Intellectual Yet Idiot

Man do I love this article

https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-inte...577#.wovcs5xob

If you don't know Nassim Taleb: he's a PhD statistician who revealed that Nate Silver's models are unsound because the uncertainty of results actually meant the probability was closer to 50:50. He introduced the concept of a "black swan," a rare yet highly impactful events that common statistical models don't properly adjust for. Most importantly, he introduced the wonderful description, Intellectual Yet Idiot, that so usefully describes the contemporary intelligentsia.

More great stuff


http://i.imgur.com/RBmScBs.jpg

Taleb is a smart guy. I like the idea of questioning the use of the normal curve, and I'm pretty sympathetic to the view that the US election was a 50/50 event. But...

Criticising Nate Silver's grasp of statistics is like shooting fish in a barrel. The first problem was the guy was trying to apply probabilities to events in the distant future, like an election 5 months away, with no idea what might happen in-between 'now' and 'then'. Second, the guy had probabilities that would change almost daily. Anyone trying to do 1) is dumb. But when they start doing 2) at the same time they are a moron.

Quote:

---

He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the September 2001 attacks as examples of black swan events

---

I don't see how all of these events were extremely improbable. WW1 was a long time coming, it was unlikely to have started the way it did, but history said it was going to happen eventually. The dissolution of the USSR also doesn't strike me as an extreme outlier. Don't know about the other ones. More importantly, I don't know how he can apply probabilities to these events post hoc, and expect people to accept he understands their causes well enough to attach a probability to each one. These are complex events with numerous potential causes, not all of which are understood.

Generally though, if there are enough events some of them will be outliers. And some of those outliers will be important events. Nothing new there.

I agree I think, but it's possible he's talking about them in a different way. Though I won't defend him. He says some stuff I don't like.

I do agree with the idea that intellectuals try to show how smart they are by making things more complicated than they need to be at times.

In my department for example, we'll have a dip in student satisfaction one year, and without any evidence it's not just a random fluctuation, a lot of people will act like it's explainable by x, y, z, and any other number of things we're doing in the dept.. Then they'll make a shitload of work for everyone to 'solve' the 'problem'.

The funniest part is that five years later there'll be another dip and they'll decide it was because x, y and z are different now and change them back. Seriously, wtf guys...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Poopadoop

I do agree with the idea that intellectuals try to show how smart they are by making things more complicated than they need to be at times.

In my department for example, we'll have a dip in student satisfaction one year, and without any evidence it's not just a random fluctuation, a lot of people will act like it's explainable by x, y, z, and any other number of things we're doing in the dept.. Then they'll make a shitload of work for everyone to 'solve' the 'problem'.

The funniest part is that five years later there'll be another dip and they'll decide it was because x, y and z are different now and change them back. Seriously, wtf guys...

---

It was a good realisation I made a while ago that almost everyone creates reasons for what happens after they happen which almost definitely doesn't take into account the whole scope of what's going on (as it's almost impossible to do). It's very easy to say this happened because x, y and z but if you're not looking at the full scope of outcomes and what exactly happened the conclusions you're drawing are complete bollocks. Then applying them to future scenarios is a nonsense and people are shocked when they don't apply.

This especially happens with unlikely events. If you run a scenario over and over when it has a really wild outcome with a 1% chance and you get that outcome it doesn't mean anything mental happened that caused that result it's just that it's expected to happen every now and then. Yet people will attempt to create reasons for the special outcome.