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.
If you detect a repressed smile on the seller’s face, you paid too much for it.
via If you detect a repressed smile on the seller’s… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Friends, this subject is for discussion, with back-up if you can:
It seems to me that IQ tests favor turkeys.
Standard tests of “fluid intelligence” that require the subject to complete a sequence favor a certain class of people who can rapidly detect naive patterns, and penalize those who are natural skeptics with richer imagination. In real life patterns are more complicated and having an ingrained skepticism that slows down inference is an invaluable asset. So my speculation is that it is OK to do well, but not to do very well.
Consider the seemingly elementary sequence: a-b-a-b-a -?- [complete ]. Naive pattern matching would give [b] as solution. But in real life ecologies the sequence could have a more complex pattern, a-b-a-b-a-b-b (there is a repetition of the 6th letter) or meta-patterns to consider. These take time to examine and someone smart would need to fight to repress his imagination.
So those who do well, but not great, should be much smarter than those who do better.
Let us debate. Does it make sense?
via Friends, this subject is for discussion, with… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Anything people do, write, or say to enhance their status or distinction shows like a mark on their foreheads, visible to others but not to them.
via Anything people do, write, or say to enhance… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Nonsensical definition of rationality, February 7, 2014
By N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”
This review is from: The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think Hardcover
I am not used to give 1 start reviews but I truly feel compelled to do so here, not just because this is a very bad book, but also because the authors are clueless about risk and are dangerously so, promoting silly risk bearing. The authors pathologize people for not accepting GMOs although “the World Health Organization has never found evidence of ill effects” a standard confusion of evidence of absence and absence of evidence. This pathologizing is similar to behavioral researchers labeling hyperbolic discounting as “irrational” when in fact it is the researcher who has a very narrow model and richer models make the “irrationality” go away. They fail to understand that humans may have precautionary principles against systemic risks, and can be skeptical of the unnatural for rational reasons.The book is a rehashing of the general ideas about evolution, except falling for a certain brand of “naive rationalism”.
via Amazon.com: N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”‘s review of The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us….
HatTip to Dave Lull