Oh, I agree. He himself claims that many analysts were saying the same things, and that you would need to be an imbecile to not notice what was going on at the time.
My feeling is that he himself does not feel that he made an impressive prediction, and was actually just pointing out that it would inevitably go wrong at some point. in fact he has been talking about the issue for long before 2008, it just happens that the publication of his book came at just the right time to make it look like he predicted it just before it happened. (I may be wrong, and am not very familiar with his recent predictions around Trump and the arguments with Nate Silver on that )
Mainstream media does not wish to explain concepts like calibration, and instead runs with articles along tine lines of “Taleb predicts crash! Is God/Superintelligence!” despite his books repeatedly hammering home the point that he aims to make bets with tiny chance of success and low downside, but huge upside.
He aims to bet £1 on horses the bookies have at 10,000:1 that he thinks actually have 2,000:1 odds.
I do not know if he has previously made predictions with attached probabilities that we could track, he would probably argue that his investments play this role.
I don’t have the impression that Taleb goes to any lengths to discourage people from thinking that he made more impressive predictions than he actually did :-).
Oh, I agree. He himself claims that many analysts were saying the same things, and that you would need to be an imbecile to not notice what was going on at the time. My feeling is that he himself does not feel that he made an impressive prediction, and was actually just pointing out that it would inevitably go wrong at some point. in fact he has been talking about the issue for long before 2008, it just happens that the publication of his book came at just the right time to make it look like he predicted it just before it happened. (I may be wrong, and am not very familiar with his recent predictions around Trump and the arguments with Nate Silver on that )
Mainstream media does not wish to explain concepts like calibration, and instead runs with articles along tine lines of “Taleb predicts crash! Is God/Superintelligence!” despite his books repeatedly hammering home the point that he aims to make bets with tiny chance of success and low downside, but huge upside.
He aims to bet £1 on horses the bookies have at 10,000:1 that he thinks actually have 2,000:1 odds.
I do not know if he has previously made predictions with attached probabilities that we could track, he would probably argue that his investments play this role.
( more details in my other comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/olj/interview_with_nassim_taleb_trump_makes_sense_to/dmr0 )
I don’t have the impression that Taleb goes to any lengths to discourage people from thinking that he made more impressive predictions than he actually did :-).
He doesn’t do so explicitly but he does so implicitly by saying that certain predictions can’t be made reliably.