Category Archives: Contributors

2014 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? | Edge.org

Standard Deviation

The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good—particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems.

Say someone just asked you to measure the “average daily variations” for the temperature of your town (or for the stock price of a company, or the blood pressure of your uncle) over the past five days. The five changes are: (-23, 7, -3, 20, -1). How do you do it?

via Edge.org.

We have entered an era where competitive social “scientists” create sophistication but…

We have entered an era where competitive social “scientists” create sophistication but, as they are unchecked (no skin in the game), are increasingly incoherent with elementary notions. (I recall an established financial mathematician who failed my elementary quiz: what happens to the call price if the stock increases). Here is something far more severe.

My answer to the Edge yearly question.

http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25401

via We have entered an era where competitive social… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Nassim Taleb Twitter – Business Insider

Author and philosophical finance whiz Nassim Taleb began 2014 with a bold challenge to his fellow economic thinkers.

“I would love to debate a prominent economist LIVE in front of an audience… Nobody has accepted so far,” he wrote on his Facebook page a few days ago.

So who is up for the challenge?

“I think any economist who debated Taleb would want to use this,” The Week’s John Aziz quipped on Twitter, pointing to this 2010 interview where Taleb argues shorting treasuries is a “no brainer” due to the U.S. deficit and the risk of inflation.

“So long as you see the picture of Larry Summers going to Davos, you have to stay short U.S. Treasuries for another year. It means they (the Obama administration) don’t know what’s going on,” Taleb told MoneyNews’ Dan Weil in 2010.

Taleb went off on Aziz and others, arguing that his actual profit and loss (“PL”) wasn’t indicative of his 2010 statement, which would have presumably lost money.

via Nassim Taleb Twitter – Business Insider.

Overweening Generalist: Promiscuous Neurotheologist: The Atheologies of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Robert Anton Wilson

NNT thinks that if religion has survived for millennia we shouldn’t uproot it unless we can be damned well sure we can replace it with something less damaging. But we cannot be sure, right?

Like the late Robert Bellah and Robert Anton Wilson, NNT thought religion was not about “belief” but about action, and it starts with ritual. We have ideas about “God” all mixed up. Most religions started off with rituals, then developed deities post hoc. Religion makes people do things, and then the King arrives and uses the local religion for social control.

Further, NNT sees very strong historical lessons in Christianity and Islam that support his idea that history does not crawl but “jumps” and is best not thought of as something that develops slowly and relatively predictably: in noting the paucity of extant writings by contemporary thinkers in or near Jesus’s time, “Apparently, few of the big guns took the ideas of a seemingly heretical Jew seriously enough to think he would leave traces for posterity.” And: “How about the competing religion that emerged seven centuries later; who forecast that a collection of horsemen would spread their empire and Islamic law from the Indian subcontinent to Spain in just a few years? Even more than the rise of Christianity, it was the spread of Islam the third edition, so to speak that carried full unpredictability; many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change.” NNT follows up these observations by making a general note about our study of history: “These kinds of discontinuities in the chronology of events did not make the historian’s profession too easy: the studious examination of the past in the greatest detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.” p.11, op.cit

Illusions of understanding: this is at the heart of NNT’s work.

via Overweening Generalist: Promiscuous Neurotheologist: The Atheologies of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Robert Anton Wilson.
HatTip to Dave Lull

Where are the Flaws in My Work?

Where are the Flaws in the Incerto? The Black Swan, Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness, B of Procrustes

Busting BS Artists: Economists, finance quants, risk quants, journalists, and others I have called charlatans or fragilistas been lining up from here to Cleveland to try to get me. For about 13 years now. Nothing so far, nothing of substance has emerged, for mysterious reasons, certainly not from indifference or lack of interest. There have been a lot of passion as expressed by the internet equivalent of mob lynching, other forms of obsessive harassment… that kind. But not a person stuck his neck out to produce an organized academic criticism in a reputable journal (except for some comments here and there often as with Andy Lo getting the message of TBS backwards)…(And this is not from academic neglect: the works so far have been getting 5,500 citations on Google Scholar, special issues of academic journals such as the American Statistician and Critical Review).
Until now, finally came an attack worth responding to, the first published in an academic journal representing the consensus criticism by the quant-risk management crowd mostly against ideas in The Black Swan. Finally. So here is the result:

Four Points Beginner Risk Managers Should Learn from Jeff Holman’s Mistakes in the Discussion of Antifragile

Note: I am not saying there are no minor errors in the works: these are defined as something that can be corrected without changing the argument of the page, chapter, book, or the collection. A flaw invalidates an argument; a minor error does not affect the substance, a typo so to speak. So far nothing has emerged, close to 14 years after FBR. Still nothing.

Straw Man Arguments (wiki)
People miss the point that I am not critical of quantitative methods, only of “quants”, precisely for the lack of logical and empirical rigor in the culture and their irresponsible underestimation of iatrogenics, or model error, mostly because of warped incentives for researchers. The insightful no-BS economist Robert Shiller misrepresented my ideas in his Nobel statement, saying ” Critics of “economic sciences” sometimes refer to the development of a “pseudoscience” of economics, arguing that it uses the trappings of science, like dense mathematics, but only for show. For example, in his 2004 book Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb said of economic sciences: “You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations, and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment.”
Then he misrepresented my ideas saying : “But all the mathematics in economics is not, as Taleb suggests, charlatanism.” But I never said it was all charlatanism, this is a logical fallacy like making one reject all medication on grounds of snake oil salesmanship. All I am saying is that one needs a much much much more no-nonsense no-BS, logically rigorous way to handle these things (which, it turned out, was Shiller’s proposal).
And, luckily, as with Holman, one can use mathematics to bust unrigorous use of mathematics.

via Where are the Flaws in My Work?.