Fascinating article, although probably not for the reasons Taleb would like.
He's signaling something, but I am too much of a plebe to know what:
"a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade"
This reverses his majority/minority argument:
"Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:
"An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts."
This argument is pretty nonsensical; if the majority is flexible, then in what sense does it make sense to say "submit"?
"...then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to the minority rule."
Taleb seems to need to work on his cut-n-paste skills:
"Note that these slaughter rules [for halal/kosher meat] are skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean [discussed in Chapter] Greek and Semitic practice to only worship the gods if one has skin in the game, sacrifice meat to the divinity, and eat what’s left."
I'll just note this in passing:
"In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly), the big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. As I said, your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive in these type of decisions...It is strange, once again, to see Big Ag who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research cum smear campaigns, with hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than the rest of the population, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric choices."
Could someone run through this with the math? This is not a use of renormalization I am familiar with.
"The method of analysis employed here is called renormalization group, a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next –without mathematics."
Signaling again: "flâneur".
Are we talking about the same French language?
"...the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters."
I actually found the article interesting, but you are right that it would improve much if he worked a bit more on these parts. I stopped at exactly the same points.
As to the last point French is a bit more logically spelled than English - even if it is still horrendous.
He's signaling something, but I am too much of a plebe to know what:
"a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade"
This reverses his majority/minority argument:
"Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:
"An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts."
This argument is pretty nonsensical; if the majority is flexible, then in what sense does it make sense to say "submit"?
"...then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to the minority rule."
Taleb seems to need to work on his cut-n-paste skills:
"Note that these slaughter rules [for halal/kosher meat] are skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean [discussed in Chapter] Greek and Semitic practice to only worship the gods if one has skin in the game, sacrifice meat to the divinity, and eat what’s left."
I'll just note this in passing:
"In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly), the big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. As I said, your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive in these type of decisions...It is strange, once again, to see Big Ag who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research cum smear campaigns, with hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than the rest of the population, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric choices."
Could someone run through this with the math? This is not a use of renormalization I am familiar with.
"The method of analysis employed here is called renormalization group, a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next –without mathematics."
Signaling again: "flâneur".
Are we talking about the same French language?
"...the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters."