Monthly Archives: October 2011

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the Fallacy of Truth « Jeremiadus

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Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull.

For Taleb, viewing human decision-making in high-risk environments, the central problem is not the risk but the human evaluating the risk. We masquerade opinion as fact – we hide our frailty as decision-makers behind pride and arrogance. We employ bad methods because our standing in the world depends upon creating epistemic methods and frameworks of knowledge that advantage us (and disadvantage others). This makes Taleb angry, because people with power and influence – experts, practitioners, and pundits – do more than anyone to perpetuate encourage fraudulent and dishonest beliefs about fractal risk that harm millions of innocent people.

Edvin David Lemus: Essays, blogs

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Longtime reader and tipster David Lemus has a new book out.
Here’s a quote:

“So the statistics presented as the bell curve can at most work in one world. What polemic philosopher Nassim N. Taleb has called Mediocristan and Extremistan, the former domain is where statistics can be apply to physical measurements with miniscule margin of error like, say, astronomy, while the latter the bell curve breaks and shatters, the scientific tool cannot handle information data commonly acquire in social sciences. Too many stochastic variables, too many fat tails, and, furthermore, error rates, nonlinearties, dispersions: what Taleb named Fragile and the opposite his appellation Anti-Fragile; and improbable, consequential and explained by narrative, events, which cannot be predicted, I.e., Black Swans completely demolishes the statistical model; although they can be mitigated to a point by using robust heuristics as Mr. Taleb himself has suggested.”