Re:Skin in the Game – chapter drafts by Nassim Taleb
by api on Thursday May 19, 2016 @12:40PM
(#11731478)
We are surrounded by some amount of randomness, but quite a bit of complexity and chaotic/nonlinear behavior that can look like randomness but does in fact contain information.
A PRNG function is an extreme example; if you know its state and the function you can predict its output precisely. A PRNG is 'pseudo' because it is not in fact random at all.
Evolution is a learning (information transfer) process. If most of our inputs and data were random, evolution would have nothing to "grab onto" and complex stable genomes and phenotypes would never have developed. Life would never have risen above the level of archaebacteria, if at all.
I've never been impressed by Taleb. I think his popularity comes from providing a pseudo-intellectual gloss for the popular "hater" prejudice that success is random and thus wholly undeserved.
(I do support the existence of a welfare state, but for reasons that differ dramatically from Taleb's. I do not support the precautionary principle, which is absurd and dangerous and reduces to an argument against any form of innovation or action.)
A PRNG function is an extreme example; if you know its state and the function you can predict its output precisely. A PRNG is 'pseudo' because it is not in fact random at all.
Evolution is a learning (information transfer) process. If most of our inputs and data were random, evolution would have nothing to "grab onto" and complex stable genomes and phenotypes would never have developed. Life would never have risen above the level of archaebacteria, if at all.
E.g. : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6844/abs/412331a0...
I've never been impressed by Taleb. I think his popularity comes from providing a pseudo-intellectual gloss for the popular "hater" prejudice that success is random and thus wholly undeserved.
(I do support the existence of a welfare state, but for reasons that differ dramatically from Taleb's. I do not support the precautionary principle, which is absurd and dangerous and reduces to an argument against any form of innovation or action.)