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Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Flaneur: probability (philosophy, math), probability (real life), Phoenician wine, deadlifts & dead languages. Greco-Levantine. #RWRI @nntaleb@mastodon.sdf.org
Matt Pfefferle Profile picture zensky Profile picture Chris Huser Profile picture arjun krishnadas Profile picture Serene Skeptic 🇺🇸 Profile picture 542 added to My Authors
Dec 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
POPPER'S METHOD:
What I did with @bigfatsurprise (I didn't know she os a prpgandist) was make her show me the MOST convincing study: working with HER CHERRYPICKING. The one with "67K", "ignored by mainstream media".

Popper started by clarigying with the most convincing argument. EPILOGUE One of the most deviously charlatanic persons you can encounter is the shill Nina Teicholz @bigfatsurprise: when unable to grasp a statistical point, she loops & loops then responds by ...fat shaming (based on lies from @saifedean).
Then she complains about MY behavior
Dec 4 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Ms Nina Teicholz @bigfatsurprise's own paper shows that cutting on Saturated Fats gives a 98.6% chance of reducing CardioVascular Events, and AT LEAST 86% of reducing mortality.
Statistics is hard for the verbalistic.
cc:thanks to @DrDamluji 2) Please do not invoke "ancestral" diets in support of the consumption of hamburgers and supermarket butter: these were different animals, and were eaten at a different frequency.
Dec 3 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The thread below shows the severe defect of AI: verbalism. It works with labels, maximally shallow thinking not any better than buzzwords.
See also below my definiton of verbalism. 2) In case the thread loops away from this.

Nov 29 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Banning Trump after Jan 6 is entirely compatible with the foundations of democracy, even necessary. By the Gödel-Popper rule, a democracy should never give its tools to those who want to thwart it. Turns out the constitution has a variant of the Gödel-Popper rule.

Note that the name "Gödel-Popper rule" is something I put together to merge Popper's paradox of tolerance and Gödel's naturalization's anecdote, see Skin in the Game.

Nov 24 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
OK, The new book is turning to be vastly more general than I thought.
Allora: a New Title: "Fallacies".
Polite for "Recollections of an active BS Busting mission 2018-2023". ImageImage 2) FALLACIES integrates much of Principia Politica (a.k.a. Scala Politica), Some of the Essays on Religion (see Medium), a simplification of the Covid forecasting papers, the paper on the Russian War (Centralized Empire vs Nato) etc.
Nov 13 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Cities are living organisms. Like all organisms they are indivisible and mutate over time. Some cities are more alive than others. You can only "feel" a city by flaneuring, walking slowly (very slowly) without any predetermined goal. 2) Cities great for flaneuring: NYC, Athens,Belgrade, Moscow, Milan, Rome, Beirut, Istanbul, Bogota, Montreal,Buenos Aires, Rio (not SP), Paris, Budapest, Warsaw ...
OK: London, Mexico C., Oslo, Stockholm, Copenh
Sometimes: Venice, Rome, Prague (too many tourists).

Nono: Dubai.
Nov 2 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
WARNING ON HEALTH QUACKS
The great @jaffer_ali1 will have 3x bypass. It was also discovered that he had numerous previous heart attacks.
Jaffer was getting advice from a quack (Covid denier), Mark Baker, promoter of "anaerobic" @GuruAnaerobic.

This was m.p. a mild MI ON TWITTER! Image 2) There is a small possibility that it was stable ischemic disease but conditional on the presence of previous heart attacks means this was it!
Nov 1 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Interesting perspective from @yhazony. I wonder abt the counterargument: my experience of altruistic pple w/lives devoted to village/community were often childless (I recently funded to name a street named after one).
Could absence of progeny make one feel more love of humanity? @yhazony 2) There is also the *aut liberi aut libri*.
Catholificism seems to hold that perspective (celibacy is required to service humankind), Orthodoxy only partially (it limits celibacy higher up e.g. bishops), but Judaism and Islam prefer clerics to have descendants.
Oct 3 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
BS ALERT
Malhotra's "peer reviewed" pseudoarticle is published in "Journal of Insulin Resistance", which appears to be a South African vanity outlet for junk scientists to show a formatted publication to their social media followers.
Plus he is on the pseudojournal's board. 2) Sample from the pseudoarticle: this is the reverse of "evidence based medicine" which he claims to represent.
Sep 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Women revolutions are harder to repress, and not just in Iran. Remember that they represent 50% of the population and are more educated, more sophisticated, more cohesive, yet more repressed than men. 2) Remember that it is the Women's March on Versailles, October 5, 1789 that caused the cascading events by shattering the regime's aura of power & invincibility.

#IranProtests #Iran
Sep 9 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I dislike the v. idea of monarchy & being a "subject", even if cosmetic. But experience shows that, just as w/religion, when you remove kings, you tend to get something vastly worse (nature abhores a vacuum).

Removing the king is like bulldozing museums.

Pple don't get Burke. 2) In the UK, the *effective* head of state is a regular citizen who works in what bankers would consider a shoddy townhouse, leaving the distractions of the pomp to the defanged *nominal* one.
In France, the president is a monarch. Mitterrand was effectively a modern Louis XIV.
Sep 7 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
My piece on IQ has 1M viewers & is still unchallenged.
The most basic problem is, assuming IQ worked: as the graph below shows, it would be too noisy (basic misinterpretation by psychs of their own statistics).
But the problem is that IQ is miscalculated.
medium.com/incerto/iq-is-… 2) Not only evolutionary psycs want IQ to work but it MUST be genetic too [The sinister project].
This racemonging stat illiterate psych couple [@primalpoly] boast the earning superiority of their higher genes while making less than auxiliary waiters at a failing NY steackhouse.
Aug 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Conspiracy theorists can appear guarded, distrustful & skeptical, but as bitcoin, anti-vaxxologism, & Russian dezinformatzia has shown, they are monstrously naive and very, very easy to scam. 2) I've seen in a long career thousands of traders/investors go bust. I've never seen a conspiracy theorist survive. You need natural skepticism, a certain reasonable filter.

(Experience is when you see history running forward, not from snapshots filtered by the survival bias.)
Aug 26 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
LIFE & TIMING

+ In your teens, learn languages

+ Betw. 15 and 50, read 18-40 h/week, w/a huuuge filter. Learn to read stuff you retain

+ In your early 20s, learn maths & how to make solid money (~ impossible later)

+ Betw. 45 & 145, lift free-weight; 55 & 100, ride bikes 2/ Note 1: "learn how to make solid money" --if that's what you want to do. Having a technical specialty (dentistry) is one way to have solid finances. Or being very, very good at something.
But I've never seen anyone suddenly learn financial acumen late in life. It's like math.
Aug 14 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
BICYCLING, TRANSPORTATION, and CARDIO METRICS
1/n
 You don't have to travel to ride a bicycle. I tried to ride it for transportation (day), *not exercise*, for 1 month and covered ~450 km in hilly terrain. 2/n
 Heart rate is in fact *on average* in Z2, but with a STD of .092. Roads have hills so it is ludicrous to aim at constant HR. [Note flaws in "research" on Z2].
You get the same results living in hilly terrain (Mediterranean); in Sardinia centenarians climb hills like goats.
Aug 9 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I like Ron Paul; overinterventionism is bad, printing money is bad.
BUT
Since the early 1900s: standards of living have risen yuuugely, > 1 billion exited famine, medicine saves lives & until 2008 holders of fixed income were paid for inflation w/something called interest. 2) So we should improve the system, make people more accountable, etc. But I failed to see the "downhill".

They say science is hard because of nuances. Everything is hard because of nuances.
Jul 20 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Statistical illiteracy.
Info is that 20 per 100K have some "serious" side effect (not fatality) *after* vaccines (across age groups).
Assuming due to vaxx, compare to ~2-5K per 100K unvaxxed hospitalized owing to Covid.

[Sent to me by antivaxx #idiot]

2) Now regardless of your computation of the risks for unvaxxed and Simpson's eff. [vaxxed are older, infection rate can be higher, etc.], it remains that we are talking 2 order of magnitude difference.
Jul 17 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
HOW FINANCE IS HARD
Wheat is trading below where it was when the Ukraine war started.
Never fall for first order narratives.
{#FatTony made his fortune shorting oil after the First Gulf War.} Image 2) The mechanism: overadjustment to shortages. $$ to produce substitutes elsewhere, plus adaptation away from expensive product.
1973 oil shock led to slow adaptation [speed limits, smaller cars] => 1980s glut; today things are much, much faster.

Now watch microchips.
Jul 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Hope du Jour: the electric-assist bicycle has the potential to turn every hilly city into Amsterdam* **.

* It is vastly more energy efficient than any other form of individual transportation.
** Disclaimer: I live in hilly places & only use regular bicycles. For now. 2) Note: An electric car (say a Tesla) has between 600 to 1100 the horsepower of a 500W electric-assist bicycle.
So why does one pay sales tax on an E-bicycle in NY AND get a tax credit for an electric car?
Jul 5 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Mini-Symposium [thread]
Friends, I have to write a foreword for
@holland_tom's Dominion, as punishment for listening to @TheRestHistory at the (profane) gym.

1- Is Xrstnty the 1st "religion" to establish the separation holy-profane?

2- Is it the 1rst to eliminate hierarchies? 3- When did the distinction between Judean [יהודה] and Jewish [יהודי] appear?
Jun 22 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
A reminder that Cash is up 22% on the year vs financial assets, and, of course, 135% vs bitcoin. 2) Cash for me is short term T bills, not quite bank accounts.