/lit/ - Literature

>>12719708
Isn’t he in favor of pederasty?

>>12719708
antifragile's awesome, all of his books are really.

>>12719708
He's really fun, but mainly he popularizes concepts that are apparent to anyone with a decent grasp of statistics. You'd do better to take some stats and epi classes.
>>12719715
huh?

>>12719725
Well honestly I'd rather read a book or two than take and pay for a uni class. What are some good stats books?

You guys look over his new draft yet?

https://www.academia.edu/38433249/Fractal_Localism_Political_Clarity_under_Complexity

>>12719708
Read all of his books - enormous defender of the Taleb. I think you have to read him with a ridiculous grain of salt. Black swan is useful but isn't revolutionary, anti-fragile is absolutely beautiful and is a foundational text for making sense of our world. The idea is that linearity is a bastardization of Mendelbrot series and fractals that actually delineate or world. His central trust, is that the majority of life's phenomenon are NOT distributed on a bell curve, and thus variance is bust, but in a Mendelbrot series. This has huge ramifications for those interested in finance, but his commentary on biological concepts is very interesting. Also, he's a serious scholar and hates academia and the Nobel prize, which I'm a huge fan of.

>>12720022
Probably the cheapest used intro to stats book on amazon that you can find an answer key for.
Do all the problems. Then pick up epidemiology for dummies, game theory if you can do calc. Read some history. IDK he synthesizes a lot of stuff, that's part of what makes reading him such a good time, but if you happen to know a lot about medicine/finance/stats you find yourself going like "that's not exactly how that works bud" a lot. But not often enough to completely discount his ideas. There's a thicc fucking tome of his "proofs" somewhere on the internet which is also shakey but not shakey enough to ignore.
I actually think you'd be better able to critique his positions if you had a good handle on this stuff too.
He does a lot of talk about metis and episteme as well so maybe read some rationalist lit on that.

The memesters on this board have convinced me that Taleb is for brainlets, like Peterson is. Am I wrong in this assumption?

>>12719708
I've read The Black Swan. It's 500 pages to basically just say "random things happen, you can't predict nothing".
And it's made worse by his annoying writing style, full of stupid anecdotes and irrelevant stories about his arab homeland.

I'm not a fan of Sam Harris, but he captured the essence of Taleb perfectly in that rant.

>>12720069
Both are for brainlets, but Taleb is actually enjoyable to read and may present some new ideas to galaxybrains. Peterson offers nothing of value.

>>12720091
It's literally the opposite of that. Memerson is some basic self help psychology, but for those that are not familiar, it can be interesting.

I cannot for the life of me imagine how Taleb is "enjoyable to read". I wanted to punch his stupid face at every other line, for his dumb ass "humor" which is basically reddit mixed with some arab low IQ shit.

>>12720144
if peterson was good to you and you didn't like taleb I think you may have terminal plebism.
There is no cure.

>>12719708
He's a bootlicking mongrel.

wrt your question i dunno OP, but i called him a sociopath on twitter and he blocked me. that's about all i know of taleb

>>12719708
>>12720050
Went to the book store yesterday to buy marcus aurelius. It was out of stock or they never had it in stock i don’t know. I was about to leave but stumbled over antifragilty. I thought to give it a try.
Sounds like i made the right choice from what i read in your comment.

>>12719708
>read Taleb
>"No, you're not reading him PROPERLY."
>read Taleb again
>"WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? READ IT AGAIN! PROPERLY"
>mfw

>>12719708
Taleb is obnoxious, but his books are essentially:
>statistics + philosophy, illustrated by long winded anecdotes

With a particular focus on medicine, finance, and the inability of modern people to properly asses risk.

>>12720063
My career is in finance/statistics, and Taleb is a breath of fresh air. Particularly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution

It's important for any statistician to know their limits. Many fields seem to believe they can predict stuff, a lot better than they can actually predict it.

Can't speak for his views on medicine, although I suspect that he is inappropriately using figures about medical errors. A significant fraction of the deaths from medical errors, are a failure to diagnose and treat conditions. Obviously, when he cites "medical errors" as a cause of death, this does not recommend his approach - "don't go to the doctor unless you have physical pain".

>>12720069
Both are obviously accessible to brainlets. I mean, you can't sell large numbers of books without marketing to the average, uninformed Joe. If you want sophisticated stuff, you probably won't find it at Barnes and Noble.

>>12719708
from what i've gathered he's a smart guy but a pompous shit and his books are smart ideas wrapped in pompous shit.
Mark Blyth reads him so i just take the boiled down working class Mark Blyth takes on his work.

>>12720666
>accuse somebody of having no morality whatsoever
>gets blocked
jeez, I wonder why he did that

>>12719708
admittedly i only read half of antifragile but that was absolutely sufficient to come to the conclusion that this man as nothing to offer.
he's an okay statistician but a very shitty "philosopher".
his books mostly read like a self help book to himself where he wants to convince himself of being smarter than "the rest" and utterly fails.
one of his more poignant flaws is his inability to think antifragility on multiple levels. e.g. in finance he wants everyone to profit of fragility and people who design financial markets should consider fragility and so on but he doesnt even get that a financial market is not some metaphysical entity and that underneath it is something else like human interaction or whatever and that it can be positive to design fragile systems so you can iterate faster through them. our problem is not fragility. capitalism already is a very antifragile system. (buy when there is blood on the street)
he promotes a property of a system that his main object of inquiry (markets) already exhibit in abundance and sells it as a new discovery.
the real challenge is how to make the system fragile so we can break out of it but this doenst even emerge to this brainlet.

>>12720759
I think he is using "properly" as a less apparently pseudy way of saying "actually."

>>12721292
>waaaaaahhhh Taleb isn't a communist
neck yourself

>>12721325
properly you could be right there.

>>12722183
>>12720759
Sorry, uk vernacular mates.

>>12720050
>His central trust, is that the majority of life's phenomenon are NOT distributed on a bell curve,
retarded

>>12720050
>The idea is that linearity is a bastardization of Mendelbrot series and fractals that actually delineate or world.
As a math minor this strikes me as a major pseud flag, also I'm assuming you meant "Mandelbrot set" since you're speaking of fractals. So things aren't really linear in nature, we get that, that's why we call them linear models--what of it?

>>12719708
I don’t read anything written by Jews.

>>12720086
>>12723204
*Phoenican

>>12721338
this was only an example. what he fails to grasp is that every system is embedded in another system. this means when you design the lower system antifragile you never get to consider the upper system. antifragility is a conservative ideology in the truest sense of the word. this doesn't make in inherently bad it just shows that taleb didn't follow his own assumptions to the end. often times fragility of a system is desired so you can reassess your assumptions and build another system.

>>12719708
Not too deep, but fairly reasonable and intelligent. Worth a read even if for a somewhat unusual perspective on things.

>>12723533
One may call him a swindler, a profiteer, etc…

>>12720050
Black swan was unironically revolutionary as an explanation of exuberance in the highest levels of finance and the underlying risks that their unknown financial engineering drives took, within major firms.

>>12719708
He's the stupid person's idea of a smart person.
Throwing around statistical data and cheap wisdoms will do that.

>>12720022
Just read Feller books like every decent mathematician.
Then you can learn about 'applications' or rather misapplications with Taleb.

>>12719708
I tried reading Black Swan, but had to give up because his writing style is so infuriating. Seriously, his books could be about 80% shorter if you removed all the times he writes about how much more intelligent he is compared to everybody else, how stupid academics and economists are, and his bizarre LARPs as a New York mafioso called Fat Tony.

I made it all the way through Antifragile - the writing style is the same, but I found the idea much more interesting. Definitely helps you see things in a new way, and re-consider some of the ideas you may have taken for granted. However, given that he uses Twitter to vehemently criticise (and even bully) academics who overreach their field of expertise, particularly when it comes to statistics (which is his field of expertise), it's a bit ironic that he does the same for most of the book, applying his 'theory of everything' to areas where it may or may not exist.

In short, the guy has the mind of a genuine intellectual but the attitude of a teenage boy. You get the impression that he's so desperate to be a contrarian, so desperate to be the only smart guy in a room full of idiots, that if mainstream opinion fell in line with his beliefs then he'd change them completey and argue the opposite point of view. The virgins who worship him online love his abrasive style, but the rest of us find it infuriating. It's a shame, because I really like some of his ideas, and wish he'd take the platform to debate them seriously instead of deriding all of his opponents as shills and charlatans and refusing to talk to them.

>>12724175
you can almost see the estrogen leaking out of this post

>>12719708
If I asked and pursued him very seriously, do you think he would offer scholarship under him? I’m a 9/10 chad btw

>>12724183
Spotted the virgin who worships his abrasive style. Go back to trying to get him to notice you on Twitter

>>12724205
I don't even read Taleb, I can just tell you're the sort of guy who has never played a sport or lifted a weight and gets absolutely emasculated by women

>>12724214
>never played a sport
Captain of my football, cricket, and rugby teams at school. Also in the athletics and basketball teams. Played football and cricket in amateur adult teams too, although I've given those up now and mostly stick to long-distance running in my spare time.

>never lifted a weight
Regular gym user for more than a decade. Used to be big into Olympic lifting, but by the time I was 23 I thought it was a bit embarrassing to be one of these gym-rats who only cared about muscle and mirror image, so switched to a bodyweight functional fitness routine I've been doing ever since.

>emasculated by women
Ok you got me there.

>>12724184
it would be extremely painful

>>12719725
>anyone with a decent grasp of statistics
which is almost nobody, not even actual statisticians

I enjoyed his four books. I especially liked antifragile and I would definitely put that forward as the must read book. It changed my everyday thinking, especially as it relates to learning new stuff.

I followed his blog posts before skin in the game and the book didnt turn out to be a lot more than those collected posts.

If you dont like his writing style, you can probably get his ideas summarised. And I do like his style but I am wary. It feels good to think I am smarter than famous people simply by doing nothing or acting normally, which is what Talebs books imply.

>>12724175

I agree that his attempt to be the wise man among everyone is cringey. He is like a guy armed with a little bit of STEM who tries to take over a primitive and remote island of humanitards. But really the only thing that makes him superior to them isnt his big STEM gun, its his immunisation against bullshit. (To continue the metaphor, at this point he has ran out of bullets and is simply smacking leftist savages with his gun for fun; he has kind of ran out of stuff).

But, to give him some credit, he is very specific as to what he insults. The world really is filled with bullshit.

>>12719725
The problem is, they're not apparent to anyone with a decent grasp of statistics. In fact, having just a 'decent' grasp might make it even worse. I'm currently completing my PhD in Psychology, and as a discipline we never really get beyond an introductory level, except for maybe 5-10% of professors who take statistics seriously and take the time to learn it properly, even when they don't have to. That's a large reason why there's a replicability crisis in the social sciences. In my view, we'd be far better off if the two disciplines (psychology and statistics) worked separately but collaboratively to produce research papers, but the majority of psychologists are too arrogant to admit they only have a rudimentary understanding of statistics.

My gf__ read and enjoyed the Black Swan, I've never read him personally.

>>12723677
>often times fragility of a system is desired so you can reassess your assumptions and build another system.
shooting the messenger because he isn't an outright communist? neck yourself.

>>12724253
Whilst it's fair to say that lots of academics are quite cowardly and allow bullshit to pass, Taleb is by no means the only intellectual who is immune to bullshit. A good example is Jordan Peterson, who Taleb described as a charlatan yesterday without saying why. Peterson also doesn't stand up to bullshit, but will at least try to debate seriously with his opponents. Taleb, by contrast, bullies them and then blocks them.

It's a shame because Taleb and Peterson have quite similar ideas in many respects, and Peterson has always treated Taleb with respect. If Taleb has a serious problem, he should accept Peterson's invitation to debate instead of just firing off tweets. I suspect that Taleb is jealous that another contrarian has become even more popular than him.

>>12724286
''I can't do it''

I have read antifragile. It's unironically my favorite book ever.
Look into the Taleb fragility detection heuristic, it's unironically brilliant.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/heuristic.pdf

>>12724253
>armed with a little bit of STEM

He is a master statistician/probability expert.

>>12724175
You're a brainlet, fat tony is not taleb. Taleb is Nero Tulip

>>12725652
no you aren’t

>>12724286
It's because Peterson paddles junk science like IQ, which at best explains 25% of the variance in mental focused professions.

>>12725677
IQ is the most valid result in social science period

>>12725702
>social science
into the dustbin it travels.

>>12724175
>bizarre LARPs as a New York mafioso called Fat Tony.

The Fat Tony taking on Socrates in Antifragile was a bit too much desu senpai, like what kind of an ego can a man have.

>>12725712
>science doesn’t count when it hurts my feelings

>>12725725
Fat tony isn't taleb you retard, it's one of his irl friends who died because he was too fat

>>12725750
not so antifragile now fat tony

>>12725750
his arteries were not antifragile

>>12724255
trust me dude anyone reading a psychology journal can tell you guys don't learn anything about stats lmao, you definitely don't need to clarify your lack of stats skills.

>>12725750
picking up twinkies in front of a steamroller lmao

>>12725240
I'm still trying to make up my mind whether Taleb is legitimate or not, following him on Twitter he seems like the greatest pseud ever but with some statistics--but this paper is actually pretty good, the basic premise is quite sound and easy both to remember and apply. I enjoyed it. Is Antifragile like this?

>>12719715
pedophrasty you retard

>>12723102
found the psycholophaster

>>12719708

I had a run in with him on Twitter, caught him stealing ideas.

My gf always thought he was a shyster. It's in the way he talks - got a cushy teaching job and conned his way into money. She says he talks like a bigshot know it all but can't really deliver.

I felt that too but figured the math held up. But, no, after I caught him being a cheating scammer I'm done too.

The concepts of antifragility and black swans are not new, but he's making bank by presenting himself as some kind of creative developer of new insights

The aphorisms book is pretty bad

>>12727516
Can you elaborate--I'm >>12727229 and still trying to get a read on this guy. Can you share the Twitter convo? What ideas was he stealing and from where?

>>12724268
nice

>>12727527

I had a sock account for trolling and getting my ideas out. Not huge, under 5k followers. Taleb and I had a few back and forths - this was after I had my suspicions on him. And when me tweets were clever, which they sometimes were, he'd take them immediately after I tweeted and reword them.

He made some poast once about how northern Europe had no culture and everything essential during a period of so many centuries came from the Mediterranean. I replied to this obvious falsehood, a product of his bigotry and snobbishness, and he couldn't refute it.

A few of the tweets he copied are now part of his standard 'aphorisms.'

This was the last one:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1090377257066074112

That day I'd been blocked by several dingdongs who I triggered, I posted a screenshot with the text "If assholes aren't blocking you for being 'arrogant', you are doing something wrong."

So then a few minutes later someone replied to my takedown of his anti northern Europe tweet, and I replied with even more evidence and said something like "notice Taleb doesn't reply - he can't admit he's wrong."

Instead of replying, he must've looked at my profile, copied the tweet, and since I had so few followers figured he could get away with it.

I really don't care if some or all of his math is good, I just think he's a shyster and dishonest and steals without credit. For him to do this so casually on a small thing that becomes one of his 'aphorisms' means he probably does it on the big stuff, too. He sucks.

>>12727577
Thanks for getting me the whole story. Guy's definitely a prick.

Taleb is absolutely based. It's so refreshing to see a public intellectual who

1. calls out fake experts and intellectual idiots on a daily basis
2. is well versed in a lot of academic fields including humanities
3. is well versed in philosophy and applies philosophy to his daily life
4. is not a scienticist and understands the importance of religion
5. does ground breaking research in his own field, while still maintaning his public intellectual status. (Compare this with hacks like Dawkins, a brilliant biologist who became famous with bashing religion)
6. doesn't write cheap bestseller books pretending to solve hard philosophical problems with some language tricks and neuroscience (like that hack Sam Harris)

The public intellectual we need.

>>12727851
>1. calls out fake experts and intellectual idiots on a daily basis
wrong
>2. is well versed in a lot of academic fields including humanities
wrong
>3. is well versed in philosophy and applies philosophy to his daily life
retarded
>5. does ground breaking research in his own field
wrong
>6. doesn't write cheap bestseller books
wrong

>>12727870
fragilista detected

>>12728989
that's just an anglo being mad at a med for being a med, could have been clearer if we didn't have to beat around the bush and he was able just to unapologetically insult all meds

>>12723149
>As a math minor

>>12721292
>it can be positive to design fragile systems so you can iterate faster through them
ah, a new theory of the consistent failure of communism: they were merely pretending to be retarded

Where are all the credible intellectuals? I'm far to stupid to become one, but I've got a nose for bullshit and I smell it a mile away off this current crop.

>>12728989
>trust fund kid on self made flaneur
>surprise, its verbose and envious

>>12724227
Either insecure or boomer, probably both

>>12727577
Thanks for the fucking essay on how you think someone stole an unoriginal remark you made on twitter

>>12720069
Taleb respects concept of skin in the game above everything so admits peterson had some good stuff before he got famous and risked his whole career while eviscerating sjws, but approx a year ago according to Taleb, peterson started behaving really shady, getting in bed with monsanto and becoming their minion. also as a no nonsense probabilist and statistician, Taleb regards IQ tests as pseudery and charlatanry, so al in all - pic related is current state

>>12729217
>according to Taleb, peterson started behaving really shady, getting in bed with monsanto and becoming their minion.

Is there a sauce for that?

>>12728989
I used to hate taleb. But I will be reconsidering him from now on. God i hate this fraud so much.

>>12729230
http://archive.is/CENKK

>>12729230
Sorry. https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/why-is-monsanto-inviting-alt-right-hero-jordan-peterson-to-a-fireside-chat-on-farming.html

He also went to the Trilateral Commission.

>>12724184
you want to get get into his and Robert Frey's RWRI training?

>>12729236
The Moral Landscape is pure fraud, I agree.

>>12729157
>(((anglo)))

>>12729236
As bad as Sam is, he's not wrong there.

>>12729249
Yeah he is just doing a moneygrab now.

>>12729316
>"I worked on the UN Secretary-General's High Panel for Sustainability Report that was delivered, I believe, in 2013, and rewrote the underlying narrative to strip out most of the ideological claptrap."
he was always a shill

>>12729230
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1103964085945802753?s=19 also Taleb and joe norman (@normonics, with whom he does research on complex systems) have strong suspicion that Peterson also doesn't run his own twitter, but tries very hard to make it look that he does.
pic related peterson's use of pedophrasty to shill monsanto. Taleb especially did lot of work to uncover this 'golden rice' scam and suggested simple, uncomparably cheaper and safer solutions fortthe problem

>>12729352
Peterstein is a hack, he makes way too much money.

Really right when he is right (skin in the game) really wrong when he is wrong (IQ)

>>12729529
t. humanitard too deeply attached to his scientistic rent-providing construct

>>12729529
How is he wrong about IQ?
His claims are valid. The math checks out, are you sure you actually read the whole thing?

>>12729552
>implying /lit/ can understand math

>>12729583
He overstates his case for sure, but his criticisms are valid.

is it true he considers Incerto finished and will not write another nontechnical book?

>>12728989
>Harris
lol, I've never seen projection this hard.
https://samharris.org/the-marionettes-lament/
https://samharris.org/the-limits-of-discourse/
https://samharris.org/speaking-of-truth-with-jordan-b-peterson/
Sam Harris is a giant fucking baby and a brainlet who paid for his PhD by using his own nonprofit.

>>12723149
This. The man is a hack.

>>12729629
no they aren’t brainlet

>>12728971
wrong

>>12719708
Based stroke poster

He supports the idea that lebanese arabic is not actual arabic but another semitic dialect heavily influenced by arabic (and turkish, french etc)
What do you think of it? I don't know either language to understand the differences. Most linguists do not agree with that hypotheses.

>>12729854
>lebanese arabic is not actual arabic but another semitic dialect heavily influenced by arabic
What the fuck? Arabic is by definition a semitic dialect.

>>12729743
That doesn't make him wrong about Taleb.

>>12729973
but he is very wrong about Taleb, anon

>>12729837
>shwayy
So Lebanon was a cyberpunk dystopia all this time?

Is it better to learn Latin or Classical Greek?

>>12730060
always pick romans above greeks

>>12729929
What does that have to do with anything?

stop spamming this shit

>>12730079
God shut up, moron.

>>12730025
No, U.

>>12730119
no wonder Cato the Elder sent you greek philosophers packing from city of Rome

Romans - prefer practice above theory
Greeks - prefer what works in theory before what works in practice
intellectuals are greeks, firefighters are all trve Romans

>>12720050
I like his qualitative assessment of things and his commentary is often funny, but his ideas regarding mathematical modelling are pretty lame, and really anyone who has done anything past basic probabilty theory/graph theory/information theory can see that he's basically full of crap when it comes to math beyond financial risk modelling (which really relies more on a qualitative understanding of human behavior than any strict mathematical models).

His idea that linearity isn't uniform isn't a revolutionary concept, which is why we use "linear models" (keyword models, ie imperfect representations of reality that will have a predictive correlation strictly bounded between (-1,1)). His conception of variance is silly, and basically requires a redefinition of the axiomatic definition of probability in order to make it functional, and he doesn't even get close to demonstrating that as necessary.

>>12729211

You're such a lame Taleb fanboy

>>12729211

Wait, so the Great Taleb makes unoriginal remarks on Twitter??? Then why should we read him at all

>>12730214
>firefighters

>>12723102
He's right though. Only people who haven't gone past probability theory 101 or probabilists who haven't tried to actually predict a real phenomenon in a long time believe otherwise.

t. statistician

>>12723149
The point is that a huge proportion of the outcomes you care about depend on actually a minority of extreme events, and that among those extreme events the majority of the outcomes yet again overwhelmingly depends on a small minority of the most extreme of extreme events, and so on. It's less a precise model than a heuristic of what to expect in financial market: maybe 95% of your gains and losses will happen in one day out of 50, and, and 95% of those (so 90% of the total gains and losses) will happen in one day out of 8 years.

>So things aren't really linear in nature, we get that, that's why we call them linear models--what of it?

You'd be surprised how many economists, biologists and physician don't understand that those models are a very partial representation of nature. Als using linear models when you're studying phenomena with extreme non-linearities can be catastrophcally misleading.

>>12724239
The more I study statistics the more I feel we're just monkeys with little ideas of what we're doing.
And I work with tenured statisticians.

>>12725702
>the most valid result in a science that can't replicate its own results and still belive correlations are the most adanced statistical tool in existence

Why should we even care ?

>>12729277
anglos are the jew-est of europeans, except maybe Venetians

>>12729529
>>12729544
>>12729552
>>12729629
Taleb's whole point about IQ is that IQ is a good measurement for retards, but not for smart people. So even if he's right it still seems to play into the alt-right playbook

>>12729973
his whole argument against taleb is that taleb is not anglo-polite. there are no actual criticism about taleb except for his lack of anglo-manners

>>12719708
Honestly, he's on the same level as Stefan Molyneux. They're both midbrow pseuds and they both have stupid fanboys who keep their ego inflated.

>>12730560
that's the best mindset to do actual statistics

>>12725702
that just means that social science is a meme-field, not that IQ is a good measure

but yeah, many social scientists will be super-critical and rigorous when it comes to IQ, but then be very lax for their own pet progressive theories that have much lower statistical predictive power

>>12730771
except Molyneux is just a theater kid playing a philosopher on youtube, and Taleb has actual experience in finance and can do actual math

>>12730761
And so the Arab SEETHES

>Psycholophasters

>>12730525
retard
>t. statistician
a shitty one apparently

>>12730596
>MUH replication crisis
how to spot a pseud 101

>>12730958
Whatever. Go find me a serious statistician who actually worked on industrial or environmental problems these past 30 years and who unironically thinks everything in nature is fundamentally gaussian.

>>12730965
Nice empty retort. The whole field is a disgrace and you know it. The problem with replication is only the first step of the sociological travesty ladder. Funny you didn't even reply to the part of my post who raises doubt about the statistical literacy among sociologists.

If sociologists had the intellectual honesty of historians and stopped LARPing as biologist they could actually produce insight as they have done in the past. But 10k papers of lousy stats a year don't make a science.

>>12730783
didnt molyneux do startup shit? dont take sides between ecelebs, rise to the 10000 foot view

>>12730757
Not really, he demonstrated that race had nothing to do with intelligence.

>>12731032
yeah, he tried to start up a cult

>>12730943
is this supposed to represent how psychologists are as retarded as fish?

>>12731139
where did he do that? his whole IQ medium article is about how IQ is a good measure of stupidity, but a bad measure of intelligence
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

>>12730757
>So even if he's right it still seems to play into the alt-right playbook
weird endorsement of the alt-right, to say the truth would fall in their playbook

I tried reading Black Swan out of curiosity but couldn't stand his writing style. Since he published pic related without noticing the obvious range restriction in the IQ test (no scores above 130) I've thought him a blow hard on subjects outside his expertise.

>>12731188
This is how IQ and SAT score actually correlate, which completely blows out his stupid theory that IQ only works for dullards.

>>12731184
no he says its not a measure at all. identifying retards is not the same ting as measuring intelligence. a five minutr conversation would do the job just as well. IQ is used by psychologists to sell their field to industry and by racists to justify hating niggers. this is me reiterating things he's tweeted

>>12730979
>everything in nature is fundamentally gaussian.
not what i said brainlet

>>12731186
i don't care about IQ, but Taleb's article about it says that it's a good measurement for stupidity
>the truth
i would hesitate to call anything in social sciences "the truth"

>>12730997
>The whole field is a disgrace and you know it.
nice empty retort
historians have never produced insight and i didn't respond to the rest of your post because "durr me no like correlation" is not worth a response

>>12731196
even if it's not a measure to identify intelligence you agree that it's a good measure to identify retards

>>12731202
well you said if he was right it would bolster the alt right position, right means in alignmnent with truth. i dont know why im explaining this really. readers will see it

>>12731208
>insight
what does that even mean beyond being a meme-word for "something cool"?

>>12731188
honestly just imagine how low taleb's IQ would have to be to make a figure like this and think he was proving something
>guys look there's noise in this data did i just blow your minds?

>>12731208
>historians have never produced insight
What?

>>12731209
i generally think intelligence and retardation are not collapsible to measurement. how many units smarter is joe than bob? the question itself is senseless

>>12731221
"larping as biologists" (by which i assume you mean "using numbers") is what gives sociology a chance at being an actual science instead of just fun fun story time for grownups

>>12731213
unless you are baiting, right as in right-wing, not right as in correct

>>12731231
>fun fun story time for grownups
what is the ecole of annales

>>12731216
if you measure someones height, does the noise increase as the subjects get taller? no. because height is a real measurement.

>>12731224
even if you think intelligence is not in a scale, being a retard is a quality that you can still detect. i can agree with that position

>>12731239
please, i beg of you, take one science class instead of studying at the feet of twitter gurus

>>12731232
"even if he's right" is not a reference to political orientation in that sentence. how is this a literature board.

>>12731251
so your counter argument is that you received a contrary opinion in a classroom. unpersuasive to me, anon

>>12731259
>so your counter argument is that you received a contrary opinion in a classroom
not at all.

>>12729694
bump

>>12731273
well i guess you shouldnt have posted as much then

>>12731284
he claimed so, but he said as much after antifragile too, then we got SITG

>>12731252
ok, let me break it like this
1 - Taleb seems invested into arguing that IQ is a bad measurement against the position of some alt-righters like Molyneux
2 - His argument is that IQ=bad measure of intelligence, but IQ=good measure of retardation
3 - Even if 2) is correct, this 2) proposition can still be used to support the alt-right's position, so arguments in 2) don't support his goals in 1)

i'm merely trying to say that his argument doesn't seem to align with his goal, i'm not trying to endorse the alt-right and i have no idea where the truth actually is

>>12731298
perhaps you'd benefit from an english class too.

The Taleb people are the same people who make Memerson and Ben Stiller shitposts/hate threads. We need a containment thread for all you cunts. Fucking braindead pseuds shitting up /lit/. Stick to fanboy and hateboy subreddits.

>>12731224
Units are arbitrary, like temperature. Before the discovery of absolute zero the scale was just arbitrarily centered (less retardedly with celcius than fahrenheit, but never mind). Early methods of measuring temperature were messy and each instrument had inherent error. No one knew what 'temperature' was, but it was obvious that there was hot and cold (just like it's obvious there is smart and dumb). All this didn't stop early thermometers from being absolutely vital to scientific discovery.
We won't ever discover an absolute zero of 'intelligence', but we might devise methods of measurement (e.g. MRI scans, genetic tests) that don't involve giving a test which requires effort/enthusiasm. This will be incredibly useful.
>>12731308
He's not right, IQ continues to predict success beyond +2sd. This is such a stupid argument. If he wanted to knock peoples IQ obsession he should have focused on how IQ is only moderately correlated with income and therefore other factors are just as important.

>>12729249
>peterson
>alt-right hero
it's shocking to realise how little journalists know about what they're writing about

>>12731406
>We won't ever discover an absolute zero of 'intelligence'
what about a rock?

>>12731481
what about YOU
b t f o
t
f
o

>>12731406
kek, all the authors have meme names

>>12719708
I have read Antifragile thrice, Skin the Game twice, the Bed of Procrustes once and the first few pages of Black Swan. I have also paid attention to Taleb on twitter, have thoroughly meandered through his 'Philosophical Notebook' found on his website, and studied his physiognomy and presence in interviews and lectures found on Youtube.

My impression is that he is through and through a skeptic and a realist, and perhaps a bit of a prejudicial empiricist. The deepest he goes is in mathematics, the metaphysics of which, to my knowledge, he has never discussed, although he is concerned with the epistemological side, since he focuses on the relationship between science (which has an a priori ground) and the phenomenal world. In other words, he does not seem to be much concerned with why mathematics can make predictions, but he has an intuition for its scope and applicability. In my opinion he is very much a worldly man, interested in always having the edge in life (not a bad thing), which he would phrase as 'not being a sucker', but not a metaphysician or particularly religious, even seeming to be somewhat of a reductionist in religious, mystical, and moral matters. As such he is a tremendous therapeutic against speculation, bloviation, armchair philosophizing and so forth, but not a systematic philosopher, either in ethics, logic, or physics.

>>12731484
nice try, but should have written (You), low IQ memer

>>12731199
You didn't actually say anything except "retard" and variations thereof.

>>12731208
Again you manage to produce a meme response without adressing my point.

>"durr me no like correlation" is not worth a response

Then why not answer this

>doubt about the statistical literacy among sociologists

because that was clearly the more general form of my remark.

Obviously IQ doesn't actually measure intelligence and there are no units of intelligence to measure to being with (or at least we haven't devised any yet). What it DOES do is determine how good you are at solving IQ tests. You might ask "so what? why is that useful?", well, it's useful because how well you do on an IQ test continues to be the single most effective general predictor for an array of criteria that we attribute to intelligence. This includes things like lifetime earnings, number and tier of degrees earned, invention, musical ability, mathematical ability, reading/writing level, criminality etc. etc. When applied to a national level this translates to stuff like research output, scientific achievement, artistic output and quality, per capita earnings, ratio of primary:secondary:tertiary sector industry and so on.

When you get large numbers of people doing IQ tests you see Gaussian distributions occur and these can be shown for any given group you can think of e.g. race, gender, religions, political leanings and income levels.

IQ is the best all around predictor of general achievement and prosperity on an individual and national level. If something comes along that can predict better than IQ then people will use it. To say it's meaningless is to deny reality. I wouldn't say that people do this inherently out of political bias, but anecdotally I have to say that the progressive left and the cuck right are more likely than the old left and alt-right to say IQ is meaningless. What people choose to do with the information is up to them, but IQ is a real and useful thing unless someone can come along and show otherwise.

>>12731231
>"larping as biologists" (by which i assume you mean "using numbers")

I mean pretending that meaningless quantitative measures actually bring anything of substance to scientific discourse. Physicists and mathematicians also use numbers, but in most contexts they either have a pretty good idea of what they stand for or are relatively honest about their lack of understanding of what the numbers mean and try to work out such an understanding.

Meanwhile the community of sociologist mostly try to reassure itself with numbers whose production they don't understand even at a basic level.

>sociology a chance at being an actual science

That would only be true if there was a critical and informed discourse about the relevance of the numbers used. I see no evidence of such a thing, at least not nearly in the scale and prevalence that would be necessary.

>>12731481
In case you're serious, there's no continuum between a rock and a human, and I can't think of a situation where we'll go "Eureka, we have discovered the absolute stupidest person on the planet with perfect certainty," and then we'd still need an upper point in order to create the scale.
Using standard deviations from the average is a perfectly adequate way of measuring something.

>>12731488
Very fair assessment and probably best post itt.

>>12730783
Taleb can do the actual math of proclaiming that "expectation values bad" because he assumes all distributions need to be linear/normal in nature for expectation as a linear operation to work. His math is probably the part of his work where he is the least correct. He is correct mostly on his talking points about statistics being largely a bluffing game, but he's absolutely wrong about why (and I'll give you a hint, it's not something profoundly wrong with the way the math works, it's more to do with the lack of human ability to really directly grapple with stochastic processes in a qualitative sense even if we can manipulate them quantitatively).

>>12731553
So he's saying that intelligence correlates over subjects, except when it doesn"t, in which case he calls that a pathology. Nice.

>>12731580
From what I've read of him it's not so much expectation not being linear than expectation being misleading in prediction in the case of heavy-tailed distributions.

>>12724227
post routine

People who are good at taking tests are people who are good at taking tests
Using DnD terms, there is INT and then there is WIS

>>12731597
A "fat-tailed" distribution as he calls them are not a problem at all, you just need to create a probability distribution function which maps to that shape and your expectation value and variance will be based around that concept. This could be done many ways (probably the easiest of which would be a Fourier transform to map your desired discrete inputs to a continuous output distribution) and often this "fat-tails" concept is very easily accounted for and logarithmic transforms to force normality are very often done in signal processing to incredible degrees of success.

If he were honest enough to admit it's a human nature problem and not a math issue he'd be golden, but he's too busy trying to be controversial and barking up the wrong tree. On top of that he's making patently false assertions about applications to biology based on this mathematical misconception he peddles and it's really more embarrassing than anything, especially his nonsense blog post about IQ as if trying to prove that IQ is an expectation of a non perfectly normal Stochastic process rather than a precise measure is anything newsworthy to evolutionary psychology or cognitive/behavioral genetics. His central idea surrounding that article seemed to be more or less "IQ is an imperfect estimation of generalized intelligence and is unnecessary because if there is enough of a generalized intelligence gap then people will self eliminate from various aspects of life", which is a neat idea except for the fact that running a nation around the idea that we'll run the experiment and tally the totals after it's over is a fucking disastrously stupid plan, especially when measures which can significantly reduce our error in predicting future outcomes are available.

>>12731522
>Meanwhile the community of sociologist mostly try to reassure itself with numbers whose production they don't understand even at a basic level.
this is just wrong. sociologists know what an IQ score means. maybe public “””intellectual””” ideologues don’t but that’s irrelevant. You also don’t need know what “produces” an IQ value to use that value for its predictive capacity.

For me he really put a finger on why all of the predictions suck and I actually stopped consuming most of the news after reading black swan. His arguments on having skin in the game and having manageable risks in your life also feel very true and empowering. As a brainlet can't say anything about his mathematics but didn't agree on his view of doing cardio in a gym. I mean i get that it seems silly to go to the gym to run there but running outside can be somewhat more dangerous, less stable as far as weather is concerned and people may just feel awkward receiving this kind of attention. And yet he was adamant on how moronic it was. I don't cling to this gripe, it just showed me that he is perhaps more opinionated than necessary to look for the truth.

>>12731780
>maybe public “””intellectual””” ideologues don’t but that’s irrelevant
irrelevant except for the fact«public “””intellectual””” ideologues» are the ones that push policy and support real social engineering programs, and other academics eating their own cocks and making predictions in their own departments are actually irrelevant

>>12727577
Oh yes I'm sure you were on twitter before he published bed of procrustes Mr wise guy

>>12730425
Name someone who doesn't

Love how people get angry and call taleb arrogant when they don't get him

>>12731488
Excellent post.

>>12719708
I love Louis C.K.