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 Originally Posted by wufwugy
I don't know this history. I just read his tweets and his articles sometimes. Can you give a nutshell of what happened?
My personal synopsis of Taleb's narrative is that he went into the field of high finance for the purpose of becoming wealthy (why else would you go into high finance, not for a love of maths certainly?), realized it had limited or no benefit for a math genius (the variance outweighed the mean by a bigly amount), argued such and such with who and who, and came to the conclusion that there is a better way to explain economic vagaries than the normal distribution. That last bit in itself is a clear and worthy insight. There is no credit denied there. Absolutely the man is clever at math.
But to anyone knowledgeable in maths his contribution is not in showing the limitations of math to a chaotic system ( pretty sure Tulving managed the same argument in the 1940s, and Nash fairly soon afterwards), but in showing to people who don't understand math that doing math is fucking hard no matter how good your are at it, and if you do it wrong you can come to the wrong answer with the best of intentions.
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