Finally, our Precautionary Principle-GMO paper is done. It establishes the difference between precaution and risk aversion.
Comments welcome, but only for those who have read the paper and do not rehash fallacies addressed in it.
via Finally, our Precautionary Principle-GMO paper… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Our longer & near final version of the Precautionary Principle. The web is great. We posted our paper and kept improving it just from indirectly answering criticism on twitter by integrating them in the text, and naming BS ones and erroneous reasoning “fallacies” antifragility. Calling something a fallacy such as the potato fallacy, or the Russian roulette fallacy saves time and eliminates sophistry. The best is the “carpenter fallacy” which addresses the insults by biologists.We are not adding the math appendix as it intimidates people and might cause them to stop attacking our paper .
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit
via Our longer & near final version of the… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Precautionary Principle, a Fact Sheet With application to GMOs,a draft for discussiom by Yaneer Bar-Yam., Rupert Read, and yours truly. New File Location
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
via The Precautionary Principle, a Fact Sheet With… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Friends, after a lifetime of dealing with a concept called Gambler’s ruin (and refinining it dynamically in “Dynamic Hedging”), it didn’t hit me that I was talking about it here, in connection with the zero-one law.
A series of finite bets, a la binary are immune to ruin if they are done right.
Let us reformat the idea of the PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE (PP) within gambler’s ruin theory. The wiki page is not good, by the way as there are plenty of interpretations. The definition we can use is as follows: there is a class of dynamic strategies that never blow up, with probability 1, but they need to consist in finite bets (like binaries). And, the bad news, is that there is that will eventually lead to ruin, here ecocide and destruction, with probability 1.
We should code ruin aversion in the constitutions.
via Friends, after a lifetime of dealing… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Something people don’t realize about fat-tailed probabilities: We may accept to take risks with .00001 pct chance of blowing up the planet. May be OK for some. But the inconsistency is that we do serially and collectively take A LOT of “one-off” risk. If nothing happens, we may do it again. And again. Or we may take many of these at the same time. Merely allowing such action will eventually mean that we will have 100% chance of blowing up the planet.
Recall the principle, by Kolmogorov’s zero-one law, that eventually if you have a small chance of blowing up you end up blowing up with CERTAINTY; the planet has never blown up (in trillions of trillions of bounded variations over billions of years) precisely because it took close to ZERO risks of blowing up. Nothing beyond local variations.
This seriality is something to add to the precautionary principle. Some risks we should NEVER take.
via Something people don’t realize about… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.