Charlatan!

My two least favourite "public intellectuals" are Niall Ferguson and Nassim Taleb. I've posted several times in response to things that Ferguson has written. After an listening to an excruciating interview with Taleb on the otherwise wonderful Planet Money podcast, I wanted to post a grand critique of Taleb to try to debunk the idea that hes' some kind of "deep thinker." Since nobody cares and I actually have real work I ought to be doing, I was very pleased to find this blog post which nails Taleb quite effectively.

Taleb is merely setting himself up as some sort of heretical alpha monkey of the quants for stating the obvious, the misleading, and occasionally the gratuitously wrong-headed and untrue.

I have no idea what an "alpha monkey of the quants" might mean, though I do like the sound of it. But if you listen to the Planet Money interview, you will see what Locklin (the blogger) means in the rest of the sentence.

Locklin also quotes Taleb as saying " Our research shows that economic papers that rely on mathematics are not scientifically valid." This might be obvious, if "rely on mathematics" means excluding any form of evidence. For example: Edward Wilson defines science as the "systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories." So math without reference to knowledge of the world is not science. It's math. But if "rely on" means to use as a necessary part, then this quote falls into the category of "gratuitously wrong-headed and untrue." Locklin has a great response:

I agree that many economics papers are silly. Since economic papers often involve math, his reasoning seems to be something along the lines of “we must do away with mathematics and instead base economic policy on chicken entrails and pixie dust.”