Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If a GMO-imbecile ask you for "a citation", answer: "Pls *provide a citation* about requirement for a citation for a logical argument." Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. He has also been an options trader. While being a celebrated, bestselling author (with his book, The Black Swan, reaching cult status) and a professor at several universities, he nevertheless delved in several questionable activities. Among these:


 * Furiously voicing his anti-GMO convictions while claiming he is doing science. He claims paid shills are invading his Facebook page and intimidating GMO "skeptics" with scripted arguments invented by Monsanto. He tweeted that he finds Kevin Folta a "lowly individual" and a "disgusting fellow".
 * An ongoing feud with Steven Pinker, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kevin Folta, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, and others.
 * Attacking New Atheism.
 * Formerly supporting Bitcoin, now being a vocal critic.

Taleb is pretty smart, though not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, because it's impossible for anyone to be as smart as Taleb thinks he is. This means everyone who disagrees with him is stupid, probably to the point of being a nonthinking animal.

To quote Taleb himself:

Sam Harris discussed Taleb's bullying tactics and character in an AMA podcast (starting at around 48:50).

Social media
He is very active on social media. His modus operandi seems to be attacking popular thinkers, baiting them into an exchange while his many fans revel in the spectacle.

His Twitter is spluttering incoherency in general. Taleb + editor = best-seller; Taleb - editor = Time Cube. Also, everyone he objects to is a "prostitute".

Guru and circlejerk
While publicly stating his disdain for fakery, he openly tolerates hordes of sycophants on his Facebook page whose only contribution is to praise him as the next Isaac Newton, constantly sucking up to him by cheering him on whenever he picks on someone, going as far as getting in on the baiting and bullying.

On the subject of his fans, Eric Falkenstein writes :

His fans especially revel in repeating Taleb's slogans such as "skin in the game" without actually bothering to understand them. As previously noted, they also compete with each other on which one can suck up most to their guru by repeating things he already agrees with.

For example, you can find dozens of comments criticizing Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by people who haven't even read the book, and accuse it of saying things that are explicitly contradicted by the book's text. It has become somewhat of an urban legend among Taleb's followers: everyone "knows" that Steven Pinker believes there will be no more wars in the future. Pinker actually denies this explicitly in his book, but why bother to read a book when you can aim for a pat on the head from your guru?

Blogger John Vos caught on to this as well:

What could be the explanation for Taleb's misinterpretation of Pinker's book (and everything else he distorts), and his continuing acceptance of the adulations of his shameless groupies?

A commenter on John Vos' website, Martin, offers the following suggestion:

So the most benign interpretation, the one that assumes Taleb actually knows what he is doing, is that he is committing a "pious fraud", that is, engaging in a "pious lie" in order to warn the world not to get complacent (ironically, by accusing other people of being frauds and taking an intransigent position against fraud). If that is the case, did it work? Obviously not.

His apostles are busier with worshiping his every utterance and sucking up to him rather than heading forth into the world and preaching about non-complacency.

The fallback explanation is that Taleb doesn't know what he's talking about and he doesn't care; he just loves the attention and controversy, to the point of masochism, and hopes an accident of history might paint him as a visionary genius, a household name. (He does sell himself as the man who warned the 2007 economic crisis was coming but nobody listened). Why does he do this? Perhaps because he feels he can't reach that status legitimately, without engaging in apocalyptic predictions about the evils of modern thought, all the while being involved in internet catfights, and is too vain to acknowledge it.

The logic of academic warfare
John Vos captures precisely how Taleb's social media activity works:

Zapping
Taleb loves "zapping", that is, blocking people who disagree with him and deleting their messages. When he does offer an explanation, it's usually a misrepresentation of what they actually said. Him deleting their messages makes it awfully hard for letting their words to speak for themselves, but Taleb's fans don't care, they cheer on.

IQ
In January 2019, Taleb got in a debate with crackpot Stefan Molyneux over Stefan's claims about group IQs. While correctly debunking Stefan's pseudoscientific claims, Taleb got it in his mind that IQ itself is a "pseudoscientific swindle", which he tweeted and blogged about at length. He has blocked several psychologists on Twitter who were trying to address his objections.

His point was that while IQ can detect extreme cognitive impairment, it's useless for anything other than that. To quote Taleb's Medium blog post on the topic:

And to quote one of his Twitter posts :

His choice of "wealth" as a standard for evaluating IQ as a measure of intelligence is a straw man, as nobody has ever claimed that intelligence automatically leads to wealth. In fact, the stereotype of the inept genius who can create entire new fields of mathematics while living in destitute poverty is exactly what people associate with high IQs. Someone being an academic ladder climber is not what anyone expects of high-IQ individuals.

Anti-GMO
Taleb is against GMO technology. As an article that documents his opinions says: "Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin, Says Black Swan Author" :

Taleb includes GMO lobbyists + sponsored scientists on the "Villains of 2014" list :

In a now-extinct tweet, Taleb writes:

"How to argue with GMO propagandists"
On August 9, 2015, Taleb published a guide on "how to argue with GMO propagandists":

One commenter replied:

To which Taleb responds:

Taleb promoted a screenshot of this exchange, adding his own description :

Taleb thinks his page is getting invaded by shills, not realizing it is simply an effect of him getting discovered by the skeptical community :

Shill list
Not unlike the Anti-vax Enemies List, Taleb has his own list of "trapped shills" where he included those he banned from his Facebook page for disagreeing with him on GMOs. :

The PDF is no longer available at the given URL. The introduction said:

This is consistent with previous Taleb activity. It is not the first case where something he posted on Twitter is no longer available. Other examples include : "BS artists invoke "science" with GMOs without considering error: science = accepting error and Risk= consequence of error."

Kevin Folta
As part of his anti-GMO rants, Taleb has picked on and bullied Kevin Folta, calling him a shill and openly insulting him in an exchange on Twitter and continuing the rants on Facebook. Here is one Twitter exchange, dated 7 Aug 2015:

On 15 Aug 2015, YouTube vlogger Jeff Holiday published a video titled "The Belligerent Bullying of Public Scientist Dr. Kevin Folta"

Endorsement by Food Babe
Food Babe has praised Nassim Taleb on her Facebook page, quoting his quack conspiracy beliefs:

Writing style
Eric Falkenstein criticizes Taleb's writing style, accusing him of playing the arrogance card (making his readers think they have stumbled upon some deep insight that the high and mighties are ignorant about):

He also criticizes Taleb's self-contradictions (doing the same things he accuses his targets of doing):

"Science"
Taleb talks a great deal about science. Ironically, exactly like Sam Harris, whom he claims to despise, he seems to think everything he believes is backed by real science, while everyone who disagrees with him in scientific matters is a charlatan who either misunderstands science or is paid by Monsanto.

Why does he think what he thinks is science? Because he writes papers (that he never fails to constantly reference) that he publishes on his own website. This is his "peer-reviewed" science. How exactly is it "reviewed"? In two ways. Either it is hailed as the next "Principia Mathematica" by his Twitter & Facebook fans (who are thus the "reviewers"). Otherwise, it is "peer-reviewed" because he considers himself the "peer" who does the reviewing of other peoples' work.

In this view, any rabble-rouser with few-and-fixed ideas is a scientist, as long as he manages to save a document as .PDF and to publish it on his own website, and then to switch the burden of proof to those who disagree with him, requiring them to write their own papers debunking his obscure mathematics premised on faulty assumptions about the issues discussed.

Taleb has, in fact, written real papers with collaborators such as Philip Tetlock. So it is indeed strange that he fails to see the difference.

Taleb's Sokal hoax
In Taleb's latest book he mentions a little trick he played on academics: basically, he created a bunch of nonsense in abstruse mathematics just to highlight what fools they are. Here's his description of this work in Antifragile:

The paper was presumably accepted by Quantitative Finance, a journal where Taleb often publishes and seems highly favorable towards his work. This seems identical to the infamous hoax by Alan Sokal, a physics professor who submitted an intentionally meaningless article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. However, Sokal was mocking the journal and its readers by publishing self-acknowledged gibberish. Taleb's mocking his biggest fans ('stupid', he calls them). Odds are, the journal editor won't find this very amusing.

Steven Pinker
For the past few years, Taleb has accused Steven Pinker of being blindly optimistic about the future. Steven Pinker largely ignored Taleb's baiting, only replying in depth to his allegations in a PDF published on his own website.

Some relevant fragments which precisely identify Taleb's pattern of distorsions and/or misunderstandings:

And:

Here is a fragment from Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that confirms what he said in the rebuttal. Pinker is actually a down to earth, rational person who does not make wild speculations:

Quixotic finance
In December 2015, Pinker tweeted a link discussing Taleb's many misinterpretations of "Better Angels". It was written in a fairly humorous tone. This prompted several interventions by Taleb and one by Sam Harris.

Taleb's main point was that Pinker is a "charlatan" because he tweeted a blog post instead of relying on "peer-review science" to address Taleb's views:

What Taleb didn't seem to consider was that the tweeting of a blog post does not preclude a positive scientific appraisal of Pinker's ideas. Most likely, Pinker just doesn't consider Taleb's opinions worthy of anything more than, in Taleb's own words, the blog post of an "unskilled bank employee finance troll".

There are legitimate things to gripe with Pinker over, but Taleb's way of going about things is rather counterproductive.

Religion
In 2009, Taleb appeared at "La Ciudad de las Ideas", in a debate that also featured Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, among others. In the December 2015 Twitter controversy involving Taleb and Pinker, Sam Harris brought up some videos from the debate :

The debate itself is worth watching, the full panel featuring Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett (new atheists) vs. Shmuley Boteach, Dinesh D'Souza, Nassim Taleb (theists), and Robert Wright (neutral). Excerpts of Taleb's interventions can be found on YouTube. . There are other videos that help us understand his view of religion. .

His points boil down to this:

Religion isn't about belief, it's about decisions
In his view, religion is a repository of useful heuristics that help people in making good decisions in situations where there is incomplete information about the world (situations of opacity). He claims that religion does not itself generate these heuristics, just that the stories get built around the rituals and are thus a mnemonic device. Invoking the Lindy effect, he claims that since it's been around for a long time, it must be doing something right.

Is his view true? Even assuming the idea that religion served useful purposes, this does not automatically guide us in knowing what those are. But Taleb seems to think he knows; he even points out such cases whenever he can find them. He is an Orthodox Christian, and in Orthodoxy there is lots of fasting. When recent scientific developments came to show the advantages of "intermittent fasting", Taleb saw it as an example of "religion knew it all along". He never explains how one should draw these conclusions but seems satisfied with automatically assuming that identifying the "hidden wisdom of religion" is never a result of coincidence and our own cognitive biases.

In his "Antifragile" book he confirms this stance, that religion is "not true" but it must be useful since it must have survived by giving societies an edge:

Is his view original? Taleb's trademark is that he makes the most banal ideas that other people have known about for ages seem like the best thing since sliced bread, original insights that nobody has thought about before.

Jerry Coyne, in his book "Faith versus Fact" makes it pretty clear that people have known about this insight for ages, when he discusses Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA concept:

Not only is Taleb's view not groundbreaking, it has been debated for centuries and it is known in New Atheist circles.

New Atheists misunderstand religion
Taleb claims New Atheists misunderstand religion by making it all about belief. He describes a hypothetical Dawkins or Pinker in a cinema, yelling "that's not real blood, it's tomato juice" (presumably looking like fools, and annoying everyone else who just "gets it").

In reality, several New Atheists have made points that contradict Taleb's accusation. Sam Harris is actively exploring the parts of Eastern thought that are compatible with and beneficial to secular people. Alain de Botton has written a book on the topic, "Religion for Atheists". Richard Dawkins has described himself as a "cultural Christian". Jerry Coyne has explicitly stated that this idea has been under debate for centuries, so clearly it does show up on people's intellectual radar.

Is religion all about decisions and too little about belief? A huge chunk of the religious certainly don't seem to think so. There are secular Jews, but most religious people do not resemble secular Jews. If religion is supposed to be all about decisions and not about faith, who can guarantee that the faith part doesn't affect the result?

Even if Taleb's point was true, Taleb's own theories would mark religion as "fragile", since the faith part is the one that makes religion so controversial in the first part.

Science does not compete with religion
Since Taleb believes religion is not actually about belief, but about heuristics and decision-making, his stance is that science does not contradict religion. Anything religion says about specific claims in holy texts is superfluous, since all that doesn't matter anyway, what matters is how religion helps people in dealing with day to day life.

For example, Taleb says religion helps people accept that the world contains unknowns: people find it hard to say "I don't know", but easier to say "God knows".

Another example he gives is of situations where no choice is clearly better than another: an ancient Greek might go visit an oracle, and thus randomize the choice and save precious time and effort that might have been wasted by over-analyzing it.

One problem with Taleb's view is that those benefits themselves can be subject to scientific scrutiny. And science might confirm or disprove a specific benefit attributed to religion. Or science might come up with alternative heuristics -- this is, in fact, the whole point of Sam Harris' book on morality.

Another problem is that his general position is pretty much unfalsifiable, so it has to be accepted on a gut feeling that things just are that way. Some benefits of religion might be confirmed, others might be disproven, but the theory is compatible with all evidence.

The pre-Enlightenment world was wiser
Taleb believes the pre-Enlightenment world was wiser, because it had the tools to deal with uncertainty, while the Enlightenment thinkers thought they could implement large scale, top-down social change on the basis of rationality.

His full argument is that traditional belief systems provided people the tools to deal with the non-linearities of the world (everything that can't be "rationally planned"), and that the "rationalistic" movement (New Atheism included) only brought forth a naive, unrealistic, and potentially destructive attitude about the world, enabling a large potential for harm, because people believe they understand and control more than they really can understand and control.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
In January 2016, Taleb started baiting Neil deGrasse Tyson into an exchange with him. He initiated the exchange by claiming Tyson is just an entertainer:

To which, Tyson replied:

The cause of the feud seems to have been an article about "What science is and how and why it works" by Tyson.

This isn't the first time Taleb had an exchange with Tyson. A reddit post from 2014 on /r/conspiracy gloats at how Nassim "probably one of the greatest thinkers of our time" Taleb, quote, "humiliates Tyson on GMOs". In case it wasn't clear the first time, the title of the self post is "Neil deGrasse Tyson got his ass kicked on GMOs by Nassim Taleb".

Medicine
Taleb's pet peeve is to point out perceived flaws in expert thinking by contrasting it with "superior" choices selected by trial-and-error by non-experts. Iatrogenics (harm resulting from medical care) is his main example.

In his "Antifragile" book he explicitly states that he is not a supporter of Alternative medicine and dislikes when he gets letters of support from people promoting it.

Iatrogenics
Taleb holds the opinion that the medical establishment is really uneducated when it comes to risk management, and that iatrogenics is a bigger problem than it is given credit for. In "Antifragile", he first starts with a historical event:

A more recent case seems more relevant:

Then goes on to state:

He never goes into any details regarding those numbers. The expression used for hospital deaths is usually "preventable medical errors". Those statistics usually include cases where the victim could have been saved, which is a far cry from saying that hospitals massively kill perfectly healthy people (as cars do). The comparison is spurious at best.

Defense of homeopathy
In November 2015, Taleb defended homeopathy as harmless placebos that divert hypochondriacs from taking too many real pharmaceutical products, going as far as to say that superstitions "can be rational".

Cory Doctorow has criticized Taleb for his attitude, correctly pointing out that Taleb ignores the great body of peer-reviewed, published evidence about the real harms of homeopathy, which fall into two categories: first, people with real medical problems (e.g. cancer) substitute placebos for effective therapies; second, people who take homeopathic remedies for difficult-to-diagnose or imaginary ailments waste public/insurance money (in healthcare systems that fund "Complimentary/Alternative Medicine") and are apt to overmedicate with both homeopathic and real medicines -- a 2015 paper looked at 45,000 patients and determined that homeopathic treatments "led to more productivity loss, higher outpatient care costs and larger overall cost."

In response, Taleb replied in his usual way by calling Cory "very stupid" and "dishonest".

Taleb's stance on homeopathy was also criticized by Emil Karlsson.

Ethnic composition of Roman Britain
In 2017, he got in a Twitter debate with Mary Beard over how many "non-white" people lived in Roman Britain. .

Taleb disputes the "white" vs "non-white" classification, arguing that it normalizes a "Northern Euro supremacist agenda (with a redefinition of the Western world and a reframing of the classics)".

In his blog post on the topic (referenced above), he argues that the category "white people" that includes both nordics and mediterraneans is a modern invention. That classification artificially lumps northern mediterranean peoples with nordics as "white", while lumping southern and eastern mediterranean peoples with subsaharan Africans as "non-white".

He further uses historical sources to show that even in antiquity, mediterranean peoples were grouped together and were considered distinct from both nordic Europeans and subsaharan Africans.

Notable contributions
Nassim Taleb has taken part in promoting and raising awareness about several concepts pertaining to risk analysis and decision making.

The Black Swan
The Black Swan refers to the fact that we live in a universe that often acts chaotically and thus, we can never rule out the unpredictable effects of small events. It also emphasizes the fact that humans are prone to rationalizing explanations as to why something happened (hindsight bias, historicism, etc.) by focusing on narratives instead of accepting the role of uncertainty.

Taleb uses this concept not just to show how others mistakenly pretend to understand the reasons behind specific occurrences, but also to encourage people to take advantage of unforeseen beneficial events (which he calls "positive black swans"). According to Taleb, one should expose oneself to "positive black swan events" (for example, by attending an event where you could make new connections, as opposed to sitting at home, watching TV). Most entrepreneurship seems to rely on strategies aimed at maximizing the potential to encounter a "positive black swan".

Skin in the game
"Skin in the game" refers to the observation that people tend to make better decisions and to better evaluate risk when they have something at stake. Conversely, when they don't have much to lose (bank managers, politicians) they tend to gamble a lot and take high risks because they are doing it with other people's money (no skin in the game).

More importantly, Skin in the Game discusses the concept of ergodicity, a topic introduced to economics by physicist Ole Peters. A non-ergodic process is one in which, following several trials, the ensemble average is not equal to its time average. In other words, the average result of one individual over time is different from the average of many individuals in a given moment. Non-ergodicity occurs in systems that involve risk, as one individual's trials will eventually lead to enough consecutive losses to incur ruin. Taleb uses this concept to illustrate the importance of thinking in dynamics rather than statics.

Antifragility
Taleb introduced the word "antifragile", which is also the title of one his books (a book he considers his magnum opus). The term "antifragile" describes systems which derive gains from situations where our intuition would expect them to break down. Some of the examples Taleb uses are:
 * Gains from uncertainty (evolution, market economies, etc.)
 * Gains from physical stressors (bodybuilding, intermittent fasting, etc.)

The usefulness of the concept is criticized by Eric Falkenstein :