Comment by astine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astine | Hacker News Reader

I was going to say something to the effect of "Who is this guy and why do we care what he thinks? He seems like an idiot." But it turns out that he's actually a respected thinker and has published some respected books so maybe I'm not allowed to say that.

However, I still think this particular essay is insulting drivel. Taleb uses a lot of 10 dollar words to mast his 10 cent thoughts. He wears his vocabulary and enculturation on his sleeve like a badge so that he can pour scorn on neophiles and other people he doesn't like. Now, this may merely be the predjudice of an "autistic" technophile, but I prefer reasoned arguments to intellectual muscle flexing.

He makes a few good points. As the old saying goes: "The more things change the more they stay the same." Some things about society will possibly never change. But his actual argument is so vapid: We still use glasses to hold liquids that we intend to drink? Just like the Mesopotamians? No kidding. But chances are that glass he was drinking out of was manufactured in China hundreds of miles away with techniques wholly unavailable to Mesopotamia and shipped across a distance, inconcievable to a Mesopotamian, and at a price, proportionally less that the price of the rudimentary earthenware mug that a Mesopotamian would use.

Taleb accuses technophiles of not studying history, but I have studied history, and the world has changed, quite a bit.

You spend a lot of time insulting Taleb, and relatively little time actually addressing the problems with his arguments.

It's a 50/50 split. In an article, 5/95 would suffice? Must a retort require so much more?

On the subject of a piece of chalk, although both are fine, I enjoy T. H. Huxley more than G. K. Chesterton. If Mr. Taleb disdains me, he need not seek my company.

Your first instinct was right.

If there's an irony here, it's that Taleb's most famous book is entitled Black Swan, hence the phrase for an out-of-context, low-probability event. Yet here he is downplaying the possibility of future black swans.

Actually he's saying the opposite. A black swan event is something that is unpredictable. He's saying that all of the futurists' predictions about the future have been wrong, therefore all of the innovations of the future will be black swans, because will have all been unpredicted. If the futurists were correct in their predictions, the future wouldn't have any black swans.

A black swan event isn't necessarily a low-probability event. It is dependent on the person who experiences the event, if that person does not take into account the possibility for that event to occur, it is a black swan event for that person. For the vast majority of the people, the most recent economic crash was a black swan event, but for a small number of people, it happened like it was clockwork.

I think you're misunderstanding what a "black swan" event is supposed to be. It's not just something that is unpredictable; that is normal. It's something that is so outside the whole frame of reference that it wasn't even not predicted; its very existence destroys the entire framework used to make the predictions.

In that sense, although your definition was wrong, you're actually kind of right - the reason predictions so often fail is that they do not take into account the unknown, which is basically a tautology, though one probably worth repeating since it's so hard for our brains to actually accept.

No, he's right both historically and logically.

History: a black swan was rare to a european. but it was native to australia. the idea labeleing events 'black swans' only makes sense in the context of the story being told from the european perspective, not the anitpodean.

Logically: A black swan is an ebodiment of non-stochastic process or the intrusion of factors outside the stochastic process under consideration. ie, its about uncertainty not risk/probability. the parametrics of risk/probability are therefore irrelevant, in the normal sense (ie, as priors or ex-ante odds, etc). It is equally as non-sensical to call a black swan x or y probability.

TLDR - A black swan is more akin to something from outside the known-state-space. [1]

[1] see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty

In case you doubt this (as comment above was downvoted), it would be interesting to hear your logic/analysis.[1]

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[1] Wiki: The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal's characterization of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands, very much like a black swan") (6.165).[3]

In English, when the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. ...

Juvenal's phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent.

After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[5] ....

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So, if you are an Australian the idea of a black swan was completely different (one of a known variety, like a kangaroo vs a wallaby) to the historical use in "the west" (ie, europe/rome/england). The 'Idea' as its used with respect to statistics, now has an Idiomatic meaning, that is not the Australian one, but rather based on the European experience.

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