A Comment On The Anointed

      107 Comments on A Comment On The Anointed

Just wanted to share this because it’s so well put.  An email alert from Reason magazine included a link to a Facebook post by Nassim Taleb that perfectly describes The Anointed, even though he doesn’t use that specific label.

Nassim Who?  Yeah, I had to look him up.  Here’s what Wikipedia says about him:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.

And here’s part of his Facebook post:

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Perfect. Now I have to go order at least one of his books.

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107 thoughts on “A Comment On The Anointed”

  1. Susan Herd

    I don’t get it.
    In Australia, all our swans are black.
    We’d have to talk about white swans! 😉

  2. JP

    Add me to the list of people recommending Nassim Taleb.

    I’d start with ‘Antifragile’ – a great read.

    Oh and Art De Vany is a friend of Taleb’s and is mentioned approvingly in Antifragile as the ‘godfather of the paleo ancestral lifestyle’.

  5. WW

    FYI, I don’t remember the source, but I am pretty sure that Taleb is either Paleo, or follows a nutritional belief very close to Paleo. May have come across it in one of his books. Now I have to search for it.

  6. WW

    FYI, I don’t remember the source, but I am pretty sure that Taleb is either Paleo, or follows a nutritional belief very close to Paleo. May have come across it in one of his books. Now I have to search for it.

  7. tw

    James Altucher had a great podcast with him about Antifragile as a primer.
    I highly recommend Talebs writing.

  8. tw

    James Altucher had a great podcast with him about Antifragile as a primer.
    I highly recommend Talebs writing.

  9. NY

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb — ‘The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.’

    1. Tom Naughton

      Whew, I’m safe. Never tried heroin, my diet is on the low-carb side, and I’m contractor.

    2. Walter Bushell

      The last addiction is the most harmful to the people around you at least for the part of the upper echelon that don’t get the bulk of their pay through bonuses and stock options, which have their own problems.

      Bonuses and stock options skew decisions toward reckless gambling with other people’s money. Heads you win, tales the customers lose. If you are running a mutual fund and you are a bottom performer amongst your cow orkers, you only chance to retain you job is to full on gamble otherwise you are eliminated and they hire someone else to run the fund.

      And then there is 2 and 20 — 2% management fee and 20% of the gain. Talk about head I win
      tails you lose!

  10. NY

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb — ‘The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.’

    1. Tom Naughton Post author

      Whew, I’m safe. Never tried heroin, my diet is on the low-carb side, and I’m contractor.

    2. Walter Bushell

      The last addiction is the most harmful to the people around you at least for the part of the upper echelon that don’t get the bulk of their pay through bonuses and stock options, which have their own problems.

      Bonuses and stock options skew decisions toward reckless gambling with other people’s money. Heads you win, tales the customers lose. If you are running a mutual fund and you are a bottom performer amongst your cow orkers, you only chance to retain you job is to full on gamble otherwise you are eliminated and they hire someone else to run the fund.

      And then there is 2 and 20 — 2% management fee and 20% of the gain. Talk about head I win
      tails you lose!

  12. Walter Bushell

    p values discussed. p<.05 weak evidence amongst many comments.

    Tangental perhaps to discussion, but important in how the anointed get
    away with what they do. "Oily to rise and oily to bed." as Capt. Peabody
    would say.

    The ASA Board was also stimulated by highly visible discussions over the last few years. For
    example, ScienceNews (Siegfried, 2010) wrote: “It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The ‘scientific
    method’ of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation.” A
    November, 2013, article in Phys.org Science News Wire (2013) cited “numerous deep flaws” in
    null hypothesis significance testing. A ScienceNews article (Siegfried, 2014) on February 7,
    2014, said “statistical techniques for testing hypotheses…have more flaws than Facebook’s
    privacy policies.” A week later, statistician and “Simply Statistics” blogger Jeff Leek responded.

    “The problem is not that people use P-values poorly,” Leek wrote, “it is that the vast majority of data analysis is not performed by people properly trained to perform data analysis” (Leek, 2014).

    http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108

    To cite this article: Ronald L. Wasserstein & Nicole A. Lazar (2016): The ASA’s
    statement on p-values: context, process, and purpose, The American Statistician, DOI:
    10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108
    To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108

  14. Walter Bushell

    p values discussed. p<.05 weak evidence amongst many comments.

    Tangental perhaps to discussion, but important in how the anointed get
    away with what they do. "Oily to rise and oily to bed." as Capt. Peabody
    would say.

    The ASA Board was also stimulated by highly visible discussions over the last few years. For
    example, ScienceNews (Siegfried, 2010) wrote: “It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The ‘scientific
    method’ of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation.” A
    November, 2013, article in Phys.org Science News Wire (2013) cited “numerous deep flaws” in
    null hypothesis significance testing. A ScienceNews article (Siegfried, 2014) on February 7,
    2014, said “statistical techniques for testing hypotheses…have more flaws than Facebook’s
    privacy policies.” A week later, statistician and “Simply Statistics” blogger Jeff Leek responded.

    “The problem is not that people use P-values poorly,” Leek wrote, “it is that the vast majority of data analysis is not performed by people properly trained to perform data analysis” (Leek, 2014).

    http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108

    To cite this article: Ronald L. Wasserstein & Nicole A. Lazar (2016): The ASA’s
    statement on p-values: context, process, and purpose, The American Statistician, DOI:
    10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108
    To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108

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