His argument is to reduce mobility in the short term to combat the uncertainty and unknowns associated with the Coronavirus. The R0 (reproductive ratio) of the virus is increasing and it’ll probably take longer to know how much havoc it’ll reap.
It’s unclear to what level the paper is referring (reduce flights on a global level, between cities in China or people leaving areas where the contagion started)
5 references and no quantitative treatment of a very very serious topic like nCoV. Taleb can publish whatever, but why is this grabbing HN front-page ?
I never understood this guy's following. Everything I've seen from him is intellectual bro-flexing, physical bro-flexing, or buzzword bingo.
Here's the bottom line, from the conclusion:
> Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.
In other words, isolate the infected. This is not new, nor is the idea of today's highly connected world causing diseases to spread faster than in the last century.
This is scary: "We estimated that the mean R0 ranges from 3.30 (95%CI: 2.73-3.96) to 5.47 (95%CI: 4.16-7.10) associated with 0-fold to 2-fold increase in the reporting rate."
Taleb's prominence is baffling to me. I've read all his books, and tried hard to figure out why people I respect believe he's an important thinker. I just can't see it. Almost everything he says sets off my bullshit alarm.
Here we have him in typical form. The point of the paper seems to be to argue that we can reduce transmission by reducing contact (obvious), and concludes that we should do this pre-emptively at large scale worldwide (never going to happen, only good for alarmist headlines). This is exactly his formula when treating risk: start with a total platitude (rare events happen), and spin it out through huge over-reach into a headline-grabbing book (black swan! boo!).
The other thing about Taleb is that he's frequently way out over his skis on on the facts. Here, he states that the "selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens" makes "extinction certain" as if he's stating an undisputed fact. But instead of citing a virology paper, he cites an interesting but not very relevant evolutionary dynamics paper that draws on a particular mathematical model. In fact, the real world is complicated, and if anything virology tells us the opposite: zoonotic viruses tend to become less virulent over time, as the tradeoff between transmission and lethality is optimised. Almost nobody working in the area of virology would agree with the alarmist nonsense that this paper takes as axiomatic.
If anyone is interested in hearing how actual virologists talk about this outbreak, the superb This Week In Virology podcast has just released an episode that dives into this in depth:
He is wrong in just about every case, yet he is right in the aggregate. We are terrible at predicting high impact low probability events and waste our time worrying about low impact high probability events.
Put another way, if we were Turkeys our risk analysis would be modelling how much food the farmer is bringing us every day. And we don't know about Thanks Giving.
>start with a total platitude (rare events happen),
That's not exactly what he says. He doesn't care about whether an event is rare or frequent, but only in combination with its consequences/impact. His main point is that we're not good at assessing the risk/costs of rare but high-impact events, that our statistical and modelling tools are insufficient for that domain too, and thus we tend to be complacent in our decision making about them. He implicitly argues it's not a platitude because we keep getting it wrong on large scales.
I think what he's mostly selling is a feeling of superiority. "I'm so much smarter than those sheep. Muh black swans and fat tailed distributions". A person susceptible to this is definitely going to buy more books to find new ways to feel superior to the "masses".
To be fair, I agree with his view on the need to have skin in the game and occasionally he has interesting insights like the decisive stubborn minority.
Readit News
It’s unclear to what level the paper is referring (reduce flights on a global level, between cities in China or people leaving areas where the contagion started)
Here's the bottom line, from the conclusion:
> Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.
In other words, isolate the infected. This is not new, nor is the idea of today's highly connected world causing diseases to spread faster than in the last century.
Here we have him in typical form. The point of the paper seems to be to argue that we can reduce transmission by reducing contact (obvious), and concludes that we should do this pre-emptively at large scale worldwide (never going to happen, only good for alarmist headlines). This is exactly his formula when treating risk: start with a total platitude (rare events happen), and spin it out through huge over-reach into a headline-grabbing book (black swan! boo!).
The other thing about Taleb is that he's frequently way out over his skis on on the facts. Here, he states that the "selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens" makes "extinction certain" as if he's stating an undisputed fact. But instead of citing a virology paper, he cites an interesting but not very relevant evolutionary dynamics paper that draws on a particular mathematical model. In fact, the real world is complicated, and if anything virology tells us the opposite: zoonotic viruses tend to become less virulent over time, as the tradeoff between transmission and lethality is optimised. Almost nobody working in the area of virology would agree with the alarmist nonsense that this paper takes as axiomatic.
If anyone is interested in hearing how actual virologists talk about this outbreak, the superb This Week In Virology podcast has just released an episode that dives into this in depth:
http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
Put another way, if we were Turkeys our risk analysis would be modelling how much food the farmer is bringing us every day. And we don't know about Thanks Giving.
That's not exactly what he says. He doesn't care about whether an event is rare or frequent, but only in combination with its consequences/impact. His main point is that we're not good at assessing the risk/costs of rare but high-impact events, that our statistical and modelling tools are insufficient for that domain too, and thus we tend to be complacent in our decision making about them. He implicitly argues it's not a platitude because we keep getting it wrong on large scales.
Fwiw his best short problem statement may be this essay in Edge.org from ~10yrs ago: https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-the-...
To be fair, I agree with his view on the need to have skin in the game and occasionally he has interesting insights like the decisive stubborn minority.
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