I absolutely love Taleb.
The following might appear too long and too technical (each fragment is skippable) but Doctor Professor Billionaire The Nassim Taleb, Superhero Rock Star Messiah, has already called bullshit on all false and useless knowledge and left us with only the issues worthy of our most urgent consideration. Daniel Kahneman considers him among the world’s top intellectuals and he is currently “the hottest thinker in the world”, serving as Intellectual Advisor for the British Prime Minister.
[Breaking news! On June 28, 2010, only yesterday while I was writing this, Taleb for the first time praised a criticism of his work, The Blank Swan by Elie Ayache, that used—SURPRISE!!!— WITTGENSTEIN’S meta-analysis. Taleb personally wrote a positive review and rated the book 5 stars. More on that below.]
[A]
I hated him for associating Wittgenstein with professional philosophers who puzzle over pointless problems such as the druggies at an NYU colloquium debating about Martians controlling your will without you knowing it, with Wittgenstein’s name dropped here and there, making you feel dumb and shit. After finishing The Black Swan I realized that Taleb didn’t dismiss Wittgenstein himself but hastily generalized that mentioning Wittgenstein is a signifier of such professional philosophers. Wittgenstein would’ve agreed with Taleb for he said it himself, “If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.”
[B]
Taleb was being deliberately controversial with his “offensive opinions” for he was aware of the utility of word-of-mouth contagion, as he would later mention further into the book as a means of “maximizing the serendipity around you”.
[C]
The Black Swan has been frank about being a “brand name” of repackaged ideas, comparing itself with The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: the facts presented were not necessarily original, but the scientific association of natural selection goes to Darwin for simply connecting the dots, deriving the consequences and importance of the ideas.
The big ideas behind The Black Swan are the following:
The Popperian Falsification and the Scientific Skepticism of David Hume
Neuroeconomics or the Empirical Psychology of Heuristics and Biases in Judgment Under Uncertainty by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
Fractal Models of Financial Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot
Cumulative Advantage, Self-fulfilling Prophecy and Role Model by Robert K. Merton (Applied to Network Theory)
Chaos Theory, The Three-Body Problem and Epistemic Human Ignorance by Henri Poincare
[D]
Other than Mandelbrot’s application of fractals in finance, these ideas, both classic and modern, are nothing new to me and to neuroscientists and to other network scientists working on complex dynamic/adaptive systems.
[E]
The problem is, the majority of academia and almost all people with authority — the so-called “experts” — are still unaware of these! They cling to long falsified knowledge and their dogmatic thinking perseveres throughout government and corporate executives and college professors and curricula by social inertia — that, and that people are afraid to question authority.
[F]
What separates Taleb from the “enlightened ones” is his aggressive activism that lets him bash the highest authority of any given domain such as presidents, lawmakers, bankers, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, professors, economists and Nobel laureates, proving them wrong face-to-face in mass media.
[G]
He is the living application and proof of his beliefs, and his courage to insult authority, for as long as he has damning evidence, empowers the small fries who have been silenced for so long. For the first time in years it’s exciting to watch the news again. You can easily imagine Taleb suddenly popping out of nowhere, calling bullshit on forecasts and predictions by governments and corporations and other institutions.
[H]
What I loved the most among Taleb’s entertaining narratives was on “How to Spot a Phony”:
If you hear an “expert” bring up Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to explain unpredictability, he is a phony. The quantum indeterminacy of subatomic particles average out in classical objects through the Law of Large Numbers, which isn’t even near the complexity of predicting how a butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi can create a hurricane in New Orleans, even within a deterministic universe.
[I]
I love how Taleb claimed Henri Poincare as his favorite philosopher, the father of chaos theory, and how Poincare did not mind Einstein stealing his special theory of relativity like how Poincare did not bother correcting typos and grammatical errors in his text, even after spotting them, since he found doing so a gross misuse of his time.
[J]
However, I am suspicious of the implicit intentions behind his actions. It is one thing to warn the American Empire of its volatility and fragility, and another to catalyze its destruction by giving “extremists” ideas. As Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, “The population of much of the developing world is politically stirring and in many places seething with unrest… It is acutely conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree… and this is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches.”
[K]
It is one thing to advance scientific knowledge by subjecting it to rigorous skepticism, and another to provoke herds of sophists and nihilists and idiots to call bullshit on everyone and everything and destroying all faith and respect for humanity and authority in favor of unnecessary skepticism that is often abused and misused with wrong evidence of falsification.
[L]
Taleb is trying to win the sympathies of outliers, injecting his own ideologies and justifying them as Darwinian. For example, Taleb attacks Christianity and its concept of monogamy as “unnatural”, that all other religions and civilizations prior to Christianity were polygamous so “the alpha males can secure wombs without sexually-deprived men at the bottom starting revolutions for a chance to mate.”
That is Dr. Taleb: fallible and noncommittal even in love.
[M]
I personally have no problems with Christianity and monogamy being dissolved and becoming out of style. I mean, in my experience growing up in a predominantly Christian country, nobody behaves like a True Christian anymore anyway! Christianity and its claims to moral righteousness and political correctness can burn in Hell for all I care, God, damn!
But there still are a rare few among Christians who truly believe that the pain of jealousy caused by promiscuity should not be ignored. Hardening society to tolerate promiscuity, more specifically, to preserve the hierarchy of “alpha males” and propagate the treatment of women as mere concubines using institutionalized religion, is bullshit.
[N]
I still have faith in the positive pragmatism of induction.
I am strongly against unnecessary scientific skepticism.
I believe that communities built upon trust are only unstable if threatened by communities built upon distrust.
All knowledge requires a leap of faith. To live is to believe.
I’d rather be a child feeling secure in a world supervised by corruptible adults than witness my daughter being raped by a gang of savage children in the free world of anarchy.
I believe in committment and in the honor and dignity of killing yourself in shame upon failure.
[O]
It is one thing to theorize possible ways to commit crimes as proof of concept, as speculation, or as fiction, and another to act them out or to publish them.
[P]
Nassim Taleb is Two-Face on toilet paper: The toothpaste Joker and the Dark Knight, on each side.
More here: http://pablobanila.tumblr.com/post/734361931/
[Q]
Amidst Taleb’s genuinely terrifying implications, he gives the most convincing words of comfort:
“I have said that nobody is safe in Extremistan [the real world]. This has a converse: nobody is threatened with complete extinction either. Our current environment allows the little guy to bide his time in the antechamber of success—as long as there is life, there is hope.”
[Raven-Feathered Ugly Duckling]
At first, Taleb’s achievements and grand ambitions made me feel insecure and frustrated with myself. Years before The Black Swan I’ve already immersed myself with the same core knowledge and successfully applied it within a target demographic. Backed by evidence of working empirical methods I was ready to take on the world—but here comes Taleb with his vast majestic wings already flying above my head. It was the same ambition but beyond my imagination.
I felt defeated.
And then, for the first time, I felt I found a father figure. Throughout the book, uncharacteristic of his brazen ways, he showed deep respect for Mandelbrot who is about thirty years his senior. Mandelbrot is Taleb’s father figure. Taleb is already 50 years old, and I still have about thirty years to become him.
This “father figure” or “role model” charisma of Taleb is one of his implicit intentions. Also the fact that Taleb’s personal history is most bizarre adds to his deliberately mysterious charm.
Being a Whitewashed Filipino exmatriate is already cliche compared to growing up in a basement library reading books amidst the shock of bombshells in war-torn Lebanon.
[WITTGENSTEIN’S META-ANALYSIS OF TALEB]
The following is what Wittgenstein and Derrida would’ve written about Taleb had they been alive, which is the meta-contextual framework of Taleb’s own “language-game” — written by a trader. You can read Taleb’s positive review and praise of the book in here: http://amzn.to/9TJLxi
From The Blank Swan: The End of Probability by Elie Ayache:
“The writing process and the pricing process are two special kinds of processes that do not take place in possibility or in probability. They fall completely outside prediction. As processes, they keep re-creating themselves and differentiating themselves, yet they do not unfold in chronological time.
The medium of contingent claims — that which transmits them and translates them into prices — is something I call the _market_. This cannot be covered by probability theory or derivative valuation theory. The medium is of the nature of writing, and the trader of contingent claims is a writer and a creator. He doesn’t predict the market (or its generalization, which is history) or try to anticipate it. The market is his _work_, as when we say that the book is the work of the writer or the poem is the work of the poet.
Indeed, it is not in probability (or worse, by luck) that money shall be made in the market, but _outside_ probability, in a medium and continuum that I can find no better way to describe than to compare it with the medium of the creation of literary work.
My observation is that Unknown Unknowns are said to be _unpredictable_ only insofar as the framework and whole register of prediction is maintained. My criticism consists in suggesting that if Unknown Unknowns constantly evade prevision, then we should be able to define them and deal with them _completely and independently of prevision_. Why even keep the framework of prevision when we keep talking of something that constantly evades it?
It is not with prevision (either Known or Unknown) or prediction that we should deal with the Unknown Unknown or definite it, but with something else, which, in the course of my book, turns out to be _writing_ and whose quantitative avatar is the market. Writing is something we produce without previous knowledge or prevision or prediction. Writing is quicker than thought and vision. It is a material process, when vision and prevision are only conceptual. Writing transpierces the page it is marked on. It is real. It is a process that eventually transports us to the future, making us attain and fulfill our promises (think of the derivative payoff as a promise that the seller of the derivative has _written_ to the buyer), yet at no point is it based on prediction or forecast.
The market, whose other name is the ‘pricing process’, us such a process. Hence my idea is that the market (or writing) should be the way we deal with Unknown Unknowns, not the place where we complain helplessly against them (as Taleb does).”
