Nassim Nicholas Taleb vs. Less Wrong | Hacker News Reader

Nassim Nicholas Taleb vs. Less Wrong

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41 pointshargup13 comments

Both are bad because if you don't agree with them, they say you're suffering from some cognitive bias.

Maybe you are.

Maybe they are.

Interesting write up. I mistook Less Wrong for Suckless and the Cat-V crowd initially and it was kind of interesting to note that they, methinks, fall much closer to NNT on these points (and in overall grumpiness). Particularly:

>LW says “all models are wrong but some are useful”. NNT says “all models are wrong but some are harmful”

>LW wants you to expand your boundaries as far as you can. A lot of talk is about optimizing things, be smarter, be stronger and so on so forth. NNT asks you to keep it small and beautiful.

>LW wants you to do “the most good you can”, NNT wants you to prevent harm and call out frauds.

However I think both schools are complementary, and I've enjoyed reading material from all parties.

I have no idea what the context of this post is but in every category of the bullet list I'd rather be on the Less Wrong side than the "NNT" side.

You'll probably have to read some of Taleb's work (i.e. Antifragile) to better understand his point.

In any case, I hate absolute terms. Pick the best one depending on the context.

Do you prefer the LessWrong side in this bullet point:

LW and NNT both knows we are wrong and we cannot help being wrong, hence LW wants you to become “less wrong” though NNT wants you to make sure that your mistakes don’t hurt you too badly or better change the game such that mistakes help you.

Regarding NNT's point here, don't you have to be "less wrong" to pick that better strategy effectively?

I'd love to see the results of a survey that looked at preference trends for NNT vs LW based on demographics and personality traits.

Submitted your own article to HN?

Nothing wrong with that... happens all the time. Plenty of top-tier HN users submit their own posts. The only problem is when it's falsely upvoted (which I'm not claiming is the case here).

I second this. It's not about promotion it's all about feedback. I often submit my own articles to do a self-check/self-balance. And if I have blindly wrote some BS I'd be happy if someone pointed it out, disrupting my tunnel vision, introducing new view points.

As an additional reason, I self-submit because my blog is static and has no comment section.

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