Especially since he's not going to starve for evidence-less anti-GMO policies. I'd like to see him name who should starve for the precautionary principle--would he?

I'm not up on recent agriculture data but I seem to recall that even before the rise of GMO the US alone produced enough surplus wheat to feed a large portion of the rest of the world. Is GMO necessary to prevent starvation, or is it more a way for agribusiness to patent the food supply?

This doesn't answer your question, but many farmers are happy to plant GMOs because they have a different risk profile than non GMO.

(For instance, Roundup Ready crops get planted because farmers prefer the risk profile, not from lack of other seed)

In Punjab we believe that the much of these farmer suicides and issues are related to genetically modified organisms.

https://www.rt.com/news/206787-monsanto-india-farmers-suicid...

> Monsanto, which has just paid out $2.4 million to US farmers, settling one of many lawsuits it’s been involved in worldwide, is also facing accusations that its seeds are to blame for a spike in suicides by India farmers.

> The accusations have not transformed into legal action so far, but criticism of Monsanto has been mounting, blaming the giant company for contributing to over 290,000 suicides by Indian farmers over the last 20 years.

http://naturalsociety.com/farmers-in-india-reject-gm-crops-a...

> Farmers in India are having doubts that genetically modified cotton is providing much benefit after a whitefly attack ravaged their fields.

> The whitefly attack on the Bt cotton variety in Punjab and Haryana reportedly contributed to the suicides of at least 3 farmers around the city of Bhatinda and tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets to demand state aid. [1]

So no, actually, we are most certainly free to reject genetically modified crops.

So why is there such a strong lobby against GMO labeling laws?

I've seen a few reasons that make sense;

1. GMO is really really hard to define. Figuring out what would need to be labeled would be ripe for manipulation. (i.e. is material genetically inserted from the same species, like doubling up a promoter region, GMO? Or if you discover something through a GM but recreate it 'naturally', is that still considered GM?)

2. The average consumer knows very little science, they'll likely avoid products that are labeled GM, whether or not it makes any sense to do so. Handicapping a potentially important technology to appease the scientifically ignorant seems like pretty bad policy.

From my perspective, opt-in initiatives like the non-GMO project are a better way to handle the labeling requirements.

That's a really good question. Surprisingly, I don't think there's just the one simple explanation - that it's regulatory capture based in the activities of lobbyists.

I think it's also a reaction to the fairly draconian anti-tobacco lobby from say, 1980 until the United States v. Phillip Morris decision. This is part of the Prohibtionist American anti-pattern.

When I first started reading I actually thought the article was about backslash against him.

He isn't, give him a chance, he's great and absolutely reputable.

There were discussions about him on Wikipedia. He used to run a hedge fund, one set up so that huge market swings were a win, but in ordinary years, it lost money. He makes a big point about how well they did in 2008, the year of the big crash. But he won't release the figures for other years, and his supporters were annoyed when unofficial figures for other-year losses were quoted in Wikipedia. It's not clear the fund was a win over the years. Except for the hedge fund manager, who gets a percentage of the amount invested plus a percentage of wins, without deductions for losses. (2% of the fund and 20% of profits are typical. It's great to be a hedge fund manager. A hedge fund investor, not so much.)

This is an issue because his whole "black swan theory" is based on the assumption that markets underprice unlikely events. You can buy options which are way out of the money quite cheaply. (If you want to bet that the price of oil will triple next month, the offered odds are very good.) But other traders don't agree. If this strategy worked well, of course, lots of traders would be using it.

So, having made some money by convincing people his "black swan theory" was worth backing, he's now written a whole shelf of books applying it to everything.

The math for his book is needed in Silent Risk.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIR1o1dnk5ZmRaaGs...

So he became independently wealthy after working only seven years @ wallstreet after his family lost their fortune in the lebanese civil war, he's rumored to be worth 30-50m minimally and possibly much more. He pretty much gamed his life right, and that's fairly impressive. Good epistemology if you ask me.

Empirica shut down because Nassim had throat cancer, if you look at how much Universa is now worth (Spitznagels fund) that's a good proxy for his techniques as it was made with the Exact same people in Nassim's fund.

Uh no, Edward Thorpe had one of the highest returns on wall street ever and was actively researching what Taleb was talking about, Thorpe absolutely knows what he was talking about, i've seen him say it in at least two interviews. Thorpe's quote is quoted at length is bottom.

For tail events(black swan events). Paul Embrechts and C. Kluppelberg cite him, she cites him in her recent book on Risk and i'm sure she has cited him elsewhere.

Robert Frey teaches Nassim's courses alongside him and was James Simon's partner at Renaissance technologies(their medallion fund makes 71% year over year 92-2014 pre-fees) and 35-41% after fees. Frey is worth 50m himself and stopped participating in that game as he thought he had enough money and became a professor at Stony Brook.

He knows exactly what he is talking about. Please stop trying to make someone reputable who absolutely is.

> Margaret Towle: In that regard, it does sound like you are working on some interesting projects. What are some of the areas, or the next problem, that you plan on tackling?

> Edward Thorp: Most recently I’ve been thinking about “black swan” 21 insurance. Just to use the terminology from Nassim Taleb’s famous book, there are two worlds you can think about. One he called the world of “Mediocristan” in which standard statistics—the kind of statistics you see in the physical sciences, things that behave fairly reasonably—apply. Th e log-normal world of Black-Scholes is Mediocristan. Th en there’s the world of “Extremistan,” where you get fat tails 22 and black swans and huge upside or downside moves periodically—the crash of 1987, the 2008–2009 period, and so forth. Th e question I’ve been thinking about is a simpl one: Suppose that you can construct a portfolio that has three things in it—Treasury bills, a stock index, and options on that stock index; can you use the options to get a better ayoff structure than if you didn’t use options in that mix? Traditional investing, that is, a long index with any excess money going into Treasury bills just for super simplicity, would be modifi ed by adding options. Th ey could be way out of the money, they could be in the money, or whatever, and you have the constraint that you can’t lose everything. So you can’t put it all in options because if the market went down enough, you would lose all that you had invested. You just buyan option at Black-Scholes prices, let the clock run for one time period, see what happens, and do it again. Th en you ana-lyze how the short-term and long-term payoff characteristics behave. I’m in the middle of looking at that now to see if we can get anything better by using options. It’s been very inter-esting so far, but we’re not done.