[snowwrestler]

I just checked my copy of Fooled By Randomness; the price tag on the back says $15.95, not Free For The Good of Humanity.

Not that I have a problem with someone making money. And it's great for Taleb that he got rich through financial trading; he's clearly good at that.

But he strays well into pseudo-expert territory when he starts arguing that he knows more about GMOs than biologists, more about climate than scientists who study it, etc.

[PublicFace]

Because books cost money to print? And take time to write? Stop burying the lead.

I am still not hearing any good arguments about NNT's actual ideas, just loose ad hominem that doesn't really represent anything other than sentiment on the commenter's part. You call him pseudo-expert, I call him well-read polymath with good ideas. Potato, potahto.

The problem of induction, that's basically NNT's core point.

The process of induction is pointless and impossible for creating models of unbounded processes with past data, and applying it is a recipe for creating huge catastrophes. Unknown unknowns make theoretical knowledge useless for forecasting. Phenomenology is more useful in most situations.

In essence, economists, top down intellectuals, central planners, etc, are wasting time and energy and resources and creating even worse problems and NNT loudly proclaims that they are doing so, this makes them uncomfortable and they like to say nasty things about him instead of his actual ideas.

Pretty familiar story, you know you've won when they attack you and not the idea's your talking about.

[snowwrestler]

Taleb's ideas have progressed from:

Even experts can't predict everything, so we should build failure tolerance into our systems (true, and reminders of this are valuable), to:

Experts sometimes get things wrong, so your guess is as good as theirs (problematic, leads to public hazards like vaccine denial and global warming), to:

Experts are actively hazardous and should be rejected because they are experts (actively harmful, see for a dramatic ex Chinese Cultural Revolution), to:

I am an expert on risk in general, and you should listen to me instead of the people who have substantive expertise (borderline demagogic, including aggressive personal attacks on anyone who disagrees with him.)

Furthermore, in 2017 the "problem of induction" is freshman philosophy. It's "you can't prove the sun will come up tomorrow just because we think it has always come up in the past"--deductively sound but practically useless.

All knowledge is limited and provisional; use it anyway. The value of that approach to human society has been firmly established since Isaac Newton. But the lack of firm surety still seems to disturb some people, and those are the folks Taleb preys on these days.

If he had stopped at a warning (step 1 above), I wouldn't call him a pseudo expert. It's the stuff he's done since then.

[PublicFace]

It's still pretty clear you don't get his ideas, let me help:

"Even experts can't predict everything, so we should build failure tolerance into our systems..."

That's not really NNT's point at all. We shouldn't even design systems that require fragile predicting systems of any kind. We shouldn't waste our time. We shouldn't be designing fragile top down inductive systems in the first place. Ever. Like centralized banks for instance. They are inherently flawed because they don't account for unknown unknowns. And any benefits are epiphenomenal (i.e. fitting the story to the facts narratively after the fact).

"Experts sometimes get things wrong, so your guess is as good as theirs..."

Also not really an NNT idea. He states that some kinds of knowledge (like experience, i.e. empirical phenomenology) are more resilient and less subject to exposure to reality then say top down theoretical knowledge like economics (which is his dead horse to beat but he has a point: there is no such thing as non-theoretical economics for the most part since they rely on homo economicus etc etc etc)

"Experts are actively hazardous and should be rejected because they are experts"

Man, you have a gift I'l give you that. NNT says you should ignore so called charlatans like economists and academics because their knowledge is not tested in the real world and never exposed to the cold light of empirical reality, having been coddled by the university tenure system and the incestuous system of paper writing and publishing. A plumbers knowledge is tested every day when he fixes pipes, an engineer's is tested in his products. An economists are not really tested since we have no way of actually replicating the universe and testing out their little toy ideas. There will always be exigent data we don't have. Hey, theres the problem of induction again!

"...induction...freshman...sun....useless..."

You conflate the word deduction in the same breath as induction so I'll help you out. Induction = using specific events to determine the general theory. Deduction = using general theory to explain specific events. Understanding why induction is a PROBLEM is the whole point. No you can't apply the problem of induction deductively because that is the literally the definition of the problem of induction: recursive. It isn't a deductive theory to be applied to knowledge to reject it, it is the core problem of human knowledge, which is constantly seeking a heuristic or a pattern where there might not necessarily be one. Induction is a trap. You keep falling into it.

"All knowledge is limited and provisional; use it anyway...the lack of firm surety still seems to disturb some people..pseudo expert"

Reflect on above ideas about big fragile systems, charlatans, and induction. Also consider that there is nothing inherently wrong with promoting any ideas (in a Popperian manner) and accusing someone of "preying" for simply sharing ideas is again ad hominem and fundamentally fallacious. Understand and attack the ideas not the person.

Go read and understand Karl Popper and empirical negativism and this whole thing might make more sense and NNT might annoy you a little bit less.

[snowwrestler]

Taleb has said that he knows more about the risks of climate change and GMOs than the scientists who study them. If he just stuck to bashing economists I wouldn't really object--it's called the dismal science for a reason. But he hasn't, so he's a pseudo-expert: someone who once had a good idea and now tries to expand it to cover areas where he's woefully out of his depth.

[ykoka]

Lol. So he is wrong because he charges $$ for his books?

BTW, Taleb has never attacked science or scientific pursuit. His main criticism has been against suits (bureaucrats, senior gov employees, corporate executives etc), and their influence on science.