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LOOSE_FEATHERS
May 6, 2008
BLACK_SWAN
A problem I have with Taleb: he's wrong in so many
incidental details, it's difficult to avoid getting
lost in an orgy of quibbling...
But still worse, would be to miss
an important clue, because the
discrepancy looks like just
another quibble at first glance.
But sometimes small things
add up... which is why
"... this trade-off between nerds have their uses.
volatility and risk can show
up in careers that give the IN_DEFENSE_OF_NERDS
appearance of being stable,
like jobs at IBM until the
1990s. When laid off, the
employee faces a total void: "If it were a bigger planet,
he is no longer fit for then it would have mountains
anything else." -- p. 204-205 that would dwarf the
Himalayas, and it would
I find it extremely unlikely require observation at a
that a suddenly-laid-off IBM greater distance for it to
employee would have that much look smooth." -- p. 260
difficulty finding another
job (I don't remember an Actually, no, the larger the
epidemic of ex-IBMers planet, the larger the
starving in the streets... I gravity, which tends to
do remember running into one smooth it out more.
of them working at Netscape). "Olympus Mons" on Mars is
taller than "Everest".
"I find it ludicrous to present the
uncertainty principle as having anything to
do with uncertainty. Why? First, this
uncertainty is Gaussian. On average, it
will disappear ... " --p. 287
In a chaotic system, tiny differences in
initial conditions can have large effects,
and the uncertainty principle means that
you can never know the initial conditions
precisely.
Chaos amplifies that
imprecision to fill
the world.
The "uncertainty principle"
has certaintly been much
abused by wonky thinkers,
but it doesn't change the
fact that this sort of
uncertainty matters a lot.
The "uncertainty
principle" and
"relativity" were
"... when you look at an very popular with
object, composed of a fuzzy-studies
collection of particles, people claiming
the fluctuations of the confirmation that
particles tend to balance the world is fuzzy.
out. ... But political, A justification
social, and weather for ignorance, One can not
events do not have this back before the conclude from
handy property ..." Tetlock/Taleb era? Einstein's
-- p. 287 relativity, that
"everything is
So, Taleb complains relative"...
that there's barely the theory is
any reason to call the very specific
behavior of a gas about which things
"uncertain": it are relative.
averages out! And it also
holds that some
Unlike the weather? things are
absolute (the
But then, first and speed of light).
foremost, the weather *is*
a large system of gas. Similarly, the
"uncertainty
principle"
doesn't claim
that *everything*
is uncertain. We
can not know
position and
"Looking into the outcome of the war, velocity alone
with all my relatives, friends, and with infinite
property exposed to it, I face _true_ precision, but
limits to knowledge. Can someone the product of
explain to me why I should care about the two is
subatomic particles that, anyway, confined to a
converge to a Gaussian?" -- p. 288 well-defined
envelope.
No, I probably can't -- but what are
you really asking? Do you want me to
explain to you why science matters?
If you want to call your relatives on
a cell phone, the electronics you're
using couldn't have been created
without some understanding of Quantum
Mechanics. Does that help?
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