way out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com