Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Flaneur: probability (philosophy), probability (mathematics), probability (real life),Phoenician wine, deadlifts & dead languages. Greco-Levantine.Canaan. #RWRI
Matt Pfefferle Profile picture zensky Profile picture Chris Huser Profile picture અર્જુન કૃષ્ણદાસ Profile picture Serene Skeptic 🇺🇸 Profile picture 583 subscribed
Dec 28, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
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.

Sep 8, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
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.
Aug 8, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Ignorant Dawkins doesn't get it that such breeding works ONLY for a SINGLE task. Like making high volume breast-milk producing persons or 100m. swimmers. Humans have a lot of dimensions by definition AND the environment changes unpredictably! 2/My point is that it is not just immoral to breed humans; it is ineffective principally because humans are not just animals!
It is a deeper version of central planning.
May 28, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Why Strava is not good for training & health, since it shows your average speed (publicly) & causes the wrong type of emulation.
Most people who show their heart rate there appear to be in Zones 3-4, the "junk miles". twitter.com/i/web/status/1… The only metric I focus on: Total hours spent in the saddle. Nothing else. Everything becomes easier.
As @Alan_Couzens said: if your cycling computer looks like a NASA screen, you have a problem.
May 5, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Roma Image Image
Apr 1, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Let me be blunt. Those who are afraid of AI feel deep down that they are impostors & have no edge. If you have a 1) clear mind, 2) a deep, not just cosmetic, undertanding of your specialty, 3) and/or are original enough to reinvent yourself when needed, AI will be your friend. 2) Many in the responses invoked a "threat to society" by AI. That's a separate problem; but for now do not self-servingly invoke a "threat to society" when what's under threat is your little franchise and rent seeking.
Mar 24, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
ENTROPY DU JOUR
The ideal Mediterranean food is minimum entropy for maximal taste, that is, the smallest number of (fresh) ingredients possible, usually 3-6.
Salad bars are a modern abomination. The Poké bowl had ~20 ingredients (salad +rice "base", 4 "protein", 5 "mixed ins", 5… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Artificial "meat" has about 50-100 ingredients compared to 4 -5 for hummus
Jan 22, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Finally settled on the title, and now it seems obvious. Image I am using entropy in a broader sense, focusing on ignorance.
The beauty of the term is that it encompasses both probability and disorder. Also covers (mis)information and BS busting.
fooledbyrandomness.com/blog/index.php…
Jan 11, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
MISINFORMATION
If you put money in a real bank (money market), an interest bearing account, not a "piggy bank", your earning power would have been preserved between 1960 and 2008.
Only talk about finance if you know something about finance. Misinformation: propagandists present a partial piece of information, factually correct, as a general attribute of the system.
Here to sell cryptos to innocent youths.
This case: nobody puts more than a few $$ in piggy banks or cash accts, salaries & investment are indexed.
Jan 1, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
If you don't get why, between 2019 and 2022, I turned down exactly 10 requests to be on his podcast, this will provide a succinct explanation. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… BTW, if you want more cues, Mr Lex Fridman does not seem to be part of the faculty at MIT. "Research Scientist" could be an unpaid external status that allows library access.
Dec 14, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
YEAR IN REVIEW 2022, 1
Taught a class (in person)"Static and Dynamic Hedging" owing to the passing of Peter Carr; incorporated my lecture notes into the 1st draft of a book --more technical reformulations of my Dynamic Hedging (1997). ImageImage YEAR IN REVIEW 2022, 2
Picked up bicycle training after 20y, ~2000 km in 4 months. Had stopped after a near miss. 1) Improved trails & bike infrastructure, 2) drivers aware of cyclists, 3) flashing lights.
If you live in hilly areas, whole HR spectrum.
Hope to do 6000 km in 2023. ImageImage
Dec 4, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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, 2022 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