11 ms·

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is enraged by this!

• rq1 7y ago
  Why would he be? I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
  • syndacks 7y ago
    >Why would he be? Read Black Swan, by NNT. His thesis is that the most significant impacts on an individual and/or a collective are the function of outliers or "Black Swans". In a Malcolm Gladwell kind of way, he uses a bunch of anecdata to prove his thesis. It's a pretty good book I suppose, but it was also before the all the faux-philosophy Malcolm Gladwell type books became a thing. >I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. What exactly do you mean by that? In all sincerity, I think you misused an idiom or at least didn't make a clear connection as to why you chose that one.
    • tajd 7y ago
      > In a Malcolm Gladwell kind of way, he uses a bunch of anecdata to prove his thesis. In my opinion this is perhaps the best 1 line description of his work in general. I think there are some interesting ideas which are worth discussing, but sometimes his attitude and use of "anecdata" tires me out.
    • DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      loved all his books. he literally captures the problem with this approach in a single "book title" (3 words total) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]