For imbeciles the Black Swan means “shit happens”. For intelligent people and those with skin in the game, it means “Build a solid protocol to not be the Turkey” and identify “consequential turkey domains”.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This is our annual reminder to not be the turkey.
(credit George Nasr)
A standard mistake is to do something to avoid criticism (as opposed to doing something because it is *right*), and, what’s worse, show it. This seems trivial but smart people make the mistake all the time, not realizing the hormetic effect: critics will now have the stimulating challenge to find something else.
If you are ever told “your critics will attack you for this”, you should 1) answer: fuck them, 2) do more of it.
via A standard mistake is to do something to avoid… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Friends, which format is better (for the textbook),
A- 1 col per page, smaller format:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/comparison1.pdf
B- 2 cols per page, larger
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/comparison2.pdf
A or B? Thanks a million.
via Friends, which format is better (for the… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Another place where fancy images of the brain allow neuroscientists to butcher mathematical/statistical rigor
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hUSTRzbzZnQUVjbm8/edit
via Another place where fancy images of the brain… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
More commentary on why neurobiology is a very soft science (high dimentionality matrix/nonlinear responses).
From The Black Swan (2007), less aggressive statement (it looks that mathematics leds me to get more aggressive in debunking):
“For an example that justifies skepticism about unconditional reliance on neurobiology, and vindicates the ideas of the empirical school of medicine to which Sextus belonged, let’s consider the intelligence of birds. I kept reading in various texts that the cortex is where animals do their “thinking,” and that the creatures with the largest cortex have the highest intelligence—we humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, and our cousins the apes.
Well, it turns out that some birds, such as parrots, have a high level of intelligence, equivalent to that of dolphins, but that the intelligence of birds correlates with the size of another part of the brain, called the hyperstriatum.
So neurobiology with its attribute of “hard science” can sometimes (though not always) fool you
into a Platonified, reductive statement. I am amazed that the “empirics,” skeptical about links between anatomy and function, had such insight— no wonder their school played a very small part in intellectual history. As a skeptical empiricist I prefer the experiments of empirical psychology to the theories-based MRI scans of neurobiologists, even if the former appear less “scientific” to the public.”
via More commentary on why neurobiology is a very… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.