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Comment by hidenotslide | Hacker News Reader

Nassim Taleb is great at providing backward looking advice. My back got better, therefore I was right to ignore the expert advice. He has predicted about ten of the last two financial crises. I wouldn't take medical advice from a financial pundit who can't seem to go more than a day without picking a fight on twitter.

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My blog making fun of Taleb used to have higher page rank than his personal website. However, Taleb is totally correct about this, and his Antifragile book is very good (though he still needs an editor).

Most of modern medical science is quackery and pharma companies trying to milk the populace for profit. Trauma surgery is quite good, and antibiotics and vaccines are important. Other than that, I'm pretty sure going to the gym and the salad section of the grocery is much more important than going to the doctor.

He may be right in this case, I am not a doctor and don't know the details of his anecdote. My point is that if I'm looking for medical advice from a pop science author I'd much prefer Dr. Gawande's evidence and experience based account to some half baked story about convexity.

I'm not even sure whether Taleb's style of writing is meant to communicate much at all, what's the point of all this phony formalism? http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medconvex

I'd like to see Taleb acknowledge at least that medical and financial estimation risks have a different character. Financial mispricing is adversarial, whereas you'd have to be more cynical than me to think doctors are always trying to get you to take the maximum care they can sell you.

My wife professionally interacts with a lot of top level surgeons -- the ones that have institutes named after or created for. They universally say it is all about risk management and risk mitigation. Trauma and neuro and cardiac surgeons of today are likely to be able to fix amazing number of issues just to have patients become gravely ill from secondary infections/non-top-notch care after the surgeries.

That's the frustrating thing though. Doctors tend not to talk in probabilities of outcomes. Fortunately I haven't had a ton of experience trying to get them to do so.

That's because most Americans have no idea how probability or risk mitigation work. It's their body, dammit, and they want you to fix it!

I dislike Taleb, but in this case he's right. Conventional, standard, advice in anywhere but the US is that over-testing, over-diagnosis, and over-treatment cause harm and should be avoided.

The problem is that Taleb is packaging up this standard advice and pushing out as some wisdom he has that he wants to impart to the masses.

> can't seem to go more than a day without picking a fight on twitter

Thanks for that. I was blocked for correcting him (I can't remember about what, it was years ago).

Also, this "only go if necessary" is bad advice unless you are a doctor and can tell, from your symptoms, whether it is or not necessary to go. Make an appointment or show up at the ER and let the doctor decide whether you need help or not.

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