Nassim Taleb has honed his replies to common questions:
Why did economists get the crisis so wrong?
That’s like asking why fortune-tellers don’t get things right. Their tools don’t work, but they continue to use them. And the Nobel committee gives prizes to people who aren’t scientists.
Which is what I’m saying about geneticists — their tools don’t work (also here) and the Nobel committee fails to notice (e.g., the recent award for teleomere research, which hasn’t yet had practical value).
You have a great phrase in The Black Swan: “Don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.” Is that still happening?
Worse. I was talking about Bernanke – they’ve given him a bigger bus.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
The micro-econ and the time and motion guys have such tight math and their tools work so well that it seduces macro-economists into thinking that surely they should be able to duplicate the same effect of theory to practice.
But micro, in a way, is measurement that just happens to predict.
There’s a fierce skepticism in Taleb’s thinking. He loves to tear down systems of thought
That’s fine. There’s a role for him.
But ultimately we do need to make tough policy decisions and to do that, we have to build systems of thought. As William James argued, it’s important to believe in something instead of being frozen by skepticism.
Taleb’s ideas are useful, unlike those of most skeptics. He used them to choose investments. I was influenced by them in my ideas about how science progresses (see my medical hypotheses paper). My theory of scientific progress has consequences. However his useful ideas can’t be expressed as funny one-liners.
The human propensity to riducule new ideas is not a new idea; i.e. Kuhn. What is surprising is a human being in the 21st century daring to challenge out-dated thinking. The financhial disaster of 2008 and the war in Afghanistan prove that events have overtaken our ability to be responsible. It is now only our ability to react to events that has overtaken our ability to see what lies before us. And that puts us all in danger.
As I read in some book, the opposition to any great idea comes in 3 stages:
1. It will never work.
2. It is trivial.
3. That is what we have been doing all along anyway.