Tag Archives: Richard Dawkins

Fortune Cookie Science, SITG, Richard Dawkins, 2016, Squid Ink, Minority Rule

Leave a reply

FORTUNE-COOKIE SCIENCE (Facebook), definition: an understanding of science, probability & rationality obtained via slogans of the type found in Chinese restaurants’ fortune cookies, particularly easy to spread on the web.

The other night at a party. (Facebook)
“How do your books differ from those of [X]?”.
Me: “I don’t know I don’t often read contemporary authors, and odds are I will never read “X”.
She: “But you are writing books for an audience, no? You are responsible to tell the audience how you compare to others.”
Me: “Do you have a boyfriend?”
She: “Yes, he is here.”
Me: “Did you ask him how he compares in bed to other men at the party or is it something you found out by yourself?”

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/683440614160076800

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/683387772120510464

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/683329125076058112

Thanks for the symposium on risks. (Facebook)  The article came out in the WSJ. But I wasn’t aware of company: almost fainted.

Anyway wrote only 2 Op-Eds in 2015: NYT and WSJ. The rule is to stay below 3.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Real Financial Risks of 2016

 

Last email from 2015. (Facebook)  Our paper debunking Pinker’s thesis was accepted by a stat journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Applications.

Science Wins! In the months that it took us to publish this our paper was under the scrutiny of professional probabilists and statisticians who deal with Extreme Events, whose comments we collected and incorporated while Pinker and his goons were active in the press, on blogs and social media spreading stawman-clueless commentary.

Happy Science. Happy 2016!

PS- More generally I have to describe the “Pinker fallacy” under fat tails. His claim is sort of, to put it in statistical or scientific terms: “Violence has dropped by .00001 standard deviations. Let us explain WHY.”
PPS- Confirms my idea that, in science, a single comment by a mathematician can outweigh those by a billion BS vendors.

Our paper is here:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04722.pdf

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/683099866638204928

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682714154592014337

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682663137754132480

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682620538460725250

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682614965706952704

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682607188402147328

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682425513017798656

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682381885499162628

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682370173916082176

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682297740513140736

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/682269244902518784

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681940551210504193

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681937533849219072

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681906519810666496

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681862755360595968

E.O. Wilson, Nowak et al. wrote a paper on altruism…

Leave a reply

E.O. Wilson, Nowak et al. wrote a paper on altruism that triggered a huge angry reaction (particularly by science journalists Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins). The paper (linked) contained words with a mathematical backup.

More than 100 biologists signed a petition asking for retraction. And the math was not remotely addressed. Yet if the paper is wrong, math should be 1) wrong (which can be shown incontrovertibly) or 2) inadequate for the task, which is trivial to show by expansion of functional/parameter space, as I’ve been doing with economics. (But here the math was addressing flaws in the math that was behind the theories supported by Dawkins and others). Neither of these 2 were done. Having seen the bitter attacks on Edge.org & elsewhere, including comments by biologists that Wilson was “senile”, I spent some time scrutinizing the math: it is impeccable, though unsophisticated by mathematical finance standards. The beauty of mathematics is that it is *impossible* to be misunderstood.

They were attacked in a verbalistic manner. In other words, with BS. I view Richard Dawkins with intellectual revulsion as the perfect bullshit artist on the planet.

—

The lesson is obvious. Fughedabout supplemental material and backup. Put the math in the front, words in the back, particularly when the words are only there to explain the mathematical reasoning. Alas, it is necessary. Math is distortion-free, which repels the distorters…

(Note the earlier idea came from Yaneer Bar Yam and his idea can be related to the one in antifragile that averages miss Jensen’s inequality. A function of a mean is different from the mean of a function).

—

PS- I am publishing a paper about the Pinker fallacy with his verbalistic/BS interpretation of risk of war and “drop” in violence. The math comes first, words later. The same with the 2nd version of the precautionary principle.

PPS- When I wrote Antifragile, which is defined as a locally convex reaction to a nondegenerate stressor, the technical material was in another paper. It turned out to be a mistake as BS artists were arguing about “resilience” (which is nonconvex), etc. The math is first, even if it repels readers.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/

via E.O. Wilson, Nowak et al. wrote a paper on… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.