/lit/ - Literature

Read it, gabish?

*is right about everything*

>academic rankings
Can't think of anything more pointless and pathetic.

>I once broke my nose…walking. For the sake of antifragility, of course. I was trying to walk on uneven surfaces, as part of my antifragility program, under the influence of Erwan Le Corre, who believes in naturalistic exercise. It was exhilarating; I felt the world was richer, more fractal, and when I contrasted this terrain with the smooth surfaces of sidewalks and corporate offices, those felt like prisons. Unfortunately, I was carrying something much less ancestral, a cellular phone, which had the insolence to ring in the middle of my walk.
>In the emergency room, the doctor and staff insisted that I should “ice” my nose, meaning apply an ice-cold patch to it. In the middle of the pain, it hit me that the swelling that Mother Nature gave me was most certainly not directly caused by the trauma. It was my own body’s response to the injury. It seemed to me that it was an insult to Mother Nature to override her programmed reactions unless we had a good reason to do so, backed by proper empirical testing to show that we humans can do better; the burden of evidence falls on us humans. So I mumbled to the emergency room doctor whether he had any statistical evidence of benefits from applying ice to my nose or if it resulted from a naive version of an interventionism. His response was: “You have a nose the size of Cleveland and you are now interested in…numbers?” I recall developing from his blurry remarks the thought that he had no answer.
>Effectively, he had no answer, because as soon as I got to a computer, I was able to confirm that there is no compelling empirical evidence in favor of the reduction of swelling. At least, not outside of the very rare cases in which the swelling would threaten the patient, which was clearly not the case. It was pure sucker-rationalism in the mind of doctors, following what made sense to boundedly intelligent humans, coupled with interventionism, this need to do something, this defect of thinking that we knew better, and denigration of the unobserved ... The researchers Paul Meehl and Robin Dawes pioneered a tradition to catalog the tension between “clinical” and actuarial (that is, statistical) knowledge, and examine how many things believed to be true by professionals and clinicians aren’t so and don’t match empirical evidence. The problem is of course that these researchers did not have a clear idea of where the burden of empirical evidence lies (the difference between naive or pseudo empiricism and rigorous empiricism)—the onus is on the doctors to show us why reducing fever is good, why eating breakfast before engaging in activity is healthy (there is no evidence), or why bleeding patients is the best alternative (they’ve stopped doing so). Sometimes I get the answer that they have no clue when they have to utter defensively “I am a doctor” or “are you a doctor?”

This is what Taleb says. Do not read books which can summarized in a few pages.

Read his books.

>>15401693
Mr. Taleb, for years, has been saying that psychology should not be considered part of science. Check his Twitter and his piece where he conclusively refutes IQ. In fact, he has even said this in Incerto.

>>15394682
Taleb is always right. No one can refute this.

>>15264073
It's not a cold. It is a multiplicative pandemic from extremistan while the cold is an idiosyncratic event with Chernoff bounds from mediocristan.

How does he do it?

Times like these prove we need him. His whole project within Incerto has been proven right.

>>15165459
>>15165568
>>15165307
The "refutation" by Pallesen is hilarious. Taleb BTFO it in a single paragraph.
>Hack job by one Jonatan Pallesen, full of mistakes about this piece (and the “empiricism”), promoted by mountebanks such as Murray. He didn’t get that of course one can produce “correlation” from data. It is the interpretation of these correlations that is full of BS. Pallesen also produces some lies about what I said which have been detected in online comments (e.g. the quiz I gave and using Log vs X ).
(You can also find more on Twitter.)
>>15166454
>>15165553
He's not Arab; he is Phoenician.
>>15163047
>Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
— From Bed of Procrustes
>>15163349
Read Incerto and then read his medium article; it will make it a million times easier to understand.

>solves every world problem

What are some good MIDDLE EASTERN / ARAB books?

Did Mr. Taleb, in the Black Swan, predict coronavirus?
>Mother Nature does not like too much connectivity and globalization—(biological, cultural, or economic). One of the privileges I got as a result of the book was meeting Nathan Myhrvold, the type of person I wish were cloned so I could have one copy here in New York, one in Europe, and one in Lebanon. I started meeting with him regularly; every single meeting has led to a big idea, or the rediscovery of my own ideas through the brain of a more intelligent person—he could easily claim co-authorship of my next book. The problem is that, unlike Spyros and those very few others, he does not have his conversations while walking (though I met him in excellent restaurants).
>Myhrvold enlightened me about an additional way to interpret and prove how globalization takes us into Extremistan: the notion of species density. Simply, larger environments are more scalable than smaller ones—allowing the biggest to get even bigger, at the expense of the smallest, through the mechanism of preferential attachment we saw in Chapter 14. We have evidence that small islands have many more species per square meter than larger ones, and, of course, than continents. As we travel more on this planet, epidemics will be more acute—we will have a germ population dominated by a few numbers, and the successful killer will spread vastly more effectively. Cultural life will be dominated by fewer persons: we have fewer books per reader in English than in Italian (this includes bad books). Companies will be more uneven in size. And fads will be more acute. So will runs on the banks, of course.
>Once again, I am not saying that we need to stop globalization and prevent travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the trade-offs—and few people are. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.

It only took a global crisis to prove him right, but alas, he is right.

Read his books.

Times like these prove just how important he is.

>>14875021
Hmmmmm
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

>>14867759
Taleb already made the moral case against IQ. Once we see that IQ is fraudulent — https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 — we can easily say that it is immoral to trap people inside imaginary boxes.

>psychology
Retroactively refuted by Taleb.