A formal definition of a charlatan. Is there anything missing? Also a formal definition of citation rings (since charlatans can hide under a collective of back-scratching fellows).
A formal definition of a charlatan…
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Monthly Archives: August 2014
After 20 months, completed the math part of SILENT RISK…
After 20 months, completed the math part of SILENT RISK. Now moving into the verbal part on top of the rigorous math apparatus, a codification of terms, making what needs to be precise as precise as possible so inference can be clean. The superimposed verbal part should make ALL math concepts accessible to the logically aware person; this approach is closer to legal philosophy in style. Reading 13th century legal philosophers like Olivi gave me an epiphany: the most important subject in the history of mankind, RISK Applied Probability doesn’t even have as much as a sketch of definitions.I noticed that many papers, researchers, decision-makers conflate many things, especially academics recall the Pinker Problem, with results patently opposite to what they claim. The GMO debacle and the sloppiness of the discussions on Black Swan risks by “scientists” not only clueless about probability but not aware of their ignorance makes this project essential.
PROBABILITY HAS BEEN BEST UNDERSTOOD HISTORICALLY BY LEGAL SCHOLAR
PROBABILITY HAS BEEN BEST UNDERSTOOD HISTORICALLY BY LEGAL SCHOLARS (In new Intro for SILENT RISK, not talking about New York lawyers but MEDIEVAL legal scholars/philosophers).
Most people claiming a “scientific” approach to risk management do not quite understand what “science” means and how applicable it is for probabilistic decision making. Science consists in a body of rigorously verifiable, replicable, and generalizable claims and state- ments –and those statements only, nothing that doesn’t satisfy these constraints.
Science scorns the particular. It never aimed at covering all manner of exposure management, and never about opaque matters. It is just a subset of our field of decision making. We need to survive by making decisions that do not satisfy scientific methodologies, and cannot wait a hundred years or so for these to be established. So phronetic approaches or a broader class of matters we can call “wisdom” and precautionary actions are necessary. But not abiding by naive “evidentiary science”, we embrace a larger set of human endeavors; it becomes necessary to build former protocols of decision akin to legal codes:
rigorous, methodological, precise, adaptable, but certainly not standard “science” per se.
Indeed the rigor of the 12th Century legal philosopher Pierre Jean de Olivi is as close to our model as Kolmogorov and Paul Lévy. It is a fact that stochastic concepts such as probability, contingency, risk, hazard, and harm found an extreme sophistication in legal texts, from Cicero onwards, way before probability entered our scientific vocabulary, and of course probability was made poorer by the mental gymnastics and ludic version by Fermat-Pascal-Huygens-De Moivre …
Text is here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QISHRiY1VLTkRiS1k/edit
via PROBABILITY HAS BEEN BEST UNDERSTOOD… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Friends, this is the list of Main Fallacies discussed in SILENT RISK
Friends, this is the list of Main Fallacies discussed in SILENT RISK (technical book in progress), mostly around how our systems of “scientific evidence” fail us with fat tails. I wonder if the list is complete. You are welcome to add some.
(The full book is here in prelim draft https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QISHRiY1VLTkRiS1k/edit)
I wonder how many people drive carefully after…
I wonder how many people drive carefully after reading a sign telling them to drive carefully.
via I wonder how many people drive carefully after… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.