Category Archives: Twitter

Silent Risk, Pascal’s Wager, Baal, Skin In the Game, Trump, Clinton-Malmaison, Gary Ruskin, Popper

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AN INVITATION TO CONTRIBUTE (Facebook)
Friends, I promised to deliver in the next few hours a discussion of the most neglected fragilities and the most overestimated risks. We can tell fragility when we see it… but we first need to look at it.

I won’t say for now what I came up with but would love for you to contribute suggestions. Don’t be shy, don’t be afraid to be out there, but please observe salon rules. And, for Baal’s sake, let’s all be brief.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681574436768722944

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Friends, we made a page for the precautionary principle (Facbook) with application to GMOs, with a variety of articles.

1) It looks like PR promoters/smear campaigners are so dumb that they don’t know that we know that they are dumb.

2) Calling GMOs “transgenics” (moving genes from one organism to a different one) better reflects their nature as genetic modification is too vague a designation.

http://fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.html

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What I think is my central piece from *Skin in the Game* (Facebook) explaining risk-loving and precaution can live together, how risk taking has a distinct logic (similar to quantum logic)… Risk management is boring, risk taking is exciting; how the two can be reconciled. How can we reconcile Aristotelian precaution and courage, both considered virtues?

www.fooledbyrandomness.com/rationality.pdf

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679701305154244610

A book isn’t just its contents; it’s a state of mind. (Facebook)
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Note: Without a state of mind, a book never survives. Also note that *almost* no book from 15 years ago has survived.

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Friends, this is technical. (Facebook) Here is the “Statistical Estimators Under Fat Tails Project” and my small contribution to it during 2015 (7 papers). One can see that very little has been done to understand random events under Extremistan and there is a lot, a lot to do.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/FatTailedpapers2015.pdf

Social networks are a great place for convex optionality. (Facebook) In 2015, I met three collaborators, two co-authors (one probabilist, one economist who specializes in inequality) and one business partner on Twitter (a partner with the Real World Risk Institute). I do not think that I would have been able to initially run into these three collaborators in the physical world, no matter how many parties I had attended (I attended a lot, a lot of parties in 2015). You can tell from people’s twitter conversation whether there can be a possible technical collaboration.

Ironically these technical matches revealed themselves through arguments during fights in my antiBS crusades (such as the Pinker-BS problem). Social life (physical, that is) is too harmonious, too devoid of fights and arguments for some skills to be made apparent.

Convex Optionality, Fat Tails, Antifragile, Math Puzzle, GMOs, Risk Minds, Smear Campaigns, Eggplant

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Let me rephrase the point of Antifragile (via Facebook) and put some clarity in the discussions. The idea is to be chance, “risk”, and uncertainty loving where chance, “risk” and uncertainty are beneficial, and risk averse in domains with ruin problems.

The ancients understood how both courage and prudence were virtues, and how there was no incompatibility between the two –simply they didn’t apply to the same domain. (More on that, soon).

The “verbalistic” takes over rather quickly. Many people don’t nuance risk properly, especially when educated: they conflate it with variations and think that *exposure to ruin* and *risk taking* belong to the same category. They are not the same animal. Concave is not convex, fragile is not antifragile; fat tails are not thin tails, etc.

What I just wrote seems trivial, but if you take a look at the not yet dismissed “scholarly” but in fact verbalistic and verbose literature (Cass Susstein-style, particularly about “nudging”), it seems largely resting on ill-defined terms and conflated concepts. We keep seeing bigwigs conflating Ebola with falling from ladders, GMOs with agriculture, etc., leading to misdefinition of rationality.

Just a brief stop for some clarity. Have a nice weekend.

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People can only be social friends if (via Facebook) they don’t ty to outsmart one another. Indeed, the classical art of conversation is to avoid any imbalance as in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: people need to be equal, at least for the purpose of the conversation, otherwise it fails. It has to be hierarchy free and equal in contribution. You’d rather have dinner with your friends than with your professor, unless of course your professor understands “the art” of the conversation.

Indeed, one can generalize and define a community as a space within which many rules of competition and hierarchy are lifted, where the collective prevails over one’s interest. Of course there will be tension with the outside, but that’s another discussion. This idea of competition lifted within a group or a tribe was the idea of the late Elenor Ostrom.

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This is brilliant! (via Facebook)
I swallow my reluctance to TED and TEDx to show this wonderful message on how fake grassroots are built on social media and…how easy it is to spot!

Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDxUniversityofNevada
In this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson shows how astroturf, or…

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/676023976167129090

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/676009006478041088

Audio

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/675808527877808129

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Friends, Ralph Nader called me recently (via Facebook) to warn me that I was going to be subjected to a smear campaign by Monsanto and friends, throwing anything they can to undermine my credibility, “throwing everything except the kitchen sink”. They care so much about their business there is nothing they wouldn’t throw at me. Nothing. He, himself, was subjected to a nasty smear campaign by GM fifty years ago.

Fughedabout the “victim” business. And it is not about enemies building you up, that’s not the point. There a *real thrill* feeling that you are risking something for your ideas. The more risk, the more skin-in-the-game, the more thrill.

The more they attack you, the more skin-in-the-game, the more you feel honorable. I cannot describe the sentiment: all I can say is that it is the exact opposite of shame.

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Thanks all for the help, (via Facebook) the persistence, and the unwavering fight against BS vending. Looks like our precautionary principle paper was used as back-up for the decision by the supreme court of the Philippines against GMOs.

People get rigorous arguments; trying to repress truth and logic is like trying to keep a balloon under water, or Fat Tony away from the fridge.

Looks like a combination of persistence and … f*** you money (which I repeat is is not about money but the moral attitude towards bullying authorities) works.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/supreme-court-of-phili…/5495025

Supreme Court of Philippines Confirms Genetically Modified (GM) Eggplant Ban
The Philippines Supreme Court permanently halted the field testing for genetically modified eggplant, Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), upholding the decision of the Court…

Precaution, GMOs, Pvalue, Vlad Putin, Bill Easterly, John Grays, Bent Flyvbjerg, MedNexus, Turkey/s

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FRIDAY SYMPOSIUM (Facebook)
Two young (motivated) friends have started a project to Uberize medicine and medical information, removing noise from medical search. I am running with them a (sort of) symposium here on the idea.

Please comment. Be tough, unrelentlessly inquisitive.
The project is very important *if* it allows the right transparency without interference from the big corporations. As you recall from the New York Times files, we have evidence that Monsanto discussed with a shill (Folta) the manipulation of entries on WebMD. Will access to multiple sources protect us?

So please ask them such questions as 1) how this system ensures independence, 2) whether they have the right filters, 3) what you like or don’t like about it, etc.

Anything that bypasses the middleman is good for us, if done properly.

MedNexus

http://www.mednexus.io

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REMOVE SKIN IN THE GAME. (Facebook)
Recall from Antifragile and earlier discussions here that a doctor’s answer would be different if you put (emotionally speaking) his skin in the game by asking him “what would you do?” instead of “what should I do?”

The opposite works equally well. A trick I did use as a trader: under pressure, to remove the emotional burden and the loss of mental clarity, you imagine that you are someone else in the situation. That someone else should be some precise person, in flesh and blood, say X. What should X do now? buy more? liquidate, etc. It applies to any decision, say “should X buy this house?”

You can use the strategy in a lot of dilemmas. Replace yourself with X, and ask: “should X resign because of ethics?”

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A SUPPLEMENT TO OUR PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE AND THE GMO PROBLEM: P v/s NP approach (Facebook)

Now our examination of GMO problem is taking us in an interesting territory. The initial work was essentially probabilistic — since few people understand both probability and fat tails, it was counterintuitive to many “scientists” (most scientists can’t even get P-values correctly to understand fat tails).

Luckily there is a huge crowd of computer scientists and mathematicians involved or familiar with the so-called P/NP problem and algorithmic complexity in general. They immediately get that:

1) selective breeding is different from insertion of remote genes from a combinatorial standpoint and how nature has to tinker in close, not remote space (genes from vicinity without going very far) to ensure stability

2) understanding the impact on a high dimensional environment of trangenics/GMOs is not possible

also not covered here, that genetics are neat to impress people with science but we will have a hard time understanding how things interact, and so long as P !=NP we will NEVER get things through genetics that we can check via experience and long term testing.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/PPAlgo2.pdf

GMOs, Putin, Downloading, Piketty, Dupire, Monotheism, Doctorow, Daesh, Cossaks

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Retweeted by NNT

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THE ETHICS OF DEBATING (Facebook)
or
HOW TO NOT BE A CHARLATAN
(revision of earlier discussion)

You can attack what a person *said* or what the person *meant*. The former is more sensational. The mark of a charlatan is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on *some* of his/her specific statement (“look at what he said”) rather than attacking his position (“look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”), the latter of which requires a broader knowledge of the proposed idea. Note that the same applies to the interpretation of religious texts.

Given that it is impossible for anyone to write a perfectly rationally argued document without a segment that, out of context, can be transformed by some dishonest copywriter to appear totally absurd and lend itself to sensationalization, politicians and charlatans hunt for these segments. “Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung” goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand, a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror, and others.

I take any violation by an intellectual as a disqualification, some type of disbarment –same as stealing is a disbarment in commercial life. It is actually a violation of journalistic ethics, but not enforced outside of main fact-checking newspapers.[Note 1]

Take for instance the great Karl Popper: he always started with an unerring representation of the opponents positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceededing to systematically destroy them. Or take Hayek’s diatribes “contra” Keynes and Cambridge: at no point there is a single line misrepresenting Keynes or an overt attempt at sensationalizing*. [**I have to say that it helped that people were too intimidated by Keynes’ intellect to trigger his ire.]

Read Aquinas, written 8 centuries ago, and you always see sections with QUESTIO->PRAETERIA, OBJECTIONES, SED CONTRA, etc. describing with a legalistic precision the positions being challenged and looking for a flaw in them and a compromise. That was the practice by intellectuals.

Twitter lends itself to these sensationalized framing: someone can extract the most likely to appear absurd and violating the principle of charity. So we get a progressive debasing of intellectual life with the rise of the media, needing some sort of policing.

Note the associated reliance of *straw man* arguments by which one not only extracts a comment but *also* provides an interpretation, promoting misinterpretation. I consider *straw man* no different from theft.

COMMENTS
I just subjected the *principle of charity* as presented in philosopy to the Lindy test: it is only about 60 years old. Why? Does it meant that it is transitory? Well, we did not need it explicitly before before discussions were never about slogans and snapshots but synthesis of a given position.

An answer came as follows. Bradford Tuckfield (earlier post) wrote: ” I think this principle is much older than 60 years. Consider in the book of Isaiah, chapter 29, verse 21: he denounces the wicked who “make a man an offender for a word,” implying that people were focusing on specific words rather than positions, and that this is a bad practice.”
So it seems that the Lindy effect wins. In fact as with other things, if the principle of charity had to become a principle, it is because an old practice had to have been abandoned.

Thanks Tredag Brajovic for the Richelieu story.

[Note 1: Journos seem to make the mistake but freak out when caught –they have fragile reputations and tenuous careers. I was misinterpreted in my positions on climate change in a discussion with David Cameron in 2009 (presenting them backwards) and when I complained, the editors were defensive and very apologetic, the journos went crazy when I called them “unethical”, some begged me to retract my accusation.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

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After a 800K circulation the previous post about the root of the problem was picked up by Politico. (Facebook)

http://www.politico.eu/…/the-saudi-wahhabis-are-the-real-f…/

The Saudi Wahhabis are the real foe
We must take our fight to the preachers and financiers of terror.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/666292678213136386

Paris, Wahabis, Salafi, Homeopathy, Beirut

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Since 2001 our policy for fighting Islamic terrorists has been, (Facebook) to put it politely, missing the elephant in the room, sort of like treating symptoms and completely missing the disease. Policymakers and slow-thinking bureaucrats stupidly let terrorism grow by ignoring the roots. We lost a generation: someone who went to grammar school in Saudi Arabia (our “ally”) after September 11 is now an adult, indocrinated into believing and supporting Salafi violence, hence encouraged to finance it –while we got distracted by the use of complicated weapons and machinery.
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Even worse the Wahabis have accelerated their brainwashing of East and West Asians with their madrassas, thanks to high oil revenues.
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So instead of invading Iraq, blowing up Jihadi John and individual terrorists, thus causing a multiplication of these people, it would have been be easier to focus on the source of all problems: the Wahabi/Salafi education and promotion of intolerance by which a Shiite or a Yazidi or a Christian are deviant people.
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If we absolutely need to put people in Guantanamo, it is the Salafi preachers, Wahabi clerics, not just the people swayed by their teaching. And if we need to correct Saudi problems, we need to start by sending to them OUR preachers, educating them into tolerance, explaining the very concept of the separation of church and state. Or, better even, encourage Muslim preachers who promote religious tolerance (laka dinak wa li dini) — instead of seeing them ostracized.
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And if you find violence unavoidable, it should be directed at the Saudi and Qatari funders of violence, as well as the Salafi theorists, rather than the young performers.
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PS Beware the usual ISIS crypto-sympathizer who sort of “explains” (that is, justifies) what happened (intentionally killing civilians) with some other Western event that can go all the way to the crusades… Otherwise it is “biased”. You cannot condemn ISIS without at the same time trying to be “balanced”? Who are they fooling? This is the technique of bundling problems that can be treated independently and you need to learn to deal with them by forcing them to discuss the problem of ISIS on its own.

https://freedomhouse.org/…/saudi-arabias-curriculum-intoler…

Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance | Freedom House
Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom released a report analyzing a set of Saudi Ministry of Education textbooks in use during the current academic year in Islamic studies courses for elementary and secondary students. The textbooks promote an ideology of hatred toward people, including Musli…
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Delenda est Salafi-stan. (Facebook)

(Background: Cato the ancient, for years, kept starting or ending his speeches at the Roman Senate with variations around “Delenda est Cartago”, *Carthage must be destroyed*. Until the Roman fleet went and destroyed Carthage, ending its threat.)
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Comment 1: Since Sep 11 no focus to cut the SOURCE of terrorism: Salafi funding of terror & intolerance in schools (Qatari & Saudi money); ISIS oil.
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Comment 2: Someone who went to school on Sept 11 in Saudi Arabia, now age 18 is brainwashed by the system to believe that all Shiites, Christians, and other minorities are deviant beings whose death doesn’t count.

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The Saudi king is shocked that his own Wahabi intolerance …kills people. Murderer! https://t.co/aahF4pKI2M

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 14, 2015
14 y after Sept 11, teenagers in Saudi Arabia are schooled to believe Shiites, Christians, & others are deviants whose death doesn’t count.

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 14, 2015
Never take an advice from a salesperson https://t.co/YZrZfFHMgx

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 13, 2015
I don’t know if the association is justified, but it takes greed to cancel the effect of corporate bullying. pic.twitter.com/XH7EVqzgQG

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 13, 2015
Superstitions can be rational if 1) harmless, 2) lower your anxiety, 3) prevent you from listening to forecasts by economists & BS “experts”

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 13, 2015
Skin in the game rule: after every tragic event in Beirut, never talk about it without visiting. Was there last week, going back in 2 weeks.

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 12, 2015