Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Not all self-labeled "libertarians" are sociopaths, misanthropes, or self-centered narcissists; not all sociopaths, misanthropes, & self-centered narcissists are libertarians.
But the intersection is high! Good thread.

[Princ Pol: How to purge libertarianism from these psychos] https://t.co/MKu3CXta4Y

Remember that what will work in the future must not make a lot of sense now. A lot of what makes sense (in naive first order logic) has already been tried --and failed.

@rorysutherland

Beautiful thread.
Entropy it is. https://t.co/0HMPlagqK9

‘A breakthrough book. Wonderfully applicable to everything in life, and funny as hell.’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is an outstanding book on the side effects of interventionism, written in extremely elegant prose and with maximal clarity. It documents how people find arguments couched in moralistic terms to intervene in complex systems they don't understand. These interventions trigger endless chains of unintended consequences --consequences for the victims, but none for the interventionistas, allowing them to repeat the mistake again and again.
Puri, as an insider, outlines the principles and legal mechanisms, then runs through the events of the past few years since the Iraq invasion; each one of his chapters are models of concision, presenting the story of Ukraine, Syria, Lybia, and Yemen, among others, as standalone briefings to the uninitiated. It was high time that somebody in international affairs has approached the problem of "iatrogenics", i.e. harm done by the healer.
This book should be mandatory reading to every student and practitioner of foreign affairs.

This is a must read as it presents a comprehensive set of the principles and axioms behind neo-classical economics. Binmore is a mathematician, hence everything is mapped properly, clearly, and thoroughly.
I spent several days in a seminar with Binmore and was surprised to discover, from his arguments, that much of the criticism against the foundations of decision theory are strawman. For the theory doesn't say what people think it says. It may have some problems (such as knowledge of probability and understanding of future payoffs) but not the problems discussed in the behavioral and heterodox literature that appear to be violated by people in their experiments.

Binmore writes the following gem: "Nor does the theory [Revealed Preferences] insist that people are selfish, as its critics mischievously maintain. It has no difficulty in modeling the kind of saintly folk who would sell the shirt off their back rather than see a baby cry".

Binmore doesn't say it explicitly, but hints that even the highly influential critiques of Amartya Sen in "Rational Fools" and elsewhere appear to be a bit strawmannish.

The book is short and dense enough to be a reference.

Very clear exposition, does the math without getting lost in the details. Although many of the concepts of the introductory first 100 pages can be found elsewhere, they are presented with remarkable cut-to-the-chase clarity.

Very comprehensive, sufficiently technical to get most of the plumbing behind machine learning. Very useful as a reference book (actually, there is no other complete reference book).

The authors are the real thing (Tibshirani is the one behind the LASSO regularization technique).

Uses some mathematical statistics without the burdens of measure theory and avoids the obvious but complicated proofs.

I own two copies of this edition, one for the office, one for my house, and the authors generously provide the PDF for travelers like me.

I will write a longer review, but this is a monument, not just a book. And the beginning of a new cultural program.

On a scale of 0 to 100, paternity tests count as 99.99 and written/oral history should count for .01. Apply that to populations. That’s plain statistics/probability. We are seeing science in action: information theory displaces BS, the handwaving just so stories we got from historians.
(A longer review to come).

As a practitioner of probability, I've had to read many books on the subject. Most are linear combinations of other books and ideas rehashed without real understanding that the idea of probability harks back to the Greek pisteuo (credibility) [and pithanon that led to probabile in latin] and pervaded classical thought. Almost all of these writers made the mistake to think that the ancients were not into probability. And most books such as "Against the Gods" are not even wrong about the notion of probability: odds on coin flips are a mere footnote. Same with current experiments with psychology of probability. If the ancients were not into computable probabilities, it was not because of theology, but because they were not into highly standardized games. They dealt with complex decisions, not merely simplified and purified probability. And they were very sophisticated at it.

The author is both a mathematician and a philosopher, not a philosopher who took a calculus class hence has a shallow idea of combinatorics and feels dominated by the subject, something that plagues the subject of the philosophy of probability.

This book stands above, way above the rest: I've never seen a deeper exposition of the subject, as this text covers, in addition to the mathematical bases, the true philosophical origin of the notion of probability. Finally, Franklin covers matters related to ethics and contract law, such as the works of the medieval thinker Pierre de Jean Olivi, that very few people discuss today.