Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “The math comes first, words later.”

Re:Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “The math comes first, words later.” by shas3 on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @03:54PM (#9306365)

I think the principal critique of Nowak et al.'s work is based on how it gets the biology wrong, not the math. Chicago evolutionary biologist (and prolific public intellectual) Jerry Coyne, reviews a recent paper that challenges Nowak et al.'s paper [1]. The answer to Taleb's weird post is within Coyne's review of Liao et al.:

> As I (Coyne) noted at the time (of Nowak et al.'s publication), their (Nowak et al.'s) dismissal of relatedness and kin selection from their model seemed bizarre, since they didn’t vary relatedness in their model. If you don’t do that, how can you say it’s unimportant in evolving eusociality?

"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science.

On a possibly related note, Taleb has recently been on a strange anti-Dawkins spree on Twitter and elsewhere [2]. Taleb has also done some weird anti-GMO bashing in the past [3].

[1] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/new-pape...

[2] twitter.com/nntaleb

[3] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-18/news...

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Re:Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “The math comes first, words later.” by tensorproduct on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @04:02PM (#9306431)

//"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science.

Very much agree. By this standard, one could put "1+1=2" as an appendix to every article you ever write and then defend them as having valid math, regardless of the content of the rest of the paper.

I find this most surprising coming from Taleb, because I thought that one of his principal arguments in the world of finance was that rigourous mathematical models are of limited use in understanding complicated real world systems. Maybe I've misunderstood him, but he seems to have changed his tune.

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