Isegoria

In Martin Gardner’s taxonomy, Eric Falkenstein explains, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a classic crank:

1. They have a profound intellectual superiority complex.
2. They regard other researchers as idiotic, and always operate outside the peer review.
3. They believe there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur.
4. They attack only the biggest theories and scientific figures.
5. They attack only the biggest theories and scientific figures.

On his personal website, Taleb once described himself as being “an essayist, belletrist, literary-philosophical-mathematical flâneur,” a conception that some people finding endearing, me not so much. Literary-philosophical-mathematical types,- especially flâneurs – tend to be ‘full of themselves,’ supporting Gardner ’s characteristic #1. He prides himself on not submitting articles to refereed journals, considers most people who are indifferent to him as fools, and disdains editors, even spellcheckers (#2). He proudly notes that someone told him “in another time he would have been hanged [for what, inanity?].” Wilmott Magazine, a quant publication published by his colleague Paul Wilmott, wrote a fawning article about him in which they noted that he is “Wall Street’s principal dissident. Heretic! Calvin to finance’s Catholic Church” (#3). His website states his modest desire to understand chance from the viewpoint of “philosophy/epistemology, philosophy/ethics, mathematics, social science/finance, and cognitive science”, supporting #4. Lastly, for #5, he has gone so far as to print a glossary for his neologisms (eg, “epistemic arrogance” for “overconfidence”). In Martin Gardner’s taxonomy, Taleb is a classic crank.
[...]
Taleb is consistently amusing because his criticisms of others apply so neatly to himself: he claims he is an empiricist yet supports his points with anecdotes. The Black Swan makes fun of ‘experts’ with credentials, but he states he does not deign to engage with anyone not sufficiently expert; he states he is not interested in being a speaker-bureau commodity , but routinely travels the rubber chicken circuit; he derides forecasters who don’t give a full accounting of their prior forecasting history, yet delinks old remarks about Value-at-Risk, and recategorized his extinct Hedge Fund as a hedge, not a fund; he claims to prize humility, yet is most immodest; he argues against applying the law of large numbers, and also of inferring too much from small samples; people apply models to reality in biased manner, people naively extrapolate data without the appropriate theory; forward thinking is adaptive, forward thinking is error-laiden. Some people think inconsistency is a sign of genius; I think it just reflects confused thinking.

Read the whole thing. I skipped ahead to the punch-line. Falkenstein poked fun at Taleb earlier, too.

Posted in Economics, Eric Falkenstein, Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 2 Comments »