Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

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That's really well written. I didn't know a lot about Taleb until I saw his attack on (now Dame) Professor Mary Beard on Twitter. I have genuinely never seen anyone so arrogant, he lead an attack on her understanding of the ethnicity of Romans in the UK. Mary Beard is a renowned classics scholar at Oxford, and the attack went along the lines of "You know nothing compared to me because I'm a black belt in probability". He had one study that showed little residual DNA to suggest that there were black Romans in Britain. She had a Hackernewsesq response

1) We know one of the Roman governors was from Africa, but don't know his ethnicity

2) Maybe [something about recessive genes I think] the DNA aged out of the record

3) Maybe most of the Romans went home at the end of the occupation!!!!!!! This one made me think of that Feymnan trait of complete skepticism. Taleb seemed to struggle with the idea that there is not much firm proof of anything that happened in Roman Britain, but not having firm evidence to back up your claim doesn't make you wrong.

It seemed to me, and this is only an impression, that the main problem Taleb had with her is that she was a woman, and a smart one too.

After having seen Talebs Twitter feed, I can't take him serious. He might have (had) some good ideas, but I find it really hard to trust the judgment of a person who berates others on Twitter (e.g. he calls Pinker a charlatan) and think hes the only genius around.

And it also seems that people like Pinker don't take him serious anymore (which seems to aggravate him even more).

PS: http://quixoticfinance.com/empty-statistics/ talks about the Taleb-Pinker feud and rebukes Taleb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing

He strikes me as the sort of person that loves confrontation. He's a raging narcissist, but he's also brilliant and highly opinionated. I find that I often disagree with him, but I appreciate his perspective. I don't much like when he bullies people in a public forum, since his followers will continue to harrass those individuals.

> but I find it really hard to trust the judgment of a person who berates others on Twitter

Feuds between intellectuals have been a staple for decades.

You are letting personality problems obscure insights.

Not so sure about that. I'm using a heuristic method. Since I'm not a statistics expert and sometimes can't properly assess Talebs statements, I ask myself: "Can I trust the judgement of this person?". Looking at the way he feuds with others (feuds between intellectuals don't all include crude insults), I feel that a person with proper judgement wouldn't behave that way. The same goes for his academic standing, which seems to be poor. These are two red flags.

This said, that doesn't mean he won't offer insight. It just that since I don't have time to read everything, I'll use my heuristic method to look for potential places for insight. In this case it would rather lead me to Pinker et al.

> I feel that a person with proper judgement wouldn't behave that way.

Then my question to you would be why do you feel that? Is it based on evidence?

Many of the worlds greatest scientists and philosophers have been jerks e.g. Aristotle was a massive sexist.

Or look at the long list of geniuses who were unstable like Galois.

Taleb has always put his money where his mouth is - to me that's a better indicator than poor manners.

> Then my question to you would be why do you feel that? Is it based on evidence?

Well signaling is a thing thats been developed since humanity exists. For me thats evidence enough. If singaling would be inefficent, it would not still be such an important factor in human interaction.

It's the same with job interviews. No matter how smart you are, you better be on time and show some manners. Because if you don't, you'll be asked: "If you are that smart, why don't you understand that you are not getting a job this way?" and frankly, there's not a good anwser to that.

> If singaling would be inefficent, it would not still be such an important factor in human interaction.

That really depends.

If you avoid a bad hire 10% of the time by rejecting everyone who is late then that can be a good trade off for you even though you have rejected many great candidates. There is a significant cost to a bad hire.

On the other hand you can read a chapter of a book at your local library for free and for a minimal time investment and then decide if you want to keep reading it.

I'd rate Talebs work as significantly more influential and insightful than Pinkers although I agree with Pinker more often.

Here's Taleb's longer article about the Roman Britain TV cartoon: https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge...

And here's an article about the debate/noise: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/dna-roma...

Beard's point seems to be that ethnic and geographic diversity of some sort did exist and the kind of thing portrayed in the show is not entirely impossible, while Taleb's point seems to be that a family of “black” and “white” people would not be a typical one and that these modern racial categories are different from those of the time. The Atlantic article puts this in context and says why the positions are not inconsistent.

> but not having firm evidence to back up your claim doesn't make you wrong.

Talebs point is the public is being mislead by taking an incredibly unlikely scenario and treating it as likely and common.

Mary's rebuttal was that it's not an impossible scenario.

He had an additional objection which was that the portrayal of Mediterranean diversity through the choice of a black (sub-saharan) character was extremely condescending - like "if you're not white European, we'll just pick some random dark skinned ethnicity to represent you, doesn't matter, the important point is non-white."

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