Many people turn to stand-up comedy for amusement. I read Nassim Taleb’s Twitter, which is an never-ending trainwreck of hilarity and stupidity:
BITCOIN, 2 points:
+ Returns are not additive at high volatility: Something that is up 1000% then down 90% is net breaking even.
+ Do not read accounts in papers about "causes". At high volatility, the word "cause" should not be used.— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) December 22, 2017
Tooleb loves to post fancy equations (rendered with Mathematica) to show how smart he is (even though he denies the importance of IQ), but apparently he is fooled by 5th-grade arithmetic.
Something being up 1,000% is not 10x, but rather 11x. In Tooleb’s defense, I see this error constantly.
1) Assuming "IQ" helps success; the performance of a population would depend >>more on the variance than average.
(convexity, #Antifragile)— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) March 11, 2017
Yeah, so that’s why sub-Sahara Africa has the most successful space program and economy in the world; nevermind their 80 IQ–it’s their huge variance, apparently.
Econs: In the age of social media, you can’t keep selling BS with pseudo-mathematics/citation ring/circular vetting with impunity. Eventually a bubble bursts.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) December 19, 2017
Pot, meet kettle…
This idiot Sokol doesn't realize that you can write about someone's work and its importance without framing it as an athletic contest.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) December 21, 2017
Jealousy isn’t a good look, Tooleb. If you read the comments, people agree that Tooleb is attacking Sokol for no justifiable reason. Tooleb is envious of the success of others. If he hates how academia is turned into a contest, it’s because he’s in last place. None of Tooleb’s ‘research’ has been cited by academia or published in prestigious journals, and that’s why he hates academia so much and why he is envious of others who get awards for their work. It’s not that there is conspiracy to censor Tooleb’s research, but rather his research is of a low quality and regurgitates concepts that experts have known for decades, as I discuss here.
Although Tooleb rages against ‘journos’ and awards, he never resists the opportunity to plug his books and seminars on the very media he claims to despite.