If your approach to mathematics is mechanical not mystical, you’re not going to go anywhere.
via If your approach to mathematics is mechanical… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
If your approach to mathematics is mechanical…
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Tomorrow I will complete a 12-month literary “fasting”…
Tomorrow I will complete a 12-month literary “fasting” with almost no reading at all outside mathematics (and some, very very few classic texts, plus this page and a few links). RESULT: The BS detector is oversensitized. I don’t know if the effect will go away soon; for now things I used to find mildly BS are now totally repellent, but things that I used to enjoy reading (like Italo Calvino’s Folk Tales) are just as pleasant.
But modern literature, and the very notion of “public intellectual” I can no longer stand. It feels largely like hype and fashion-magazine discourse. I am scheduled to go to Jaipur festival in January and can’t bear the idea of listening to writers, talking to them… I am in trouble.
Tomorrow I will complete a 12-month literary… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Antifragile / GettingStronger.org
How does the barbell strategy apply to health? A great example is combining occasional, high intensity weight lifting or interval training, alternating with long stretches of rest, recovery and ”doing nothing”. The intermittent stress of lifting an extreme weight pushes the body to overcompensate and prepare for an even greater future challenge, but the interlude of rest and recovery is restorative and avoids the downside of chronic overuse. We can extend this idea of a bimodal “barbell” strategy to practices such as intermittent fasting or cold showers. The barbell strategy is the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom to engage in moderate aerobic exercise on the treadmill every day, or to eat regular small meals throughout the day. Periodic intense stressors build antifragile resilience — but chronic stress without rest and recovery only wears us down. By alternating between “extremes” of intensity and rest, feast and fast, luxury and poverty — we become more resilient because we increase our range of responsiveness to environmental variability.In my 2011 post on Stress Oscillation, I developed a similar concept how to use intermittent exposure to stressors to enhance allostasis. What I like especially about Taleb’s barbell strategy is its guidance on how to implement this in a way that maximizes upside and minimizes downside risk. He insists that one “leg” of the barbell is quite safe, while the “stressor” leg adds to the upside.
TEchnical: Small is beautiful. Completed. Now…
TEchnical: Small is beautiful. Completed. Now covers pollution.
Comments welcome before submission to ArXiv.
via TEchnical: Small is beautiful. Completed. Now… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
FAKE EVIDENCE
FAKE EVIDENCE
In some domains, “evidence” comes too late. The good news is that we have a methodology to bust these claims and make the difference between *true* and *fake* evidence.
This shows why the Law of Large Numbers makes evidence slower under fat tails (In some domains, only *negative* evidence counts). And this is the method we are using in statistics to bust sloppy and fallacious (mechanistic) thinking by applying an inferential technique on a problem for which we know the answer.
Incidentally this is exactly what Pinker doesn’t get: scientific “evidence” is NOT journalistic fact checking. And this is why I consider that advocates of GMOs on grounds of “science” are dangerous.