Finally, our Precautionary Principle (with Application to GMOs) Is on ArXiv (without the math).
We thank all the people here who helped with the development and refinement of the idea.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
[1410.5787] The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)
via Finally, our Precautionary Principle (with… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
EBOLA: A simplified model extracting the effect of uncertainty, & why should ignore the “empiricism of the idiot”.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIdlJNSXo1dkMzOVU/view?pli=1
Ebola.pdf – Google Drive
via EBOLA: A simplified model extracting the effect… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
EBOLA. You need to focus on growth rate, not number of victims –in other words the 2nd order, not first order effect, the nonlinearity.
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[Added: Something that doubles every 24 days multiplies by 37,000 every year. The doubing period is 15-20 days in Libera. So the idea proposed by Yaneer Bar Yam is to slow it down in the place of origin. You can’t rely on the medical establishment here to screen propery too risky. And you want to avoid having ebola spread out of Africa too much before the winter up North when epidemics grow faster, and avoid having consumers panicking ahead of the Christmas season as they become agoraphobic.]
[Comment: This should be familiar to people here as it is the same nonlinearity behind fragility and antifragility.Naive evidentiary methods lead people to focus on death rate which is lower than mortality from hitting one’s own furniture and deem overreaction or even concern to be “irrational”. But these rates do not grow exponentially. These are the same evidentiary idiots who refused to see financial risks in 2007. Much psychologists of risks don’t know probability and think people are “irrational” when it is the psychologists who confuse, Pinker-style, naive evidence for statistical property.]
via EBOLA. You need to focus on growth rate, not… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
RELIGION vs ATHEISM: Religious people are largely atheists, depending on the domain & why the discussion is largely flawed.
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Some philosophy now. One brilliant contribution by economists is the concept of “cheap talk”, or the difference between “stated preferences” (what you say) and “revealed preferences” (from actions). Actions are louder than words: what people say (in opinion polls or elsewhere) isn’t as relevant, as individuals reveal their preferences with hard cash or, more generally costly action, or even more generally risky action (which, invariably, brings us to *skin in the game*). This is why opinion polls are considered largely BS. I also believe that the notion of “belief” is largely misunderstood.
Likewise I consider the difference between “believer” and “atheist” as mere verbiage unless someone shows difference in action.
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In Chapter 1 of SILENT RISK, the notion of “probability” is shown to be verbalistic and empty (probability maps to “degrees of belief” mathematically, is ~ belief), largely INCOMPLETE, while revealed preferences via decisions is what matters (more technically probability is something deeply mathematical, useless on its own, an integral transform into something larger, and cannot be “summarized” in words). And decisions and decisions ONLY can be a metric for RATIONALITY. [Footnote 1]
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In our paper Rupert Read and I wrote that the “belief” content of religion is epiphenomenal (“pisteic” not epistemic), it is merely like believing in Santa Claus makes Christmas a more colorful event.
Belief is cheap talk (to oneself). Western society, particularly the U.S., has managed to marry deep religiosity (in talk) with total atheism (in words). What matters in the West, is the action by the state never impacted by religion. In rational decision-making it has a small cost.
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If you want to know if someone is a believer in words not in action, just observe whether he relies on some supernatural force to get him out of trouble or if he’d rather rely on the laws of physics and the logic of biology. An individual who goes first to the doctor and as a mere luxury to the priest (without paying for immediacy) is technically atheist though nominally a religious believer. So it looks like religion is something left to the spiritual, socio-ritualistic.
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The idea hit me when I saw a joke of a cleric who said “I throw charity money in the air, letting The Lord take what share He wants and I keep the rest”. People have adapted to the idea for millennia.
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Finally “Christianity” has evolved since the Middle Ages to become “atheistic in decisions and Christian in beliefs”.
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Some unrigorous journalists who make a living attacking religion typically discuss “rationality” without getting what rationality means in its the decision-theoretic sense (the only definition that can be consistent). I can show that it is rational to “believe” in the supernatural if it leads to an increase in payoff. Rationality is NOT belief, it only correlates to belief, sometimes very weakly (in the tails).
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[Footnote 1] See in Silent Risk the paradox of the trader who makes a bet against the “probable” though he believes it will eventually happen.
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SILENT RISK(S) is at:
via RELIGION vs ATHEISM: Religious people are… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Let us go through some deep & rigorous logical thinking which would lead us to a clear policy in dealing with terrorism/fundamentalism.
TWO QUESTIONS, one easy one hard (the second –more uncomfortable– one should come next post).
So step 1 (the easy one).
QUESTION ” Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?”
One step further, “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?
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This is in fact the incoherence that Goedel (the grandmaster of logical rigor) detected in the constitution while taking the naturalization exam.
I wrote about idiots asking me if one should be “skeptical about skepticism”, using a similar answer put to Popper about ” if one could falsify falsification”.
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Please answer. People who agree may not like the next question.
via Let us go through some deep & rigorous logical… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.