posted on October 23, 2020 04:33 PM by
u/BrazilianDoto
134
u/CarryOn15121 pointsat 1603471662.000000
It’s nice to see Taleb, one of the motte’s favored pop intellectuals,
shit all over their favorite subject with a stunning level of
pretentiousness that only he can express.
Delicious sneer, so filling I skipped breakfast.
*edit*: I mean, the first paragraph alone is dessert for breakfast, pharmaceutical grade self-saucing chocolate pudding.
Was that the IYI thing? I always thought it was funny that a guy who prides himself on his erudition came up with such a clumsy phrase to diss people with.
It’s really edifying to read a Taleb treatment of a subject I’m
(somewhat) familiar with. I get the same sense from this article as the
other prose of his I’ve read: he deliberately constructs ideas in a way
that obscures his meaning. He has a habit of coinage that is largely
unnecessary because his pet concepts are not very different from
existing ones. My chief criticism of eg “anti-fragility” is that the
mechanism described is already and better understood by extant concepts
- that the author is being deliberately abstruse, even whimsical. I
think it’s a dodge ala Elron Hubbard: writing within a universe of
self-invented ad hoc terminology makes it very difficult for
non-disciples to level criticism that the ingroup finds acceptable,
since they’ve all decided to call their apples “oranges” instead.
He has one big idea, and it’s a good and timely one, that the classical model of probability is inadequate.
He takes an autodidactic delight in applying his fat tailed spanner to pointing out the weak foundations of established fields that he otherwise knows or cares little about.
But he does have a fundamental understanding – that we know less than we think we do – that he is happy to admit about himself so I don’t think he’s a Hubbard type charlatan.
I'm not knowledgable enough to argue the validity or importance of his theses on statistics, but I think the LHR comparison is valid in as far as both authors are trying to impart ideas to the reader that are parallel to the text -- between the lines, if you will. Look at the similar stylistic idiosyncrasies (belligerent, authoritative tone; the peculiar mix of formal and unorthodox styles; the frequent unnecessary coinage; the creation of a lexicon). Look at the Medium article, which opens with a dense rebuttal to an unwritten critique of his article. Taleb has read and written enough formal papers to know the "Background" section (in a Medium article??) is more usually a place to discuss prior research, rather than make sweeping declarations and insults to your critics in bold face. He trolls, a lot, in big and small ways - for someone who talks about signal to noise ratios he doesn't seem concerned with it in his writing. Why?
His shitposting is indeed epic, he is full of himself, and yes a lot of his iconoclasm is going after low-hanging fruit. At the same time it’s refreshing to see the chancers and number torturers get bodied so directly by him.
There is a definite evangelical subtext but I don’t get a cultish vibe from him, just a chaotic desire to shake things up, Of all the pop science writers I think he’s actually a public intellectual. Let him wield his fat tail superpower, the results will be messy but the aftermath will be a better world.
Yes, finally: a public intellectual with no regard for the public! The only thing messy about the future he heralds is in chancing a cult of fat-tailed language torturers, in my ignorant opinion.
>There is a definite evangelical subtext but I don’t get a cultish vibe from him, just a chaotic desire to shake things up,
Not from him necessarily (or at least not beyond a bit of bog standard preening here and there) but his followers/disciples/acolytes on twitter are horrendous.
Fucking "Maestro" indeed...
Strongly agree.
NNT is often right about things, but in the sense that he's reinventing (or reskinning) existing concepts. If he were actually Antifragile to critique, he'd make an attempt to learn from any of the disciplinary conversations he parallels. Instead, he is more interested in shadow-boxing with figments of his own reasoning, and then declaring himself a brilliant intellectual.
I really wish he didn't have the tough guy act. But then I wonder if the fame from Black Swan sorta traumatized him, and he's never processed that in a good way.
Regarding Antifragile, he wrote a fair bit about how much effort he put into scouring the literature for words or concepts that got across this idea, and he couldn’t find any which is why he coined the term. It’s surprising that such an idea has gone unnoticed through history, but maybe it just wasn’t isolated and defined properly as a generalizable object of study as a whole until Taleb.
In the spirit of the sneer, I would point out that he must not've looked very far - the thesaurus lists several perfectly good antonyms for "fragile," not to mention the deliberate pedanticism of acronyms like IYI: not exactly an epistemic innovation. I suggest that antifragility in particular is at least superficially similar to many easily-accessible concepts. Off the top of my head, how about "tonic" in the traditional medicine sense: something that re-invigorates a system by inducing inflammation or enervation? Could it be he deliberately avoided that very apt metaphor, because tonic is a synonym for snake oil? Or because it underscores how so-called antifragility isn't applicable to many systems - health being a perfect example. Or as Norm always says: what doesn't kill you makes you very weak, and almost killed.
I don’t think “tonic” would have caught on, but I see what you’re saying. Actually, the way some tonics work is through hormesis, which is a perfectly good established word that could have been used, seems a match for antifragility. However, an important distinction is that antigragility is a mathematically precise model which uses his now famous convexity function, while the older ideas like hormesis are just empirical observations.
EDIT: Come to think of it Convexity would have worked as a title too, lol, and it's not entirely novel.
He's definitely familiar with both terms, as he discusses them in Antifragile.
It would've been more honest if he had said that "antifragile" was just an effective meme that yoked both concepts together.
Taleb is smart, but nobody is as smart as Taleb thinks he is.
His ability to be a smart dumbass is occasionally [spectacular.](http://web.archive.org/web/20150924032003if_/https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/646695656778821632)
As someone who's read multiple Taleb books, my honest advice is that you should get a copy of Antifragile from the library, read the intro, pick a random chapter, and THEN if the digressive, jargon-bloated prose doesn't bother you, read more.
You can get the thesis in the introduction alone. Reading the entire canon is only really worthwhile if (A) you want to know enough jargon to talk to his followers, or (B) you find Taleb's writing persona entertaining.
It’s nice to see Taleb, one of the motte’s favored pop intellectuals, shit all over their favorite subject with a stunning level of pretentiousness that only he can express.
so that’s what distant cry of “senpai noooooo” was in reference to.
[deleted]
Thank based skin man
Pls reply “thank based skin man” or never be antifragile again
It’s really edifying to read a Taleb treatment of a subject I’m (somewhat) familiar with. I get the same sense from this article as the other prose of his I’ve read: he deliberately constructs ideas in a way that obscures his meaning. He has a habit of coinage that is largely unnecessary because his pet concepts are not very different from existing ones. My chief criticism of eg “anti-fragility” is that the mechanism described is already and better understood by extant concepts - that the author is being deliberately abstruse, even whimsical. I think it’s a dodge ala Elron Hubbard: writing within a universe of self-invented ad hoc terminology makes it very difficult for non-disciples to level criticism that the ingroup finds acceptable, since they’ve all decided to call their apples “oranges” instead.
In before some IQ fanboi goes ‘this was debunked already’. (And optionally drops some weird copypasta before getting banned).
Taleb has elevated the art of pretentiousness to stratospheric levels on twitter, but he has the erudition and integrity to do so. I’m a big fan.
[deleted]
As usual with Taleb I think he overreaches a little but I appreciate and approve of the work as a vigorous entry into the fray.
Taleb is my favorite crank.
Go off king
👑
Question: Is this guy’s writing worth reading? Specifically the Incerto series.
Isn’t this the guy who think Lebanese Arabic is actually Phoenician or something?