[coldtea]

>No experiment could ever possibly hurt scientific knowledge. (...) This is an extremely flawed initial assumption. There is no requirement for chance to be centered around zero. Consider rolling a dice: sometimes you'll get more than the mean, sometimes less, but you'll never roll a negative number.

That's the convexity property Taleb argues must lie underneath research though.

So, you're saying the same thing.

What he means with the first paragraph is not that chance can't lead to gains -- it's that chance alone cannot lead to gains. There should be an additional property, and that's what the article is about.

Consider your counter-argument: "You can certainly win on chance in the long run, that's the foundation of casinos".

And yet, that's not the foundation of casinos. That's what the article speaks against. For if it was chance + long run alone the "foundation" then it would work for the players too. But players face ruin in the long run (unless they have an infinite supply of money), while casinos do not.

The foundation of casinos is chance + resilience to chance events (a casino doesn't go under from this or that player winning) -- e.g. the exact convexity the author talks about.