Arguing with biologists about risk is exactly like arguing with George W. Bush about algebraic geometry.
This is by Mark Buchanan, a physicist.
The Trouble With the Genetically Modified Future
With GMOs, there’s no way of knowing how bad the worst-case scenario could be.
via Arguing with biologists about risk is exactly… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The world’s shortest man, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, greets the tallest living man, Sultan Kosen, to mark the Guinness World Records Day in London November 13, 2014.
via Photo: World’s tallest man hanging out with world’s smallest man – Boing Boing.
5.0 out of 5 stars Aramaic Alive., November 5, 2014
By N N Taleb “Nassim Nicholas Taleb”
This review is from: Modern Aramaic-English/English-Modern Aramaic Dictionary & Phrasebook: Assyrian/Syriac Paperback
There is no way we Levantines can learn the language of our ancestors in an organic way except via nerds insisting on 1 grammar, 2 writing in one of the unwieldy Syriac scripts that one cannot even read on a computer screen without dowloading strange fonts. But Aramaic is still spoken, let us take advantage of it, and figure out how to say “I want to eat mjaddara” rather than memorize poetry by some dead author. Aramaic isn’t a dead language and it is the shame Levantines study Arabic instead of our own heritage.
This book in the Latin alphabet makes both Swadaya and Turoyo alive and easy to read, with all manner of real-world expressions. One can use it to supplement scholarly studies, or just to figure out how modern people speak our ancient language. There are Arabic influences, but the distance between the spoken language and, say, Bar Hebraeus is quite narrow.I would suggest the authors expand the dictionary. It would be the only one in the latin script.Most excellent, except for very few and small mistakes. “Debo” in Turoyo is not wolf, but bear.
via Amazon.com: N N Taleb “Nassim Nicholas Taleb”‘s review of Modern Aramaic-English/English-Modern Aram….
HatTip to Dave Lull
SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY OF FRAUDULENT SCHEMES
A Ponzi scheme increases in fragility over time; it requires more and more new funds to keep it going, so it collapses when one eventually runs out of suckers.*
Now it looks like it is a universal property of fraudulent schemes: you need more and more PR, lobbyists, shills, and repetitions of the narratives to keep the story going, particularly in the age of the internet. This is what I am observing with my current fraud-busting projects, with the Saudi-Wahabi government funded intolerant version of the religion, GMOs maquerade of “science” and “evidence”, the economics/macrobullshit establishment, the “education” bubble student loans helping real-estate developers, etc. You can see it particularly with GMOs as all the lobbying efforts can evaporate in the face of a single probabilistic argument; tens of thousands of comments do not measure up to a single derivation.
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*A Ponzi scheme is one by which one finds new investors to pay off old investors: think Madoff or many heavily endebted governments.
via SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Taleb and co focus on two examples. The first is nuclear energy. They point out that many people are justifiably concerned about the risk associated with nuclear energy. Scientists are well aware of the harm that can be caused by radiation release, core meltdown and the disposal of radioactive waste and these risks have been studied extensively.
While the potential harm from a nuclear accident can be large, it is generally scale dependent and far from global. So when it comes to making decisions about whether to use nuclear energy on a local scale, the risks involved can be managed using appropriate safety measures that have been carefully considered.
Taleb and co contrast this to the case of genetically modified organisms. They argue that the risk from genetically modified organisms is a potential for widespread impact on the ecosystem and widespread impact on human health. In other words, it is scale independent.