My guess is Taleb wouldn’t be offended by this, and would in fact argue that any serious intellectual should be viewed as a half-crackpot.
Serious intellectuals get some things right and get some things wrong, but they do their thinking independently and therefore their mistakes are uncorralated with others’. That means their input is a valuable contribution to an ensemble. You can make a very strong aggregate prediction by calling up your half-crackpot friends, asking their opinion, and forming a weighted average.
Pseudo-intellectuals, whom Taleb calls IYIs, are just regurgitating what other people say. That means their opinions are all highly correlated. The ensemble prediction obtained by asking a lot of pseudo-intellectuals isn’t much stronger than the single opinion of just one such person.
There is an ethical component to this dichotomy. A serious intellectual is risking his reputation (being perceived as a crackpot) to add aggregate strength to the collective wisdom. In other words, the serious intellectual is accepting individual fragility to make the collective anti-fragile. In contrast the pseudo-intellectual seeks to protect himself from risk, while making the collective fragile, since the collective opinion of a group of IYIs is very likely to be wrong even if (especially if!) there are many IYIs and they all agree.
Thats a way too simplistic way to think about this. One has to stand on the shoulders of giants to be intellectual in the first place. Also there is this thing called scientific consensus and there are reason why its usually rational to lean ones opinions in line with scientific consensus- not because of other people think like it too but because its usually the most balanced view of the current evidence.
Talebs argument about being IYI is pretty ridiculous and includes stuff like not deadlifting, not cursing on twitter and not drinking white wine with steak while naming some of attributes of IYI using people he does not like. I get it its partly satire but he fails to make any sharp arguments, its mostly sweeping generalisation while generating these heuristics around the concept of IYI that are grossly simplistic.
Come on : ”The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.”
My guess is Taleb wouldn’t be offended by this, and would in fact argue that any serious intellectual should be viewed as a half-crackpot.
Serious intellectuals get some things right and get some things wrong, but they do their thinking independently and therefore their mistakes are uncorralated with others’. That means their input is a valuable contribution to an ensemble. You can make a very strong aggregate prediction by calling up your half-crackpot friends, asking their opinion, and forming a weighted average.
Pseudo-intellectuals, whom Taleb calls IYIs, are just regurgitating what other people say. That means their opinions are all highly correlated. The ensemble prediction obtained by asking a lot of pseudo-intellectuals isn’t much stronger than the single opinion of just one such person.
There is an ethical component to this dichotomy. A serious intellectual is risking his reputation (being perceived as a crackpot) to add aggregate strength to the collective wisdom. In other words, the serious intellectual is accepting individual fragility to make the collective anti-fragile. In contrast the pseudo-intellectual seeks to protect himself from risk, while making the collective fragile, since the collective opinion of a group of IYIs is very likely to be wrong even if (especially if!) there are many IYIs and they all agree.
Thats a way too simplistic way to think about this. One has to stand on the shoulders of giants to be intellectual in the first place. Also there is this thing called scientific consensus and there are reason why its usually rational to lean ones opinions in line with scientific consensus- not because of other people think like it too but because its usually the most balanced view of the current evidence.
Talebs argument about being IYI is pretty ridiculous and includes stuff like not deadlifting, not cursing on twitter and not drinking white wine with steak while naming some of attributes of IYI using people he does not like. I get it its partly satire but he fails to make any sharp arguments, its mostly sweeping generalisation while generating these heuristics around the concept of IYI that are grossly simplistic.
Come on : ”The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.”
OK.