Monday, August 22, 2011

Taleb Bans Statistica da Puta

A mild guy: "The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system"

Who practices what he preaches: " Professor Bernanke indeed found plenty of economic explanations—what I call the narrative fallacy—with graphs, jargon, curves, the kind of facade-of-knowledge that you find in economics textbooks. (This is the kind of glib, snake-oil facade of knowledge—even more dangerous because of the mathematics—that made me, before accepting the new position in NYU's engineering department, verify that there was not a single economist in the building.)"

10 comments:

Tecumseh said...

Mediocristan corresponds to "random walk" style randomness that you tend to find in regular textbooks (and in popular books on randomness). Extremistan corresponds to a "random jump" one. The first kind I can call "Gaussian-Poisson", the second "fractal" or Mandelbrotian.

Of course, Herr Rott is all enamored of Gaussian and Poisson distributions, and couldn't care less about fractals. Then again, he sank all his cash into Bear Stearns in late 2007.

Mr roT said...

Where's the PDE?

No PDE, no math. No math, no physics. No physics, no nothing, go back to the integers and the Bible.

Arelcao Akleos said...

Ja, Herr Kroneckerott.

Mr roT said...

1, 2, 3, ...

Tecumseh said...

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gatt gemacht, alles andere ist Rotterwerk.

Mr roT said...

Gatt? Damn.

Tecumseh said...

Mein Gott. What a typo.

Arelcao Akleos said...

Das große Gatt-sby

Tecumseh said...

Das große Gattorottade.

Mr roT said...

Gatterdömmerung.