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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

I tried reading a few of Taleb's books but I couldn't get past the common sense arguments lacking any data. Feels like self help books. Does anyone else feel this way? These aphormisms really remind me of that.

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Not trying to dissuade you from your opinion, as I agree one can dislike Taleb's book for that reason, but part of the point Taleb tries to make in his books is that often data is used as a crutch to prop up arguments which don't make sense on their own, and that we often need to be able to fall back to more fundamental methods of reasoning before even trying to bring in data.

Or, more simply: More data does not always equal better conclusions.

I can't help but wonder which of his books you read. I disagree with Taleb about a lot, and I find some of his attitudes annoying, but I don't know how you can use "data" to argue with something like Fooled By Randomness. One of the major arguments of the book is that "data" and the inferences drawn by using it are dramatically less reliable than they seem. Turning around and asking for data really seems to miss the point.

To be fair, I've only read about 50 pages of each - one was Skin in the Game and the other Antifragile

That makes sense. I haven't read Skin in the Game, but based on the topic it does seem like something that could be studied. Antifragile I found painful to read because of his tone and didn't finish it, although I think that's a slightly harder one to demonstrate with data.

IYI.

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