The criticism of peer review and Noble prize can also deemed as a criticism of the peer review system. Since the peer review system endorses the misdirected, misguided risk management known as the CAMP–epitome of the current risk management theory as well as the Black-Merton-Scholes model of future pricing. This same model and the same “economists” were leading a group of experts in finance to form the LTCM group. This group is the victim of its success during the 1998 financial crisis.
This is the source of NNT’s attack on academics and the Nobel prize.
When arguing against corporation sponsored or government sponsored–profit motivated and political motivated program, the critics like to point out the legitimate peer review system as the most objective system of evaluation of researches. But when even the peer review system is criticized by NNT, there is nothing left to go by. The current system has totally collapsed.
“lock madness or Bell Curve in the wrong place” is the way NNT attack the theory of risk management of the current school that dominating the western and North American universities.
“Elegance in the theories is often indicates of Platonicity and weakness —It invites you to seek elegance for the elegance’s sake. A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometime necessary, alawys self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation, and close adult supervision.” This sounds like the author is talking about the string theory that many people tout about in the theoretic physics community.
NNT (Taleb) likes to praise the medicine and military practitioners. It is because they deal with issue that is life and death in nature not other peoples’ money.
Paul Samuelson, John Hicks (UK), Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu at the targets in academics that NNT has in mind. It is beside the Black, Merton and Scholes.
Scholar Martin Shubik found himself ostracized ( a common fate of dissenters) when he points out “that the degree of excessive abstractive of these models (portfolio model theory), a few steps beyond necessity, makes them totally unusable.”
“Plenty of people have argued with me about whether I am against ‘essentialism’(i.e. thing that I hold that don’t have a Platonic essence), if I believe that mathematics would work in an alternative universe, or some such thing. Let me set the record straight. I’m a no-nonsense practitioner, I am not saying that mathematics does not correspond to an objective structure of reality, my entire point is that we are , epistemologically speaking, putting the cart before the horse, and of the space of possible mathematics risk using the wrong one and being blind by it. I truly believe that there are some mathematics that work, but that these are not as easily within our reach as it seems to the confirmators.” According NNT.
“non commoditized in thinking” is to mean “not doing group thinking” according NNT. This skeptics attitude “lends itself to a protocol of how to act –not how to think, but how to convert knowledge into action and figure out what knowledge is worth” says NNT.
While the word skeptics still ringing in my mind, I come across the same word used by people that is “skeptical” to the Global warming world view. This is why skeptics is such a bad/good word depending on where you stand.
“I’m most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analysts–those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists and phony statisticians…. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religion wars, but they’ll not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, political theory under Stalinism or during Vietnam War.” Say NNT.
“Even priests don’t go to bishops when they feel ill. Their first stop is the doctor’s. But we stop by the office of many pseudo-scientists and “experts” without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel though as we saw in (LTCM).” NNT balks at the current misplaced trust of public.
This reminisces the story of social scientists attack on the horrible practice of human sacrificing of the Mayan culture seen again and again in US TV program. This is such a bump rap to the Mayan culture. They have the most accurate way to measure the movement of celestial objects in history. Yet they were demonized as the most barbaric culture in the history of the world in US TV. This is not much different from the killing of the present day warfare on the name of national interest, human right, economics interest, justice, empire prestige, etc.
On top of that, killing be because of traffic accidents, drugs pushing and trafficking, justice, are probably hundred time higher then the killing because of ritualistic needs or fear of impending natural disaster such as drought, flood, earth quake, etc. Moreover, killing to avoid a natural disaster, can be justified like the pretext to save life, such as the case of using atom bomb on the the Japanese. The amount of people died in the offering to God is minutiae comparing to killing during a natural disaster in the ancient time such as famine, disease, flood, earth quake, or the remote Black Swan such as asteroid hitting the earth that wiped out dinosaurs or creating dinosaurs environment.
The repeating of the story of human sacrificing of Mayan is to justify to conquering of the American continent of Europeans and make the viewers feel good about themselves. Nothing more. This is no different from today demonizing Saddam Hussein so to justify the invasion of Iraq. The same with those animal survival program on TV, they are just a way to justify that this is the real world regulates itself. Winner takes all.
“Globalization has allowed the US to specialize in creative aspect of things, the production of the concept and ideas that is the scalable part of the products and increasing by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable components and assign them to those happy to be paid by the hour. There’s more money to be made in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell and Boeing can get paid for just thinking , organizing and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries t do the grunt work and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the non-creative technical grind.” This is a narrative of NNT about globalization.
Then yesterday, Bill Gates was testifying in front of US congress calling for more subsidies for the hi-tech industry. Complaining no enough engineers and technical students graduated from US universities, R&D costs too much, need more Hi-b visa for foreign workers.
NNT points this out as a way to explain the reason underlying the rule of “cumulative advantage” of rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. This also “explains why losing manufacturing jobs can be coupled with a rising standard of living.” NNT adds that “clearly the drawback of a world economy where the payoff goes to ideas is higher inequality among the idea generators together with a greater role for both opportunity and luck.”
This gives me the impression that NNT is really careless about the equity aspect of the “extremistan”. This is the nature of “extremistan” that he has repeatedly shown in the book Black Swan. His point is that there is nothing one can do about it.
The point of the whole book is that many people mix up the “mediocristan” with “extremistan”. In “extremistan” winner-take- all is the rule, the reward is scalable in this realm. He likes to stay away from the ethical aspect of this land of “extremistan”.
The only focus he makes is the epistemological aspect of the “extremistan” a
nd “mediocristan”.
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