If that is the practical point made by T&D — and I'm not sure it is — it seems to me fallacious. Doesn't it amount to saying, "the parameters baked into the underlying data-generating process we posit may be constant, so who cares that the actually existing level of inequality is increasing?"
Taleb is not talking about what one might care about, but pointing out some mathematical facts about fat-tailed distributions (distributions with a power-law tail) and quantiles. The population top centile, he shows, can be a substantially biased underestimate of the distribution top centile, even for very large populations (100 million).
Among the consequences of this is that if you take ten countries, each with the same value for the top centile, and aggregate them, the top centile of the combined population may be substantially larger. In that situation, what is the "real" fraction of wealth of the top 1%? The value for any individual country, or the value for the aggregate? Would the answer depend on whether the countries were all economically isolated from each other?
It confuses what I really care about (actual inequality) with the imperfect model (the power law) of what I really care about.
I've never understood what people find so objectionable about inequality. Poverty, yes, inequality, no. To me, what is wrong with some people being rich while others starve is only that some starve. It bothers me not at all that among those who are not poor, some are vastly wealthier than others, even though I am not one of them.
If your objection to the richness of the rich is a claim that it is causally responsible for the poorness of the poor, then you are interested in underlying mechanisms described by the distribution.
Taleb is not talking about what one might care about, but pointing out some mathematical facts about fat-tailed distributions (distributions with a power-law tail) and quantiles.
The practical import of those mathematical facts lies ultimately in their relevance to features of the concrete world. If they do not bear on features of the concrete world which you or I care about, then they may have intrinsic beauty as mathematical results, but it would be mere misleading mathsturbation to present them as practically significant, as T&D do.
...In that situa
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: