http://agnosticism.tribe.net/thread/d5b29a0e-f46b-4ba9-a23d-c4dc17bb8ae8?format=rss Tribe.net. Local Connections http://agnosticism.tribe.net/thread/d5b29a0e-f46b-4ba9-a23d-c4dc17bb8ae8#88a22958-4c77-411d-b431-dc754719c0a1 The following paragraph (with the above title) appears on page 291 of Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. “I am most irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst—those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against the economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don’t go to bishops when they fell ill: their first stop is the doctor’s. But we stop by the offices of many pseudo-scientists and ‘experts’ without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though, as we saw in Chapter 17.” Taleb is *not* *not* *not* endorsing religious belief in any way. He is a thoroughgoing skeptic. His complaint is that too many people who pride themselves on being skeptical of religion are *not* skeptical *enough* about sciences that predict the future or explain the past. Earlier in the book Taleb cites findings showing how *badly* securities analysts actually perform, and how economists fare little better than cabdrivers in predicting the economy, yet “informed” people keep employing securities analysts and economists and invest their own money based on such forecasts. (Taleb worked for years as a “mathematical trader.”) Taleb argues that “soft areas” such as history and the social sciences—any narrative-dependent study—should be downgraded “to a level slightly above aesthetics and entertainment.” (Page 171) How is it that we can *know* that the future is fundamentally unpredictable (-and that the past is thereby harder to understand than historians suggest) and yet *still* go to specialists in such prediction (-such as war planners, economists, and securities analysts)? Not only do we go to them, we *pay* them! And we let their judgment influence our behavior. And when the investment fails, the war drags on, or the weather ruins the crop, everyone acts as if their predictions were really sound but no one could have foreseen *what actually happened*. Well, if you can’t do that, then what *are* you predicting? In a word, how things will go if everything goes as expected (-which, for the record, never happens.) Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:42:59 GMT http://agnosticism.tribe.net/thread/d5b29a0e-f46b-4ba9-a23d-c4dc17bb8ae8#88a22958-4c77-411d-b431-dc754719c0a1 $item.owner.firstName 2008-07-23T15:42:59Z