Comment by jkuria | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkuria | Hacker News Reader

Taleb needs to find something new to talk about. In his book Fooled By Randomness, he takes a paragraph and makes it a chapter. Takes a chapter and makes it a book, talking endlessly about black swans, how people who are successful are successful because they got lucky and repeating analogy after analogy to make the same basic point. In this post he makes sweeping statements about debt being bad, based on wisdom from Babylonian times and Roman proverbs:

"David, you must counter this complexity by lowering indebtedness. We have known since Babylonian times that debt is treacherous and allows no room for mistakes: felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb ("happy is he who owes nothing")."

He sounds like Ahmedinejan in his letter to former president Bush advising him to embrace the ways of the prophets of old :)

There are many situations where debt is your friend but like all good things it can be abused. Common Taleb, find something new to talk about! Black Swan is so 2002!

Isn't it better to have one idea that is insightful and correct, than to have many ideas which are wrong, like most commentators?

Not when it keeps being rehashed ad nauseum.

Maybe he intends to keep rehashing it until people understand. Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated.

It wasn't that great of an idea: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html

Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated.

Absolutely not. Ideas that are diffuse and unoriginal, on the other hand, are often repeated because they are uncompelling.

I've read The Black Swan, and although it was entertaining, I didn't feel like I learned anything of value.

Absolutely not.

Bastiat articulated the Broken Window Fallacy in 1850, and here we are 159 years later shredding perfectly good cars to 'create jobs.' It certainly seems like some good ideas can't be repeated often enough.

The only good idea that he has is to repeat and rehash in order to sell more books.

Isn’t being better than most commentators an awfully unambitious goal?

Well perhaps. So let's think about it. Black swans are not rare, they were thought to be completely impossible, and then people found them not to be impossible. So far maybe not so correct.

Secondly, regarding insight. This idea which everyone credits to Taleb is of course described all over the place. For example, as "the impossibility of inductive reasoning in the natural sciences" in The Mathematical Experience. As far as fat tails are concerned, every textbook on financial maths I own talks about fat tails the corrections that must be made to account for them, and they were all published before either of Taleb's books.

It's a letter to the leader of the opposition and, potentially, the next primeminster. Taleb must be concise with his argument - it's not new to us because many of us have read The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness.

I agree that commercial debt can be used for investment and is therefore useful. I think he is commenting on national debt. The problem is that the UK and US hold a magnitude of debt that will not be re-paid for several generations. Most of us would agree this is not healthy.

Further to this, his point about debt is that it is used to prevent the old institutions from failing and the resulting tax increases are hindering the next wave entrepreneurs. The financial crisis should have sped up the next wave of creative/destructive innovation in the financial sector but instead we are pretty much back to the status quo in The City and on Wall Street.

Have you read either of his books?

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