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Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

Given that perhaps 90% of Excel spreadsheets have errors I fail to see that Excel is a good or useful tool. Nicholas Taleb warns against the use of constructs (e.g., value at risk) that give false confidence to the user. Excel unfortunately appears to be such a tool. I believe most Excel users would deny that _their_ spreadsheets have significant errors notwithstanding strong evidence to the contrary.

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Given that perhaps 90% of all programs have coding errors, I fail to see that any programming language or program is a good or useful tool.

Your comment is just darling. "Given that perhaps 90% of Excel spreadsheets have errors ..." -- a completely made up statistic leads to -- "I fail to see that Excel is a good or useful tool." -- a conclusion that doesn't even follow from your made up evidence, even if it were true.

Nicholas Taleb would be rolling over in his grave, if he was dead.

"darling"? "made up evidence"? Are you employed by Microsoft?

Others may have provided this URL: "What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors" by Raymond R. Panko http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/Mypapers/whatknow.htm

The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group: http://www.eusprig.org/

Grammar correction: "if he was dead." <--- _were_ dead, _were_ dead!

Luckily he's very much alive. From Nicholas Taleb's website at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/jorion.html

"My refutation of the VAR does not mean that I am against quantitative risk management - having spent all of my adult life as a quantitative trader, I learned the hard way the fails of such methods. I am simply against the application of unseasonned quantitative methods."

Use of a paradigm that has such a high error rate is, at the very least, an "unseasoned quantitative method".

"These error rates, although troubling, are in line with those in programming and other human cognitive domains."

I take it you are against software in general, then.

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