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James_Miller comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - Less Wrong
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Nassim N. Taleb
Opportunity costs?
I would say it should be the one with best expected returns. But I guess Taleb thinks the possibility of a very bad black swan overrides everything else - or at least that's what I gathered from his recent crusade against GMOs.
True, but not as easy to follow as Taleb's advice. In the extreme we could replace every piece of advice with "maximize your utility".
His point is that the upside is bounded much more than the downside.
Yes, but my point is that this is also true for, say, leaving the house to have fun.
This is not always true (as Taleb himself points out in The Black Swan): in investing the worst that can happen is you loss all of your principle, the best that can happen is unbounded.
Not quite, as most people are risk-averse and care about the width about the distribution of the expected returns, not only about its mean.
If you measure "returns" in utility (rather than dollars, root mean squared error, lives, whatever) then the definition of utility (and in particular the typical pattern of decreasing marginal utility) takes care of risk aversion. But since nobody measures returns in utility your advice is good.
What? He's crusading against GMOs? Can you give me some references?
I like his writing a lo, but I remember noting the snide way he dismissed doctors who "couldn't imagine" that there could be medicinal benefit to mother's milk, as if they were arrogant fools.
My source were his tweets. Sorry if I can't give anything concrete right now, but "Taleb GMO" apparently gets a lot of hits on google. I didn't really dive into it, but as I understood it he takes the precautionary principle (the burden of proof of safety is on GMOs, not of danger on opponents) and adds that nobody can ever really know the risks, so the burden of proof hasn't and can't be met.
"They're arrogant fools" seems to be Taleb's charming way of saying "they don't agree with me".
I like him too. I loved The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness back when I read them. But I realized I didn't quite grok his epistemology a while back, when I found him debating religion with Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. Or rather, debating against them, for religion, as a Christian, as far as I can tell based on a version of "science can't know everything". (www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hnqo4_X7PE)
I've been meaning to ask Less Wrong about Taleb for a while, because this just seems kookish to me, but it's entirely possible that I just don't get something.
I feel like it should be pointed out that being kookish and being a source of valuable insight are not incompatible.
"Can't know" is misses the point. Doesn't know, is much more about what Taleb speaks about.
Robin Hanson lately wrote a post against being a rationalist. The core of Nassim arguments is to focus your skepticism where it matters. The cost of mistakenly being a Christian is low. The cost of mistakenly believing that your retirement portfolio is secure is high. According to Taleb people like the New Atheists should spend more of their time on those beliefs that actually matter.
It's also worth noting that the new atheists aren't skeptics in the sense that they believe it's hard to know things. Their books are full of statements of certainity. Taleb on the other hand is a skeptic in that sense.
For him religion also isn't primarily about believing in God but about following certain rituals. He doesn't believe in cutting Chelstrons fence with Ockham's razor.
That's not self-evident to me at all.
It's not self-evident, but the new atheists don't make a good argument that it has a high cost. Atheist scientists in good standing like Rob Baumeister say that being religious helps with will power.
Being a Mormon correlates with characteristics and therefore Mormon sometimes recognize other Mormons. Scientific investigation found that the use marker of being healthy for doing so and those markers can't be used for identifying Mormons.
There's some data that being religious correlates with longevity.
Of course those things aren't strong evidence that being religious is beneficial, but that's where Chesterton's fence comes into play for Taleb. He was born Christian so he stays Christian.
While my given name is Christian, I wasn't raised a Christian or believed in God at any point in my life and the evidence doesn't get my to start being a Christian but I do understand Taleb's position. Taleb doesn't argue that atheists should become Christians either.
(If there is something called "Chelston's Fence" (which my searches did not turn up), apologies.)
Chesterton's Fence isn't about inertia specifically, but about suspecting that other people had reasons for their past actions even though you currently can't see any, and finding out those reasons before countering their actions. In Christianity's case the reasons seem obvious enough (one of the main ones: trust in a line of authority figures going back to antiquity + antiquity's incompetence at understanding the universe) that Chesterton's Fence is not very applicable. Willpower and other putative psychological benefits of Christianity are nowhere in the top 100 reasons Taleb was born Christian.
If Christianity would lower the willpower of it's members then it would be at a disadvantage in memetic competition against other worldviews that increase willpower.
Predicting complex systems like memetic competition over the span of centuries between different memes is very hard. In cognitive psychology experiments frequently invalidate basic intuitions about the human mind.
Trust bootstrapping is certainly one of the functions of religion but it's not clear that's bad. Bootstrapping trust is generally a hard problem. Trust makes people cooperate. If I remember right Taleb makes somewhere the point that the word believe derives from a word that means trust.
As far as "antiquity's incompetence at understanding the universe" goes, understanding the universe is very important to people like the New Atheists but it's for Taleb it's not the main thing religion is about. For him it's about practically following a bunch of rituals such as being at church every Sunday.
I often see this argument from religions themselves or similar sources, not from those opposed to religion. Not this specific argument, but this type of argument--the idea of using the etymology of a word to prove something about the concept represented by the word. As we know or should know, a word's etymology may not necessarily have much of a connection to what it means or how it is used today. ("malaria" means "bad air" because of the belief that it was caused by that. "terrific" means something that terrifies.)
Also consider that by conservation of expected evidence if the etymology of the word is evidence for your point, if that etymology were to turn out to be false, that would be evidence against your point. Would you consider it to be evidence against your point if somehow that etymology were to be shown false?
Sorry for the typo.
I think that Taleb has one really good insight -- the Black Swan book -- and then he decided to become a fashionable French philosopher...