Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Jul 27, 2021 3 tweets 2 min read Read on X
100% wrong. Engineering != science.

As explained in #Antifragile, our world is built by engineers, tinkerers, & practitioners, often uneducated, misclaimed by universities.

Science never claims ANYTHING about these matters. Science=research procedure not a risk control method.
The BS model:
Science => Technology => Practice.

Historically, the truth:
Practice =>Technology =>"Scientific" misattribution

@paulg ImageImageImageImage
Know How vs. Know What
A truth is that, as much as we enjoy counterintuitive intellectual puzzles, our world owes a lot more to the Teslas than to the Einsteins.
Engineers would have figured out the time discrepancies without asking questions. The reverse doesn't work.

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More from @nntaleb

Nov 18
I am not convinced that jumping without a parachute is bad. What's the most clear and comprehensive study demonstrating their harm?
2) The asymmetry: it is when you go against time that you must prove reliability, not the reverse. Why? Because nature & time have near infinite stat significance.
There is NO study showing LT health effects of consuming chemically extracted deodorized lubricants.
Follow the $$$
3) BTW the same thing I am saying abt the uncertainty of using seed oil applied to smoking at the time when people saw no evidence of harm.
You need separate cohorts for a long time to extract risk factors. Unlike smoking we can't control consumption of seed oil in modern life.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 7
Advice to a university president.
In ~40 years in finance I've never see anyone hire an economist. We hire electrical engineers, quants, physicists...
The MD heals patients, the engineer builds bridges, the economist writes papers (used by other economists to write papers).
2/ Economists are usually employed by the public sectors: regulators & central banks where they hire one another.
Their knowledge is too weak for the real world.
3/ Economists, while being known to be totally useless in the private sector, proved great marketing skills in securing for themselves the highest academic salaries.
Read 7 tweets
Jul 1
France: the unsustainable & unavoidable mutation of a standard industrial welfare state into a low-growth-high-debt museum welfare state with a medieval economy focused on handbags, cheese & wine, regardless of the "rightist" or "leftist"outcome.
2/ France: One reason the xenophobic statist group called the "right" is gaining is that poor immigrants are incompatible w/the new French museum state -ignoring that the high ratio of Asian tourists to population also harms the marketing oriented character of that new state.
3/ For those who still don't get the Pareto distr:
4/5 of largest French corps in capitalization, LVHM, LOréal, Hermès, & Dior are into #Lindy Medieval products.
(LVHM has > 3x the capitalization of Airbus which is not even formally French, 8x Dassault's, etc.)
Read 4 tweets
Apr 27
There are physiological benefits from both a moderate amount of vigorous exercise & an immoderate amount of moderate exercise.
The cardiac risks come from moderate amount of moderate exercise & immoderate amount of vigorous exercise.
The logN matches the distributions in nature. Image
In their criticism of Attia in the New Yorker, both Emanuel and Dhruv did not seem to understand the data (nor its properties above).
½ hour/day of moderate exercise is INSUFFICIENT,
Data shows NO J curve for low-mod. ex., w/ continous drops in relative risk to at least 15h/w.Image
3) cc: @PeterAttiaMD @DhruvKhullar @ZekeEmanuel
Read 5 tweets
Dec 28, 2023
Turns out that the claim by Christians in Jerusalem that religious Jews spit on them is true. It is "tradition". I did not believe it (not good marketing to get support from America), but it turned out to be true.
My god.
2) My nightmare. Because I argued it was fake news like the fake protocol.

3) Gets worse

Read 4 tweets
Sep 8, 2023
If a chatbot writes a complete essay from a short prompt, the entropy of the essay must be exactly that of the initial prompt, no matter the length of the final product.
If the entropy of the output > prompt, you have no control over your essay.
In the Shannon sense, with a temperature of 0, you send the prompt and the reveivers will recreate the exact same message.
In a broader sense, with all BS being the same ornament, receivers get the same message in different but equivalent wrapping.
Read 5 tweets

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