Ord, Kahneman & Taleb — r/SneerClub archives

Ord, Kahneman & Taleb (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nunser/ord_kahneman_taleb/)

posted on June 07, 2021 09:14 PM by u/GriffTheJack

I’ve been slowly moving in the space of “aspiring rationalist” for a few years, but I’m not a very internet-savvy person. I don’t read blogs, don’t really participate in forums, not on Twitter, that kind of thing. I’ve especially found that being on Reddit for longer than brief moments is bad for my mental health (I’ve heard that that’s common).

Tried to read a bit of the Sequences waaay back in the day when I first read and enjoyed HPMOR, but they didn’t click for me.

Anyway, recently I’ve devoured a few audiobooks that strike me as non-internet alternatives to the “Rationality” community, showing off the good parts without the baggage or circlejerking:

Thinking, Fast and Slow / Daniel Kahneman
Noise / Kahneman
The Black Swan / Nassim Taleb
The Precipice / Toby Ord

I’m about to embark on all of the rest of Taleb’s series of books, starting from the earlier one, “Fooled By Randomness”, then “Antifragile” and so on. Tetlock’s “Superforcasting” is on the list, Kahneman and Taleb both talk about his work and got me interested.

Having just discovered this sub, and knowing that these writers are adjacent to the online subcultures you all are meant to sneer at, I would love to hear some dirty opinions about them. I’m afraid I might be enjoying their work too much, especially Taleb, who strikes me as an almost Yudkowsky-esque figure of arrogance. And I love Ord’s ethical arguments, but he is trying to legitimize the AI-risk crowd, talking about prominent non-MIRI organizations who are working hard on AI alignment and see it as a real problem in the field. Thoughts?

u/SpillTheCheerwine 31 points at 1623127915.000000

I really like Thinking, Fast and Slow. I think it’s important that Kahneman specifically discourages linking the study of cognitive biases with self-improvement, which tells me he’s not an aspiring cult leader.

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u/rockandorstone 24 points at 1623165951.000000

If anything, that book just taught me to start accepting cognitive dissonance, in myself and others, as a fact of life and not so much as a sign or stupidity/ignorance. As a corollary, accept that shit's fucked because we don't live long enough as individuals to properly get over our biases in most cases. I now find it easier to not only spot cognitive dissonance, but also I get much less mad at people who display incoherence resulting from it. It's really not their fault, we're just wired like this.

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u/DELETED 24 points at 1623109371.000000

[deleted]

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u/GriffTheJack 6 points at 1623111438.000000

I've only read / listened to The Black Swan, can't comment on the other books yet. In that one, he seemed less interested in neologisms, more in puncturing the core assumptions of various fields. Being told that "you're doing it all wrong because *see consequences*" is a pretty simple and effective utilitarian-style argument, even if it is stretched out over however many endless pages of sneering, deliberately baiting people and calling everyone and their mother "middlebrow". I especially thought the core message was pertinent to anyone who is moved by the arguments of The Precipice. Reading them back-to-back really hit home how flimsy Ord's probability numbers are for everything other than the well-researched asteroid collision risk. He mostly just seems to be making them up, and weights the probability of brand new emerging technologies to become x-risks as relatively low, which is interesting from the perspective of the Black Swan. (My implication being that the probabilities could very likely be much, much higher than Ord suggests)

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u/Shitgenstein 15 points at 1623121450.000000

I have a copy of *The Black Swan* somehow (I think I ended up with my brother's copy without realizing it) but haven't read it - just sitting in the bookshelf. I learned about the problem of induction in my philosophy undergrad, like, a year or two before the book was published and it seems like the whole book is just about the practical implications of that? Like, I really suspect that, for the praise it receives, it's really just undergrad-level epistemology in so many examples and some new jargon ("the fourth quadrant"?). I should actually read it but, from reviews from people I trust, it sounds super up its own ass.

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u/DELETED 20 points at 1623161655.000000

[deleted]

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u/Shitgenstein 13 points at 1623163798.000000

Right, that's what I hear, but it's also not just that it's condescending, which is obnoxious, but condescension from such a banal insight, which is doubly obnoxious. Like, as a way to introduce the problem of induction to a popular audience with some interesting stories of how it's relevant to everyday life - cool, awesome, go for it - but I don't want to relive the cringe of the pretentious philosophy major passing off what they just learned last week in class as their own brilliance at some party.

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u/DELETED 9 points at 1623171708.000000

[deleted]

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u/Shitgenstein 2 points at 1623172750.000000

History is replete with such examples so, yeah, there is a lot of interesting things to read out there.

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u/SpillTheCheerwine 2 points at 1623218108.000000

Have you seen The Good Place?

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u/repe_sorsa 7 points at 1623186044.000000

There's a [2002 New Yorker article about Taleb by Malcolm Gladwell](https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.edu/dist/2/51/files/2018/03/NYorker2002-blowingup.pdf) which focuses mainly on Taleb's investment strategy based on this concept of unknown unknowns and most other investors neglecting to consider them. At that length I found it very interesting but I've always wondered how you'd go on from there to fill out a whole book. "Lots of anecdotes" is pretty much what I've been guessing.

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u/GriffTheJack 3 points at 1623133652.000000

If you think the American Dream is a collective delusion and that the empirical evidence shows that the field of economics is underprepared for market catastrophes, I would give it a try. The starting story definitely hooked me, the real-world collapse of Lebanon into civil war and the extremely basic idea of "it's the things you don't see coming that hit the hardest".

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u/n2_throwaway 8 points at 1623365199.000000

> If you think the American Dream is a collective delusion and that the empirical evidence shows that the field of economics is underprepared for market catastrophes, I would give it a try. The problem is, these are very pedestrian insights. You can learn about this through philosophy (as some folks upthread have), you learn about this in statistics (optimizing for "the tails" instead of the median), you also just pick it up through working in fields that end up having to do a lot of risky work (like Search and Rescue). Taleb's insight is basic, but the tone with which he presents his research, as if he's some savant, is what really gets me about his stuff.

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u/GriffTheJack 2 points at 1623368090.000000

Perfectly reasonable, it does go on a bit longer than it should, but I think the thing that makes me scratch my head about this "it's so obvious" argument is that market disasters have continued to happen, decade after decade. Obviously it isn't so obvious to *some* people, and those people get paid billions of dollars of US taxpayer money to stay rich when they make terrible decisions. Increasing awareness of this problem can only be a good thing.

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u/n2_throwaway 5 points at 1623380255.000000

> Obviously it isn't so obvious to some people, and those people get paid billions of dollars of US taxpayer money to stay rich when they make terrible decisions. Increasing awareness of this problem can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, the _problem_ is fairly obvious, but the solutions are not. There are a lot of incentives for short-term thinking. In democratic governments you have term limits, quarterly budget requirements, elections, and more. In corporations you have a system obsessed around posting quarterly profits and losses. And this is just on the surface of it. Thinking long term isn't the hard part; incentivizing human systems to deal with long-term consequences.

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u/silly-stupid-slut 3 points at 1623930538.000000

Just to back up really quick: Taleb's Black Swan is not actually about Mill's black swan of falsification. It's not about the problem of induction at all. The point Taleb aspires to make is: 1. People are not perfect predictors. 2. This means peoples predictions will sometimes be wrong. 3. The only way to know if a prediction is wrong is to see if it happens. 4. The only way to be prepared for a predicted event is to spend human effort and raw materials on getting ready ahead of time. 5. So how do you prepare for the future knowing that your plan for the future is wrong, but not how it will be wrong? The anecdotes are about something Taleb actually does right. Intimately aware of the kind of people who read his books, he knows that about all of them will respond to this problem with the plan "become a perfect predictor". And he's trying to slam it into their heads that **everyone** thinks that's the right answer. Everyone has tried that. It never works. The Perfect Rationalist will still have to deal with this problem. Omega will still have to deal with this problem.

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u/Shitgenstein 3 points at 1623934683.000000

Okay. I really don't see how your description isn't just a longer way of saying the point is that inductive failures happen and how to anticipate and prepare for that possibility.

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u/silly-stupid-slut 2 points at 1623962306.000000

No that's pretty close, although the book is sort of more interested in discussing why people **don't** prepare for that possibility, or if they should. But what the book is **not** is a discussion of induction as a philosophical concept. There's no attempt to provide evidence for evidence here. It's just a book about how induction is totally possible and has no flaws, we just suck at actually doing it.

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u/DELETED 13 points at 1623161022.000000

[deleted]

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u/GriffTheJack 1 points at 1623198616.000000

Yeah, listening to them on audiobook helps. I can listen to them at work, have fun with the anecdotes and acerbity without taking them *too* seriously.

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u/Soyweiser 9 points at 1623101598.000000

imho, and well, im not that knowledgeable about these things, Talebs books are mostly fine, however without an editor he turns into a massive galaxy sized arrogant asshat (and even with an editor he tends to include his ‘beefs’ as negative characters in his books apparently, not that I noticed myself). By not reading his blog, nor his twitter you are prob fine.

And as I have no opinions of my own, read the rationalwiki page on taleb.

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u/DELETED 15 points at 1623133792.000000

Whenever I see a *book* by Taleb, I feel like "this could have been an email."

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u/GriffTheJack 5 points at 1623103765.000000

Hmm, thank you. I had a feeling that it would be at least that bad. What I got from this is: Read his books critically, take the interesting / challenging parts into consideration and ignore his less rigorous work. (And continue to stay off Twitter)

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u/saladinsaladout 6 points at 1623195088.000000

You also don’t need to read the entirety of them. The first 100 pages will usually give you a good sense of his main point, and I have found he rarely adds to the depth or utility of his ideas beyond that point.

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