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Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
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May 31 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Assuming it is true (it's not), this idiot is committing the standard retrospective distortion (intro of #TheBlackSwan):
+ Airlines spend $$$ on copilots, w/benefits that are "practically non-existent".
+ I spent $$$ on fire insurance, "there is no evidence" it was useful.
2) A better analogy: "we should eliminate airport checks SINCE there have been no terrorist incidents", which was actually uttered by a politician.
3) And Covid reduced life expectancy across the board by ~2 y.

medium.com/incerto/no-cov…
4) Here is my comment on the Hanke study establishing no benefits to lockdowns.

[Also note that lockdowns no longer make sense now; they were useful in buying time until we figured out better treatments & developed vaccines]

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More from @nntaleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 18
Aside from narcissistic insensitivity, prbm w/ @jordanbpeterson is the pseudostatistical crap that produced IQ, Eugenics, scientific racism, & now "objective" aesthetics.
If there's a biological/noncultural preference for *some* shapes, it has a high VARIANCE across subjects.
2) Where I explain how pple [idiots like @jordanbpeterson] fail to get the law of large numbers by particularizing the general. Racism is one such example of assigning population traits to individuals.

3) The IQ piece. IQ measures unintelligence, not intelligence [NONLINEARITY]
medium.com/incerto/iq-is-…
Read 5 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 16
The Messianic illusion is that a single person σωτήρ (or, worse, a single action) will come to save the world, fix society, improve the economy, rescue the company, etc.

But advance comes from distributed progressive improvements, via negativa, mostly thanks to funerals.
2) Notes
+ Compare the French Revolution (which set back democracy more than 60 years) to the English progressive constitutional monarchy [and... it is still a monarchy]
+ What you see with the Lebanese election is largely the result that ~170,000 voters have died since 2018.
3) Notes
+ Trump came to DC on the promise of magically making things different. A lot of talk, & whatever he delivered (vaccine fast track, printing & distributing money, weapon sales to KSA) had nothing to do with what he promised ex ante and wants reckoned ex post.
Read 5 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 15
Don't give Monte Carlo a bad name
Platias & Di Maggio, econ & "crypto" specialists, gave TERRA$ no chance of collapsing from the peg simulating "1 mil. y".
1-MC works, BUT ONLY if you are using correct assumptions (tails & feedback loops)
2-No diff betw 1 mil & 1 bil years

IYIs
2) Turns out Di Maggio @ProfDiMaggio and Platias are irresponsible & must be sued for incompetence & causing pple to rely on their models.
We've known for 35 y to NEVER simulate Geo Brow Motion without stochasticizing vol to simulate tails. See my Dynamic Hedging (1997), preLTCM!
3) The precedent is J. Stiglitz and Peter Orzag, using similar Mickey Mouse simulations, putting their name on a paper showing Fannie & Freddie had no chance of going bust... just as I was saying it is sitting on barrels of dynamite.
Read 4 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 11
ON CLASSICAL LANGUAGES & MULTIGLOSSIA
My interpretation of Kripke-Wittgenstein: a language must have temporal & spatial consistency (memory is imperfect so your language cannot be private).
Classical languages have a property: unlike dialects, they don't vary across time.
1/n
A lingua franca is needed for science & business, so requires spatial consistency. Words must have the same meaning in Oxford & Krasnodar.

But a missed point is that it must also be read across generations. Syriac did not change a bit between Ephrem & Bar Hebraus (1000 y).

2/n
In English one cannot read a novel >200y. But between Cato I & Isaac Newton, Latin remained invariant (>1800 y).
"Classical" lang. by definition must transport across time. Class. Arabic has a span of 1700 y; attracted diglossic authors who spoke at home another lang.

3/n
Read 9 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Apr 3
FINANCE QUIZ DU JOUR
A call struck at K=120, for t= 66/252 trading days (.26 of a y) has a delta of .04 and a price of .1595 ($15,950 per million) when the underlying S=100. It is dynamically hedged daily at end of every day (total 66 x).
You spend $15,950. What is the max risk?
2) Correction: $1,595 per million notional, was off a decimal.
3) Not pretty. About 18 times premium lost under the nasty path: a grind up to the strike where you keep shorting more stock and losing on the hedge.
\lambda is the vol multiplier; worst is when lambda is about .3 and S ends up at strike, 120. Breakeven is at 1.2 times vol.
Read 4 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Mar 30
Like many Covidopaths, @GuruAnaerobic has no ability to understand science. Same w/commentator @normonics whose stat/math skills are middle school level.
Effect of Metformin is for 3 MONTHS, max ONE YEAR before conception, not the effect of "decades".

ImageImage
2) Here is the clueless comment Image
3) The point is that assuming Metformin is the culprit, you don't need decades to detect a birth defect since it shows... at birth.
With a not-so-large sample of Metformin users it would have shown immediately under scrutiny. But Vaccines have tons of scrutiny.
Read 4 tweets

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