POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Who to punch first….

There's Taleb, who says true things that everyone already knows, but pretends he's a great seer. Also, the true things he tells you are absolutely useless (in terms of helping one see what actions are needed).

There's Gladwell, who spins a great just-so-story, and tells you stuff that would be useful, if said stuff were at all true.

Both make a lot of money in speaking fees and royalties.

The problem w/ Malcolm is 1: he doesn't know much about anything and 2: he's gullible. He never asks the questions that more educated people would ask. So Gladwell is extremely easy to attack. Steve Sailer is probably his most tenacious nemesis (and much better than most Gladwell critics when it comes to picking Malcolm apart on sports topics). My first real inkling of Gladwell's shallowness came when he wrote this misleading piece on pensions -- Jane Galt/Megan McArdle critiqued it (as did I here and here). Then I realized his modus operandi was pretty much the same across the board. Spin some kind of story around individuals, why "conventional thinking" was wrong, and swallow whatever story from advocate with some plausible-but-bullshit (usually irrelevant) explanation. Yes, it does take 10,000 hours or whatever to become tippy-top in whatever field but a: that's irrelevant to the vast majority of people out there (there are billions of us, you know - just being good at something is okay) and b: you can polish shit for 10,000 hours and it's nothing but a shiny ball of shit. Me practicing golf for 10K hours would not have made me into Tiger Woods. JEEZ.

Taleb has lots of critics, too, but he's harder to attack because his bullshit is less obvious. He usually tells a lot of truth. But why he's supposedly such a guru amongst everybody....not quite as compelling. He is usually taking stuff that's pretty well-known amongst the quants, and when it goes wrong in the way that quants know it can go wrong, he pops up and says "Told ya so!" in front of the non-numerate public. Booking Taleb can make your group seem smart in a way that booking Gladwell does not (because Gladwell obviously does not understand numbers in any real way.)

Anyway, I'll throw in Marilyn vos Savant as the third "public figure" who sticks in my craw, but she's not been in the public eye recently. Her stupidity was cemented for me when she decided her supposedly highest IQ made her competent to opine on math well beyond most mathematicians. She got a well-deserved drubbing amongst mathematicians (revenge for the Monty Hall problem screw-up, which she did get correct, but to be fair to the mathematicians, the problem was originally ill-posed), and slunk back to her brain-teasers, where she belonged.

Only if Taleb and Gladwell could slink back into obscurity, that would be great.

Yes, I'm feeling grumpy. I've got a few other nemeses, but those are my public ones. They don't even know I exist, which is fine by me.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.