That's hardly debunking. I would call it further obfuscation and and an appeal to motive. Taleb is a noble truth seeker and the GMO proponents are out to silence him.
Hardly.
Having read his books, he's a bright guy often with compelling ideas. If he would leave them as thought experiments and appeals to common sense honestly I think his arguments would be more effective. His need to formalize everything mathematically, for a reader with a moderately sophisticated mathematical background, ends up undermining his argument.
That's most of his writing though: throw a lot of complicated words at the reader and hope some naive ones start seeing mystique depth in his thought.
His writing is incoherent though. Even reading abstract of his paper [1]:
>>We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans", unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence. We formalize PP, placing it within the statistical and probabilistic structure of ruin problems, in which a system is at risk of total failure, and in place of risk we use a formal fragility based approach. We make a central distinction between 1) thin and fat tails, 2) Local and systemic risks and place PP in the joint Fat Tails and systemic cases. We discuss the implications for GMOs (compared to Nuclear energy) and show that GMOs represent a public risk of global harm (while harm from nuclear energy is comparatively limited and better characterized). PP should be used to prescribe severe limits on GMOs.
Leaves little doubt. You can't call him a truth seeker - he is a quack with some talent for wooing people.
All I can grok out of Taleb's rebuttal is that he and his team might be conflating "rare events with predictable frequency" and "events with unknown frequency" but I don't know if this is accurate either.
If you're going to create an account just to stan for Taleb, then please offer a little bit more substance in your comments.
Deconstructing the Precautionary Principle is not "misinterpreting" PP. The entire notion of "mathiness" put forth by the author is that PP is too wiggly, and thus open to whatever vague interpretation is convenient. That is the meat of what Merberg is saying, and handwaving it away isn't an argument.
says... another account created just to comment on this issue.
I put my foot in my mouth all the time, but I put my name to it. Taleb is interesting. Are you saying that the other account is literally Taleb, and that he's known for astroturfing campaigns? I wouldn't discard such a proposition, but I'd prefer hearing it from someone non-anonymous.
(For all I know, you're just an account created to extend the thread.)
Hardly.
Having read his books, he's a bright guy often with compelling ideas. If he would leave them as thought experiments and appeals to common sense honestly I think his arguments would be more effective. His need to formalize everything mathematically, for a reader with a moderately sophisticated mathematical background, ends up undermining his argument.