None of them are even relevant to arguments about the merits of
capitalism or socialism. Some of these are fucking baby school math
shit, it’s not even nerd shit, it’s just patronizing autofellatio.
Jevon’s is that thing where if something gets more efficient in its
use, demand can rise so much that it obliterates the final savings you’d
expect from efficiency. Like you make a new paper that uses less tree,
but you end up selling so much of it you increase the rate trees get
chopped down. That’s a green issue, not a red or yellow issue.
Hanlon’s razor is a razor, not something fundamentally true. Assume
your opponent is acting in good faith and just stupid, not malicious,
especially when writing to academic journals. Occam’s razor is a similar
device; don’t assume unneeded complexity. Unfortunately, evil people
with the knowledge and power to do differently exist and troll the fuck
out of people who act in good faith unconditionally, in the same way
string theory and supersymmetry probably don’t explain actual physics.
Alex doesn’t understand the word heuristic.
Ergodicity is a mathematical description of how well shit gets mixed
over time in a calculus context. So you can, say, relate a gas
particle’s individual energy to the temperature of the gas as a whole.
Shit gets mixed up in economies related to their activity levels;
therefore, they’re moral, just like a room full of hydrogen and
oxygen.
Path dependence is decisions have consequences that can affect things
way down the line even after the original context is gone. He’s sneering
that somethings “are”, therefore they “ought”.
Power Law Distribution is if the way things are spread out follow
patterns that look like some number to some power, usually e^x. You
probably took highschool math and didn’t need that explained.
Expected value is an average number in statistics. You expect a coin
tossed 100 times to land heads 50 times, not that it necessarily will.
You probably took highschool math and didn’t need that explained.
The green lumber fallacy and antifragility are related. Basically
*some* things thrive in chaos, therefore, capitalism is better than
pansy-ass protectionist socialism. Basic fucking death cult logic,
misunderstanding that just because some risk-taking is good, doesn’t
mean all of it is. I mean the lack of risk taking in capitalism is a
pretty dominant feature of the system at times; everyone wants to play
fucking follow the leader with chasing trends and shoving whatever
garbage down everyone’s faces until the consumers get tired and the
corporations start cynically milking the blood and piss out of whatever
the consumers happened to take refuge in, starting the cycle anew.
Fucking hell, they don’t take the necessary risks investing in actual
research because if the study is unfavorable or useless it’s a risk to
their shareholders if they don’t have a system like in the US where they
can just fuck off and charge more than life’s worth for their monopoly.
Like you need a goddamn safety net or people won’t take risks. You can
be anti-protectionism and pro-fair trade style free trade and still be a
socialist goddamn
Red queen hypothesis is from evolutionary biology. Things need to
constantly change, adapt, and evolve in order to not go extinct. Somehow
this means we must keep defending a 400 year old economic system that
immediately crashed the dutch economy, lead to colonialism and new world
slavery, collapsed on itself several times, ruined the environment, and
keeps putting bandaids on every problem it sees if it threaten’s next
quarter’s profits. Again, more is-ought death cultist logic.
Survivorship bias - he’s basically saying the few examples of
socialist successes aren’t enough to discredit the failures. And like,
it’s astonishingly easy to just turn this the fuck around.
Pareto Optimality - some decisions have trade offs, and there’s a
balance between them sometimes. No shit. So why is letting the world
continue where the few get to make incredibly unoptimal choices and just
sweep their negative trade offs to the masses a good one?
Bikeshedding - Organizations governed by council give
disproportionate weight to trivial issues. I think he thinks this
discredits socialism because in command economies councils make bad
decisions. But it’s absolutely stupid when you remember that usually
companies are governed by boards of directors who in turn are beholden
to a writhing mass of faceless, fickle, selfish shareholders acting on
pure animalistic instinct.
transitivity - I don’t know what he’s getting at. Either he thinks
you don’t know that
A>B
B > C
∴A>C
is true or he thinks how many nouns a verb needs to sound grammatical
matters.
false positives is him reaching
Tail risk is if you’re pricing your stocks too cheaply than most,
something might change in the market and you can end up ruining the
whole thing by selling everything for a loss relative to what you would
have gained, etc.
Bikeshedding made me lol, it is a managenent concept, I learned about it in business context because it happens a lot in business meetings.
It is just a general cognitive failure, even artists have this when they work on commissions.
This guy should work in consulting. (Not a compliment obv). If Taleb saw this he prob would start shouting IYI at him (this kind of 'no skin in the game' buzzword frontloaded intellectual is just what Taleb seems to dislike, he prob also dislikes communism, so it would be a toss if he goes all crazy).
Good post Tovarisch
> Bikeshedding - ... I think he thinks this discredits socialism because in command economies councils make bad decisions.
I think it's in there because it's the one management concept software engineers have heard of.
Hey don't mean to be too much of a nerd, but my understanding is that a power law distribution has a tail that is not exponentially decaying. That is the tail of the distribution is proportional to x^(a), for some parameter a, rather than proportional to exp(-ax). What this means is that samples from such a distribution display a lot of variance as extreme values are more likely than from a distribution with an exponentially decaying tail (in fact it's possible for a power law distribution to have finite expectation but infinite variance). One of the canonical examples is the Pareto distribution. Ironically, a socialist (or anyone who is critical of capitalism) might want to talk about power law distributions as the distribution of wealth tends to follow some power law distribution or another such heavy tailed distribution.
Otherwise thanks for clearing up all the other things in your post! There were definitely some odd terms I hadn't heard before.
On a non gov scale, turns out coops (socialism for businesses) do better on longevity and worker happyness and pay than non coop businesses. So there is also that.
Challenge him to prove that anyone of those things means socialism
can’t work. I bet he can’t do it. He will just strawman socialism.
Socialism is just reconfiguring a system of tubes to distribute the
water more fairly throughout the whole system. That mostly means
removing clogs (diversions) and damns. That is removing rent seeking.
It’s not about ignoring the realities of the way water flows. I suppose
some ignore the way water flows…but they are just morons.
Economists don’t need to worry about losing their jobs because if
socialism….lol.
This reminded me of the time when rationalists went ‘the left never
thinks of rentseeking behaviour, checkmate’ which just shows they dont
talk to any serious left politicians.
it's something from one of Taleb's books. seriously about 1/2 of these things on this list originate from or are discussed at length in The Black Swan and Antifragile which leads me to believe the OP read like 4 books and now considers himself a free thinking sage of hidden wisdom.
Taleb is truly the greatest buzzword-smith of our times and I guess I can see why he's popular. We would probably have dealt with climate change by now if people actually worked on it all the time they spent talking about how distressingly worrying black swan events are, or how we need to make this or that or even things in general (more) antifragile.
Oh jeez, oh wow, he borrowed a phrase from probability to make a
point he didn’t care to elaborate! Surely he must have a truly marvelous
proof for his assertion, which his twitter was too narrow to
contain!
None of them are even relevant to arguments about the merits of capitalism or socialism. Some of these are fucking baby school math shit, it’s not even nerd shit, it’s just patronizing autofellatio.
Jevon’s is that thing where if something gets more efficient in its use, demand can rise so much that it obliterates the final savings you’d expect from efficiency. Like you make a new paper that uses less tree, but you end up selling so much of it you increase the rate trees get chopped down. That’s a green issue, not a red or yellow issue.
Hanlon’s razor is a razor, not something fundamentally true. Assume your opponent is acting in good faith and just stupid, not malicious, especially when writing to academic journals. Occam’s razor is a similar device; don’t assume unneeded complexity. Unfortunately, evil people with the knowledge and power to do differently exist and troll the fuck out of people who act in good faith unconditionally, in the same way string theory and supersymmetry probably don’t explain actual physics. Alex doesn’t understand the word heuristic.
Ergodicity is a mathematical description of how well shit gets mixed over time in a calculus context. So you can, say, relate a gas particle’s individual energy to the temperature of the gas as a whole. Shit gets mixed up in economies related to their activity levels; therefore, they’re moral, just like a room full of hydrogen and oxygen.
Path dependence is decisions have consequences that can affect things way down the line even after the original context is gone. He’s sneering that somethings “are”, therefore they “ought”.
Power Law Distribution is if the way things are spread out follow patterns that look like some number to some power, usually e^x. You probably took highschool math and didn’t need that explained.
Expected value is an average number in statistics. You expect a coin tossed 100 times to land heads 50 times, not that it necessarily will. You probably took highschool math and didn’t need that explained.
The green lumber fallacy and antifragility are related. Basically *some* things thrive in chaos, therefore, capitalism is better than pansy-ass protectionist socialism. Basic fucking death cult logic, misunderstanding that just because some risk-taking is good, doesn’t mean all of it is. I mean the lack of risk taking in capitalism is a pretty dominant feature of the system at times; everyone wants to play fucking follow the leader with chasing trends and shoving whatever garbage down everyone’s faces until the consumers get tired and the corporations start cynically milking the blood and piss out of whatever the consumers happened to take refuge in, starting the cycle anew. Fucking hell, they don’t take the necessary risks investing in actual research because if the study is unfavorable or useless it’s a risk to their shareholders if they don’t have a system like in the US where they can just fuck off and charge more than life’s worth for their monopoly. Like you need a goddamn safety net or people won’t take risks. You can be anti-protectionism and pro-fair trade style free trade and still be a socialist goddamn
Red queen hypothesis is from evolutionary biology. Things need to constantly change, adapt, and evolve in order to not go extinct. Somehow this means we must keep defending a 400 year old economic system that immediately crashed the dutch economy, lead to colonialism and new world slavery, collapsed on itself several times, ruined the environment, and keeps putting bandaids on every problem it sees if it threaten’s next quarter’s profits. Again, more is-ought death cultist logic.
Survivorship bias - he’s basically saying the few examples of socialist successes aren’t enough to discredit the failures. And like, it’s astonishingly easy to just turn this the fuck around.
Pareto Optimality - some decisions have trade offs, and there’s a balance between them sometimes. No shit. So why is letting the world continue where the few get to make incredibly unoptimal choices and just sweep their negative trade offs to the masses a good one?
Bikeshedding - Organizations governed by council give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. I think he thinks this discredits socialism because in command economies councils make bad decisions. But it’s absolutely stupid when you remember that usually companies are governed by boards of directors who in turn are beholden to a writhing mass of faceless, fickle, selfish shareholders acting on pure animalistic instinct.
transitivity - I don’t know what he’s getting at. Either he thinks you don’t know that
A>B
B > C
∴A>C
is true or he thinks how many nouns a verb needs to sound grammatical matters.
false positives is him reaching
Tail risk is if you’re pricing your stocks too cheaply than most, something might change in the market and you can end up ruining the whole thing by selling everything for a loss relative to what you would have gained, etc.
He doesn’t think you know what feedback loops are
or metacognition as if that’s relevant at all
Why yes I’m sure learning all that nerd shit would change my mind instantly.
Survivorship Bias something something kinds of governments to not get overthrown by CIA
I give up.
Please hypercompete me to homelessness.
::looking at the capitalist world economy:: Uhm, murphy’s law much? Checkmate.
Challenge him to prove that anyone of those things means socialism can’t work. I bet he can’t do it. He will just strawman socialism. Socialism is just reconfiguring a system of tubes to distribute the water more fairly throughout the whole system. That mostly means removing clogs (diversions) and damns. That is removing rent seeking. It’s not about ignoring the realities of the way water flows. I suppose some ignore the way water flows…but they are just morons.
Economists don’t need to worry about losing their jobs because if socialism….lol.
This reminded me of the time when rationalists went ‘the left never thinks of rentseeking behaviour, checkmate’ which just shows they dont talk to any serious left politicians.
Is Green Lumber fallacy like Red Herring fallacy but for inland races?
He didn’t even bring up Schelling points, entry level rationalist libertarian shittiness.
Isn’t this just a delightful little self-own?
“You socialists thought we orthodox economists were the hirelings and running dogs of the rentier class, but ackshually we are just very bad at math.”
(Yes, I see that he’s some kind of cryptocurrency grifter, not an economist, but you get where I’m going with this.)
Oh jeez, oh wow, he borrowed a phrase from probability to make a point he didn’t care to elaborate! Surely he must have a truly marvelous proof for his assertion, which his twitter was too narrow to contain!
If only the socialists too would follow NN Taleb on Twitter
I’ve heard of a Gish Gallop. How’s that?
Wonder if this person has heard of the sunk cost fallacy yet
Concepts that today’s Debate Lords have never heard of before: a swirlie