My Favorite Heuristic for Evaluating Relationships: The Antifragile Person
taylorpearson.me
taylorpearson.me
On twitter, I've watched Taleb seemingly track textual mentions of his name or book (not @ mentions or hashtags) and then castigate and isnult the ones saying anything critical. These aren't people addressing him personally or that he follows, they're randoms microblogging to their handful of followers that he feels the need to push back against and blast.
I do agree with you about Black Swan as well. I couldn't finish and felt it was a big let down from "Fooled By Randomness".
He wrote a book, the swan one, which is a rehash of his previous one, the randomness one. The book contains very little scientific data. It's mainly about him sitting down and deducing things (which are probably true, I'll give him that). It's verbose, it's boring, it's irrelevant and, of course, it's a best-seller.
I wonder how people like you get away with such utter mis-characterization of him? It was how people receive Taleb and Graham that I realized that one person's true identity doesn't matter and that people like you somehow exist contraire-chic indeed.
Indeed your post is probably just tribal signalling. Subscribe to his FB, read his posts, you truly find an incredible man of genius. He can admit to be human.
I don't know what else to say but when I see stuff like this about him(like valleywag people probably saw comments on Graham). I cannot think of any other way other than to plead to the audience that the person they think they see of Taleb is not what it is, and the commentator above me mislead, or is mis-leads.
I like how people some-how point to him calling other people idiots is somehow something outrageous to the point of murder, this is a place of extreme passivity though. Grothendiek protested vietnam by giving lectures in the forests while the U.S bombed nearby, Guass was quite stern, etc etc. Genius comes in variety.
I'm underinformed on Taleb, but I too share the view that his ideas have less substance than is necessary to justify two or three full books.
When i first started out learning about finance - say, 14 years ago - i was really taken by NNT. he seemed like an unheralded genius. Now that i've read a lot and understand enough about what he was doing, he seems like a bitter person who dispenses questionable advice in a nasty fashion. NNT appeals to financial "outsiders" because it gives a sense of power to think they know something about the flaws of the insiders.
I would say just about everyone would be better off reading the collected letters of warren buffett, and forget you ever heard of NNT. and if you want an interesting unorthodox quant, read eric falkenstein.
I'm not an expert in his line of thinking, nor do I currently practice his method of investing, but isn't his goal to hedge against loss (with potential for profit from it when it strikes others) rather than maximizing profits on the whole? I imagine he'd be upset that an "average" would be the ultimate indicator of the worth of his ideas.
Outside of the practical utility of his investment advice (which is outside of my interest area, for better or worse), I still think his work deserves one's attention and would not direct them away from NNT as you have. I'd probably skip the first book, and I've not read Antifragile yet, but it at least gives some probably needed context to the modern fixation on normally-distributed data as evidenced by the simplistic quantification of so many things (e.g., the Freakonomics podcast).
But he does speak like a man of dogma, something that always makes me wary.
If you want a man of dogma who's going to criticize the overuse of normal distributions to generate illusorily "informative" statistics, I think you'd be better off with E.T. Jaynes.
If you think you're offending 95% of the people you talk to, then maybe that's some feedback you should consider.
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
Isn't turning this into the cliche "fail fast, fail often, succeed in the end" still missing the point? As is trying to apply the principle to an individual?
It's about encouraging high levels of risk taking because of it's benefit to society as a whole even though the individuals involved are accepting a path with an irrational risk/reward balance.
So an "antifragile person" would do these types of things knowing that they should expect to die less successful than if they had taken another path, but they do it anyway and if enough people do it the result is that society benefits.
What's worse is that at times I actually wondered "I wonder what gwern thinks of Taleb's xyz, or Hanson of Nassim's abc." Your post only further contributes to my melancholy.
> I wonder what gwern thinks of Taleb's xyz
I'll save you some time: Taleb is a pundit who has forgotten all the truths he learned about randomness, who makes shallow analogies (to take the last one I remember which irritated me: muscles are anti-fragile? Uh, no, they're optimized for minimizing resource usage and that's why exercising stops them from underperforming and produces illusory 'anti-fragileness'; put real stress on them and you'll get something like rhabdomyolysis), whose financial ideas seem to have been refuted in practice without any acknowledgement by him of this. And his personal style destroys any possibility of meaningful discussion with him: he lives in a world where he is surrounded by sycophants or fools. If he is right about anything, it'll be the usual stopped-clock thing; just like Seth Roberts, his methods do not allow him to regularly arrive at truth, and so unless one plans to investigate his claims in detail, he is better avoided since he is a good writer who is good enough to fool a great many people with ideas which, if implemented, will predictably make them worse off on average. OP is an example of this: he says he has learned an abrasive personality style from Taleb, which is not going to make his life better.
tl;dr A lot of his work is dismissed by high-tier to the bottom to middle of the top tier intellectuals, but if you note his contact with top top tier, it is well received. The bottom to middle of the top tier being people Less Wrong type people who read Kahneman, whereas Taleb actually knows and is friends with Kahneman, knew Mandrelbrot etc etc.
"It's weird. Just last night, actually, in bed, Jessica was saying, "Why does everybody hate us so much? Why is everyone trying to attack us?" I explained that reputation is potential energy." - Graham's essay response to women in tech incident.
It's like the people of the online community want only one personality type, passive, ultra-kind etc etc. Taleb just isn't like that.
You can disagree with him/some of the things he says and still appreciate his place in the intellectual sphere of today and history. It's like at a family wedding where two brothers just get mad at each other, but it's not 'hate'. It's just 'oh you guys'.
If you had to say modern intellectual discourse as Light side vs Dark side. Taleb is the "Thug side", but don't let the contrarian-chic of HN let you be fooled, he actually has legitimate substance and IS relevant.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/mandelbrotandhudson.pdf , an essay by him dedicated to Mandrelbrot.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/DerivTBS.htm >- Technical work dedicated to his ideas.
If he's good enough for Kahneman, his idea's relevant enough for Terrence Tao. How come the oh contraire crowd here dismisses him so lightly(?)
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm , there's a lot to him. The way I see randoms talk about Graham & Taleb really colored the way I see public individuals. If you're public, they'll try to character assassinate you as best as possible.
(And if you're wondering why I'm being such a dick to you: it's because I'm from academia, where your published research is everything, your books and personality-cult for popular consumption nothing. Academia's motto: show us how you got your answers and submit to replication, or we will throw you out.)