We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those "risk experts" in the economic domain who fight the previous war) --these are the ones now trying to impose the solutions on us. But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the same conclusions as the ones endorsed by anti-environmentalists, pro-market fundamentalists, quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, super-Green, since we do not know what we are harming with now. That's the sound policy under ignorance and epistemic opacity. To those who say "we have no proof that we are harming nature", a sound response is "we have no proof that we are not harming nature either" --the burden of the proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.

One practical solution I came up with, based on the nonlinearitities in the damage (under the assumption that harm increases disproportionally with the quantities released), and using the same mathematical reasoning as the one that led to my opposing the "too big" concept, is to spread the damage across pollutants --should we need to pollute, of course. Let us carry a thought experiment.

Case 1: you give the patient a dose of cyanide, hemlock, or some poisonous substance, assuming they are equally harmful.

Case 2: you give the patient a tenth of a dose of ten such substances, for the same total amount of poison.

Clearly we can see that Case 2, by spreading the poison ingested across substances, is at the worst equally harmful (if all the poisonous substances act in the same way), and at the best close to harmless to the patient.

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[I translate liberally: Horace saw that he who is well treated by the muses (...) will despise the honors, the Olympic Medals, the rewards of a common life. He will have to resist the persecutions of the envious (...) to which his retirement & solitude will expose him more than others. From this Holy Mountain where true erudition placed his residence, he observes the rest of the world with compassion and with a profound disdain of the transactions & activities of the vulgar.]

Huet despised Montaigne --whom he called Montagne.

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[The very same week I wrote my central piece (totally unrelated) on convexity, optionality and error --decision and higher order effects. On that in 12 months or so. Coincidentally (or not) this rush of ideas came when I started my internet diet]

Once the math was on piece of paper, Raphael and I realized he had a devastating result in its consequences. Devastating. More than Bertrand Russel /Gödel problem, more than anything. Why more than Gödel ? Because Gödel does not stop us from doing mathematics; this can stop us from calculating small probabilities and build real robustness.

A background: My problem is that epistemology since Aristotle was focused on the True/False, equipped with logical rules. Unusable, because you need to take account for consequences and probabilities. Once you ignore the diadic True/False, the entire architecture then collapses. As you probabilize it with credal states, (i.e. you have degrees of belief following the constraints of probabilities), you have a double problem of payoff (increased dimensionality) and problem of self reference (probabilities don't fall from the sky; they break down with rare events that have to have a strong a priori, and they are fragile in the tails). I had been struggling about the problem of self-reference by probability measures ever since I remember thinking about anything, thinking I could solve it without axiomatic set theory.

The Initial Problem

Dramatic changes in epistemology and logic when two steps are introduced:

a- The introduction of probability –when one switches from the simplistic Aristotelian “True/False” to degrees of belief, or credal probabilities.

b- The adding of consequence, or payoff, as the decision is no longer to be based on traditional True/False or “evidence” notions, but, rather, on total expected payoff, probabilities times consequences associated with them.

As one of the result of these two changes, the simplified, philistinified, academified, and glorified notion of “evidence” becomes useless. With Black Swans you act to protect yourself from the negative ones (or expose yourself to positive ones) even though you may have no evidence that they can take place) –we check people for weapons before boarding a plane even though we have no evidence that they are terrorists. This focus on off-the shelf commoditized notions such as “evidence” , we will see, is a problem with people who claim to use “rigor” yet go bust on the occasion. A probabilistic world has trouble with “proof” as it is, but in a Black Swan world things are a lot worse.

FIRST TREATMENT: Epimenides the Cretan (Taleb -Pilpel, 2002)

It is a problem of self reference by probability measures.

We can state it in the following way: If one needs data to obtain a probability distribution to gauge knowledge about the future behavior of the distribution from its past results, and if, at the same time, one needs a probability distribution to gauge data sufficiency and whether or not it is predictive of the future, then we are facing a severe regress loop. This is a problem of self reference akin to that of Epimenides the Cretan stating whether the Cretans are liars or not liars. Indeed, it is too uncomfortably close to the Epimenides situation, since a probability distribution is used to assess the degree of truth – but cannot reflect on its own degree of truth and validity. And, unlike many problems of self reference, ones related to risk assessment have severe consequences. It is more acute with small probabilities.

An Undecidability Theorem (Taleb-Douady, 2009 (2010))

Raphael Douady and I re-expressed the philosophical problem mathematically, and it appears vastly more devastating in its implication than the Gödel problem. At the time of writing, we produced a formal proof using mathematics, and a branch of mathematics called “measure theory” that was used by the French to put rigor behind mathematics of probability. The paper is temporarily called Undecidability theorem of probabilistic measures: On the inconsistency of estimating probabilites from a sample without binding a priori assumptions on the class of acceptable probabilities.

Take the basic question of probabilistic inference as follows: "given a set of observations, what are the most probable probability measures it was drawn from?" or else "what is the conditional probability that a given probability measure was the one drawn from, knowing the sample?" This question requires that an a priori probability measure be given on the space Ã(Â) of probability measures on Â. (a "probability measure" is a positive measure with total weight summing up to 1). In order to weaken this assumption, one can simply ask what is the "probability density function" (PDF) on the space Ã(Â)implicitly implied by a sample. Even this question requires a "natural" measure, such as the "Lebesgue measure" on Ã(Â), even though such a measure would not be finite (the total weight is infinite, but it is possible to compute a Radon-Nikodym density with respect to this measure).

The problem is that there is no "natural" probability measure on the space Ã(Â) because, this space being infinite dimensional; thanks to Riesz theorem, it is not locally compact, and this fact prevents the existence of a Lebesgue measure on the space itself. Consequently, unless one make a extremely strong a priori assumption that the set of "acceptable" measures is fully described by a finite number of parameters, the "basic" statistical question is meaningless.

            117- Nothing

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Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.

To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it.

The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a severe error because not only much of our knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge plays such a minor life that it is not even funny.

We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point. Let us see how.

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MEDICAL NOTES- Aggregation of notes on the history of medicine as I am writing my long chapter on iatrogenics.

103- The translational gap

How long can something be held as wrong before its practice is discontinued? A long, very long time, much longer than we think. We've know that "modern finance" and economics represented a danger to society [since 1961, with close to 400 blowup episodes including the crash of 1987] to no avail --and this blowup of the banking system will not bring any relief. Even the fact that I may have made the point in what may turn out to be the ALL TIME bestseller in economics and philosophy of science [ and the mother of all empirical evidence] might not help displace the charlatans. Some ideas from the history of Medicine (Medicina, soror philosophiae!).

Noga Arikha "Just Life in a Nutshell: Humours as common sense", in The Philosophical Forum Quarterly, XXXIX, 3:

When William Harvey demonstrated the mechanism of blood circulation in the 1620s, humoral theory and its related practices should have disappeared, because the anatomy and physiology on which it relied was incompatible with this picture of the organism. In fact, people continued to refer to spirits and humors, and doctors continued to prescribe phlebotomies, enemas, and cataplasms, for centuries more --even when it was established in the mid-1800, most notably by Louis Pasteur, that germs were the cause of disease.

See also Arikha's book (it was swallowed by my uncatalogued library so I am ...reordering it).

The most complete compendium is in Wooton Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates.

p 184 [...] why doctors for centuries imagined that their theories worked when they didn't; why there was a delay of more than two hundred years between the first experiments designed to disprove spontaneous generation and the final triumph of the alternative, the theory that living creatures always come from other living creatures; why there was a delay of two hundred years between the discovery of germs and the triumph of the germ theory of disease; why there was a delay of thirty years between the germ theory of putrefaction and the development of antisepsis; why there was a delay of sixty years between antisepsis and drug therapy. [he explains elsewhere that there was no money in microscopy, which delayed implementation...]

Elsewhere Wooton shows how surgeons resisted anesthesia (because it was considered cheating), how doctors in France were still bleeding patients at the end of the 19th century, yet: In 1851 [...] Dietl showed that bloodletting tripled the death rate in a pneumonia.

p 240- Pasteur had a sensible distrust of doctors. p 14 I took it for granted that in an open argument, good ideas would always defeat bad ideas. [...] Peer group pressure often halt progress in its track.[...] Despite the brilliant work of philosophers and historians of science, no one has really worked out how to write a history that takes account of this. p 293 Shapin tells us that "The Harvard biochemist L.J. Henderson [1878-1942] was supposed to have remarked "that it was only sometime between 1910 and 1912 ...that a random patient, with a random disease, consulting a doctor chosen at random, had, for the first time in the history of mankind, a better than 50-50 chance of profiting from the encounter."'

Also, something that explains why I am going nuts.

By 1861 [Semmelweiss] was denouncing those who had not adopted his views as murderers.

James Le Fanu: The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (1999) talks of "collective deception".

I call this the translational problem because of a great paper by Ioannides (my hero) et al. Life Cycle of Translational Research for Medical Interventions in Science (Sept 5, 2008) --they show how long it takes from initial scientific paper to implementation --and how the cycle is lengthening. But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.

New books on medical history: Gloria Origgi have me a book on Semmelweiss by ... Louis Ferdinand Celine! (merci mille fois). Also Francois Lebrun Se soigner autrefois Médecins, saints et sorciers aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles, Georges Vigarello Histoire des pratiques de santé, Jackie Pigeaud La maladie de l'ame, Collectif (Centre Jean Palerne): Rational et irrationel dans la médecine ancienne et médiévale. I also got a long paper by Gerd Gigerenzer on medical practice and conditional probability (I guess it is the misunderstanding of Type 2 error that is costing us so much).

Also I consider the work of Gary Taubes (and soon the book by Art DeVany) as documents in the history of medical errors.

***

Canguilhem wonders why it took so long to figure out iatrogenesis: "Quant a l'iatrogenese medicale, comment peut-on penser que les médecins aient attendu la deuxieme moitié du XXe siecle pour observer les effets secondaires" [Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Vrin, 1968, 1994].

Scribonius Largus: who accompanied Claudius, was interested in pharmacology but not interested in hidden causes.

Comme indices plaidant en faveur de cette orientation empirique chez Scribonius, on peut noter la place de choix acordée a la pharmacologie, le respect scrupuleux des auctores, de meme que l'absence d'interet pour la connaissance des choses cachées. [Joelle Jouanna-Bouchet, Scribonius Largus et Marcellus: entre rationnel et irrationnel, in Collectif, Rationnel et Irrationnel dans la médecine ancienne et médiévale, Publications de l'Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003].

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Telling people NOT to smoke seems to be the greatest medical contribution of the last 60 years. Druin Burch, in the recently published Taking the Medicine

The harmful effect of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of EVERY medical intervention developed since the war. (...) Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer" [emph. mine]

Life expectancy: Another problem. I keep hearing the fiction that medical practitioners doubled our life expectancy. Life expectancy increased because of 1) sanitation, 2) penicillin, 3) drop in crime. From the papers I see that medical practice may have contributed to 2-3 years of the increase, but again, depends where (cancer doctors might provide a positive contribution, family doctors a negative one) . Another fooled-by-randomness style mistake is to think that because life expectancy at birth was 30, that people lived 30 years: the distribution was massively skewed: the bulk of the deaths came from birth & childhood mortality. Conditional life expectancy was high --I do not know of many measurements (it should not be too hard) --just consider that Paleo men had no cancer, no tooth decay, almost no epidemics, no economists, and died of trauma. Perhaps legal enforcement contributed more than doctors to the increase in life .

60  Religion Protects You From Bad Science  --Medicine, Expert Problems, and the Rationality of Temples

I-Medicine

Nobody seems to notice that over the millennia religions (all religions) have saved people from death –because it protected them from doctors and “science”. Because of the illusion of control, we feel like “doing something” when facing a problem –“seeing an expert”, etc. If religion is at least neutral then it is a great way to stay out of harms’ way: science, faux-experts, quacks, etc.

Martial in his epigrams gives us an idea of the perceived expert problem in medicine in his time (i.e., the doctor causing more harm than expected, but exploiting his expert status):

Nuper erat medicus, nunc est uispillo Diaulus: 
   quod uispillo facit, fecerat et medicus I thought that Diaulus was a doctor not a caretaker –but for him it appears to be the same job.

Non habui febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo. I did not feel ill, Symmache; now I do (after your  ministrations).

Montaigne goes deeper. He reports on the attribution problem seen by the ancients –not too different from current stockbrokers & economists. Doctors claimed responsibility for success and blame failure on mother nature.

On demandoit à un Lacedemonien qui l'avoit fait vivre sain si long temps: L'ignorance de la medecine, respondit il. Et Adrian l'Empereur crioit sans cesse, en mourant, que la presse des medecins l'avoit tué. A Lacedaemonian was asked what had made him live so long; he answered “ignoring medecine". The Emperor Adrian continually exclaimed as he was dying that it was his doctors that had killed him.

Mais ils ont cet heur, selon Nicocles, que le soleil esclaire leur succez, et la terre cache leur faute; et, outre-cela, ils ont une façon bien avantageuse de se servir de toutes sortes d'evenemens, car ce que la fortune, ce que la nature, ou quelque autre cause estrangere (desquelles le nombre est infini) produit en nous de bon et de salutaire, c'est le privilege de la medecine de se l'attribuer. Tous les heureux succez qui arrivent au patient qui est soubs son regime, c'est d'elle qu'il les tient. Les occasions qui m'ont guery, moy, et qui guerissent mille autres qui n'appellent point les medecins à leurs secours, ils les usurpent en leurs subjects; et, quant aux mauvais accidents, ou ils les desavouent tout à fait, en attribuant la coulpe au patient par des raisons si vaines qu'ils n'ont garde de faillir d'en trouver tousjours assez bon nombre de telles... [Attribution Problem]

Effectively you hear accounts of people erecting fountains of even temples to their favorite gods after these succeeded where doctors fail (see Vivian Nutton’s Ancient Medicine, an interesting book for a start, though near-silent about my heroes the empiricists, and not too detailed about ancient practices outside of a few standard treatises).

I truly believe that it was rational to resort to prayers in place of doctors: consider the track record. The risk of death effectively increased after a visit to the doctor. Sadly, this continued well into our era: the break-even did not come until early in the 20^th Century. Which effectively means that going to the priest, to Lourdes, Fatima, or (in Syria), Saydnaya, aside from the mental benefits, provided a protection against the risks of exposure to the expert problem. Religion was at least neutral –and it could only be beneficial if it got you away from the doctor.

Montaigne on why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy [Agency Problem].

Nul medecin ne prent plaisir à la santé de ses amis mesmes, dit l'ancien Comique Grec, ny soldat à la paix de sa ville: ainsi du reste.

The easy part is to show that religion was superior to science. It is hard to accept it: religion protects you from bad science. Now my conjecture, which I am trying to substantiate, is that the empiricists (Agrippa, Philinus, Menodotus, etc.) and to some extent the medical methodists, did not have the expert problem. The empiricists insisted on the “I did not know” while facing situations not exactly seen in the past, for which an exact treatment did not repeatedly yield a cure. The methodists did not have the same strictures against analogy, but were still careful.

II- Agrippa (no relation)

Which brings me to a strange, and strangely overlooked writer –or perhaps a literary mystery as we could be dealing with two writers. Or a joke. Or a madman –a victim of acute schizophrenia. Montaigne’s sources on medicine come from the recycling of the very erudite Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium declamatio invectiva (“De vanitate”), published c.1530. It is a strange skeptical attack on the negative aspect of science and knowledge by a 16^th century man who is mostly known for a treatise on magic that he wrote before that, & for his practice of magic & alchemy. And it was not a change of heart: Agrippa continued to practice magic & alchemy after writing the De vanitate (which attacked alchemy and magic!). De vanitate is a Pyrrhonian treatise though, seemingly, Agrippa was not aware of the works of Sextus Empiricus (which had not been available in Latin). He covers literally everything: mathematics, medicine, EVEN FINANCE, in way that is suspiciously similar to (but more extensive than) Adversus mathematikos. I just got a photocopy of the text that Montaigne read (in Medieval Latin, almost impossible to read owing to the characters & even harder to understand), & the only readable document a photocopy of a Medieval French translation by Louis Turquet de Mayerne. The only bound volume I managed to locate was selling for $4000 on Abebooks (photocopying such text is legal; photocopied but bound volumes make for a much better reading quality than originals).

Agrippa might be the only Pyrrhonian skeptic who was imprisoned for his writings (I guess if you do not take my brief jail episode in Lebanon into account).

Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic" Rebirth" and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia Renaissance quarterly [0034-4338] Keefer yr:1988 vol:41 iss:4 pg:61

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Ierodiakonou & Vanderbroucke [1993]. More fundamentally, the Greeks wondered what gave rise to the stochastic nature of medicine. Here, their ways split. In the second century AD Alexander of Aphrodisias held it to be an inherent property of medicine. Medicine does not proceed by syllogisms to the effect that something necessarily and invariably is the case. Rather, medical propositions are concluded in terms such as "for the most part", or "in only a rare case". These expressions hold true generally, but not necessarily for the individual. Others such as Galen in the same century, believed that medical science in itself was as impeccable as any other but that its practical application was fallible because of variation in the individual patient. [Medicine as a stochastic art. Ierodiakonou, Katerine,Vandenbroucke, Jan P., Lancet; 2/27/93, Vol. 341 Issue 8844, p542, 2].  I looked for Ierodiakonou’s research (she is a classicist, V. is a medical researcher) on the vanishing Aenasidemians.

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There was a period during which "medicine derived its explanatory models from the physical sciences" [Andrew Wear, in Conrad et al., 1995].

Giovanni Borelli, in De Motu Animalium, compared the body to a machine consisting of animal levers. "He wrote that God applied geometry when making animal organs, and that since the movements of animals are the proper subject of mathematics they can be understood in terms of levers, pulleys, winding-drums, and spirals, etc. Borelli ordered his book into propositions as in geometry, first demonstrating, for instance, the forces involved ..."

Cicero and Probability: Cicéron de Clara Auvray-Assayas. "... probabile" n'est pas une traduction du Grec mais un concept forgé par Cicéron; son usage ne se limite pas a la theorie de la connaissance, mais permet d'articuler la rhetorique et la philosophie ... une critique rationnelle de toutes les doctrines systématiques."

Apres avoir montré qu'il n'existe pas de representation telle qu'elle differe d'une fausse, l'academicien propose de se fier a ce qui est "persuasif", pithanon en grec, et que Ciceron rend par probabile. A premiere vue il s'agit donc de la traduction de l'adjectif grec "pithanon"... Reste la question du sens: non seulement le latin fait disparaitre l'element semantique essentiel, la persuatsion, au profit des valeurs de la preuve et de l'approbation contenues dans le verbe ˆprobare , mais le sens actif du grec pithanon (qui persuade) est occulté dans l'emploi de l'adjectif probabile dont tous les emplois attestes sont passifs ("qui peut etre prouvé/approuvé). [...] le sujet ne recoit plus passivement ce qui le persuade, c'est lui qui juge si une chose mérite son approbation.

[Cicero translated Plato's Timaeus λογος εικος [believable rationalization/explanation] & εικος μυθος [believable story] by probabilia, something we can give approval to.]

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Another major error (again voiced by two economists, among whom was (angry) Lord Eatwell): you cannot observe without some theory. Even Galen used it as his lame argument “Logos is needed for observation … observation is impossible without logos”. It misses the point entirely. Empiricism is not about not having beliefs: it is about avoiding to be a sucker, a decided and preset bias on where you want your error to be –where the default is.  An empiricist defaults to suspension of belief (hence the link with the skeptical Pyrrhonian tradition), while others prefer to default to a characterization or a theory. Mostly, avoid the confirmation bias ! (we empiricists prefer the disconfirmation/falsification bias).

Tension between “rationalism” and empiricism: The distinction appears to be expressed in modern terms (Claude Bernard -l' empirisme compris dans son sens le plus large et le plus général est l' opposé du rationalisme ;l' empirisme est alors l' exclusion de tout raisonnement de l' observation et de l' expérimentation.(emph. his)) The medical empirical tradition supposedly died out c. 200 AD. (to be revived later first by Paracelsus, then by a collection of surgeons, but waxed and waned. I suppose that it was stamped out by the Arabs). Within Hippocrates’ corpus some writings are said to be in the rationalist tradition, while others (the oldest) are in the empirical tradition.  & Al-Razi on the difference:

فالرازي مثلاً يقدم النظري على العملي، ويعطيه الأسبقية إذ يقول : "من قرأ كتب أبقراط ولم يخدم، خير ممن خدم ولم يقرأ كتب أبقراط"، ويقول أيضاً : "إن قليل المشاهدة (أي الخبرة) المطلع على الكتب خير ممن لم يعرف الكتب"

Note that Al-Razi, nevertheless, stood up to Galen, something that did not take place again for 5 centuries. He wrote a book called: "الشكوك على جالينوس".

Primary (or close to): Galen (almost all there is to know in found subf. empirica), Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, Photius, Celsus (De Medicina), Caelius Aurelianus, Arabic texts (?): Ibn Sina, Al-Razi, Comments on “Jalinos” by Averroes,

Secondary: Charles Daremberg (cours du Collège de France), Lorenzo Perilli (Menodoto di Nicomedia & papers), Victor Brochard, Albert Favier (unreliable), Zeller, Ludwig Edelstein (Ancient Medicine –collected papers), Deichgraeber (not translated: I cannot read German), Harris Coulter (a linear combination of his predecessors, mainly Deichgraeber), Vivian Nutton (not very good), Roger French (Medicine before Science), Don Bates (Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions)…

Literature on Pyrrhonian skepticism: Unlike the literature on empiricism, you can fill up a wall of books and file cabinets of contemporary, post-contemporary, and secondary sources.

OLDER SEQUENCE

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I leave aside the confusion absence of evidence/evidence of absence--and the misunderstanding of the very notion of "empiricism". It is a fact that in the real world of our daily decision-making 1) we do not have much evidence of most relevant things, yet we need to take action; 2) in most situations, "true/false" is never symmetric (one side is more harmful than the other), so the burden of evidence is one-sided. Which is why once these fakes "doing science" lose their tenures after the endowments (and charity) run out of funds, they will be barely fit to do anything in the real-life ecology. I wonder what you can do with an unemployed, say, academic orthodox economist. You could do better with non-post-academic cab drivers. Clearly those the most fit at dealing with "just evidence" will be idiot savants outside their evidence domain.

And I can expect that with the SP500 about 20% lower than here, you will see tenures unexpectedly evaporating. The silver-lining of the crisis, perhaps, with the de-academification of society.

When I was warning about the risks of the financial system, I encountered nasty resistance from these types --recall that I blame the academic establishment for this idiotic risk taking."Where is the evidence?", they kept saying, missing the subtlety of the a-delon & evidence of fat tails. Two unpleasant situation, worth naming names because these two individuals are exceedingly harmful to society. 1) The most unpleasant situation was the psychologist Dan Gilbert from Harvard who broke the Brockman dinner party etiquette by shouting insults within earshot, c. Feb 2007, (and with Harvard's endowment at > twice its current value), and kept ranting in my back that "he offers no evidence!" . 2) The second one was in London, in 2006, when one Herr Doktor Prof. Armin Falk University of Bonn, who did some bullshit experiments on bounded rationality, not knowing that I was a trader, shouted in a strong German accent: "I do science ; you just do philosophy". Science it was.

So let me take this into more interesting territory, and express my anti-social-planner views. Even more that in Hayek's days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards.

Finally, beyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions --we can't live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we've used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!

PS- I went on a European radio to express my ideas. When asked: what should we do, I replied: just listen to John Gray. He is the greatest living thinker. It was a great surprise when a few hours later, I opened my mail and saw John Gray's book with a handwritten note from him.

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Some people think they attend the opera for the story.

It is the same with language. Language is largely made to show-off, gossip, confuse people, delude them, charm them, seduce them, scare them, exploit them, etc. And, as a side effect, convey information. Just a side effect, you fools.

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Is it true? How about the reverse: you do not become free by acting intransigent; those who are free have the obligation to be intransigent. Fat Tony to Nero: "Being self owned is a state of mind".

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The only bad news came at the end of the session, when a VIP central banker, former IMF hotshot, co-author of a macroeconomics textbook classic (with Blanchard), came to me to critique my point about feedback loops. I had said that unemployment in NY caused by Wall Street losses, percolating and generating unemployment in, say, China, then percolating back into unemployment in New York, because of these feedback loops, were not analyzable analytically, owing to the monstrous estimation errors with such effects. The hotshot disagreed, explaining that we had input-output matrices that were good at calculating such feedbacks, citing a "Nobel" (Leontieff, I presume) --I looked at him with the look "he is arrogant, but does not know enough to understand that he is not even wrong" (needless to say that he was one of those who did not see the crisis coming). The problem is one of convexity, described in The Black Swan with the story of the billiard balls, as unpredictability compounds when we add additional bounces. It was hard to get the message that even if econometric methods could track the effects in normal times (natural, since errors are small), such models said nothing about large deviations, for which the errors would be monstrous.

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My Central Idea. People miss the obvious and get sophisticated with the useless details. I was at Balthazar three times in the past week. The last time I was having dinner with someone who was rehashing points from book reviewers saying (as a compliment) that I masterfully glued together ideas ideas from a variety of sources across philosophy, psychology, mathematics, economics, etc. [Of course, if I am saying obvious things, how come they did not see my obvious (and obviously stated) consequence that the current economic system would collapse? ] Then I realized that people miss the obvious, here my central idea --they get a lot of things from my books but not the fundamental idea. Sadly, NOBODY thought of my central idea before. Sadly, otherwise we would not be here.

My central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare. We need an a priori model representation for that; the rarer the event, the more the dependence on aprorism. Further, we do not care about probability (if an event happens or does not happen); we worry about consequences (how much total wealth or total destruction will come from it). Given that the less frequent the event, the more severe the consequence (just consider that the 100 year flood is more severe, and less frequent, than the 10 year flood), our estimation of the CONTRIBUTION of the rare event is going to be massively faulty (contribution is probability times effect; multiply that by estimation error) ; and nothing can remedy it. So the rarer the event, the less we know about its role --and the more we need to make it up with an extrapolative, generalizing theory. Hence model error is more consequential in the tails and some representations ARE MORE FRAGILE than others. Then there are the SUBPLOTS:

1) I ground the idea into reality with epistemology/the philosophy of induction (to which it is remotely related), psychology (hindsight bias), psychology of risk, model error (Ludic fallacy), strong apriorism (Platonicity), the fact that people can't predict rare events and spin stories --and are more confident with rare events, ironically, the charlatanism in economics [institutionalized bullshit --nobody checked the track record], etc. 2) I also set up a domain separation (Mediocristan-Extremistan) and a decision separation (simple binary yes-no payoff or complex, expectation based) and have to worry about expectation--based decisions in Extremistan, THE FOURTH QUADRANT. 3) I set up an agenda to de-fragilize the world from the 4th Quadrant and make people more robust to negative Black swans and exploit positive Black Swans. 4) I made a living by hunting for fragility to the 4th Quadrant by people ignorant of it --and I was dead CERTAIN that the current economic system would collapse violently and unpredictably, and that Banks would go bust IN UNISON [next prediction almost everything else fragile will follow].

I am now setting up a program to help humanity formulate decisions under ignorance by changing the world in such a way as to make our forecast errors inconsequential --how to change the world for it to allow for our ignorance; the exact opposite of the enlightenment program. We should make our structures less complex (less debt) to face the growing complexity from globalization & the net, etc.

People find a frame (skepticism,, empiricism, bullshitism), then try to squeeze an idea into a category. No, it is NOT Hume's problem of induction (which, incidentally, is not Hume's); it is NOT Mill's problem; it is CERTAINLY NOT Popper's falsification (it was more intelligently dealt with by Menodotus) and it is NOT about the dichotomy risk and uncertainty; it has little to do with Austrian Economics (except that they believe in fundamental uncertainty); it is not about power laws (I used it as a technical tool and used chaos theory to show the fragility of nonlinear modelization in the tails). Nobody before has examined my problem in the history of thought, let alone systematize the idea of decision-making under certain classes of ignorance.

I continue.

Nouriel Roubini. Two days earlier, and five feet away, at Balthazar, I had lunch with my new friend and party-friend, Nouriel Roubini, who ( I am certain, alone among economists) predicted the current crisis --by predicting I mean seing the full extent of the damage. Nouriel, on top of his prescience, is a massively impressive and confident fellow, who uses his own brain to think. I asked him out of the hundreds of thousands of persons on the planet who deal in economics, whether academics , practitioners, journalists, or traders, how many saw this coming. He, modestly, said: a few. I only see him as the ONLY one among professional economists who saw it coming --I do not call myself an economist but a philosopher. 1) Some might have worried about housing, but I do not think that predicting a housing crisis meant predicting the crisis --you need to envision the consequences on the entire structure, the house of cards. I am certain that the crisis would have taken place even without a housing catalyst. 2) Many economists, like the empty suit Kenneth Rogoff claim, after the fact, to have seen something like it --but I wonder if this is not something in hindsight as he did not bark enough at the time; I need to see private investment portfolios and check the EVIDENCE that he and people like him were not exposed to bank stocks, general stocks, if they were even short the market (if they "knew" it would happen, did they take action?).

So we live on a planet in which out of hundreds of millions of of people fed with trillions of pieces of information, hundreds of thousands of research papers and books, thousands of textbooks, etc., only a handful of citizens warned against the dangers we were facing. Do you feel comfortable being in such an environment? And the irony is that Nouriel and I didn't discuss crises more than the bare minimum; we are mostly interested in parties.

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There was a period during which "medicine derived its explanatory models from the physical sciences" [Andrew Wear, in Conrad et al., 1995].

Giovanni Borelli, in De Motu Animalium, compared the body to a machine consisting of animal levers. "He wrote that God applied geometry when making animal organs, and that since the movements of animals are the proper subject of mathematics they can be understood in terms of levers, pulleys, winding-drums, and spirals, etc. Borelli ordered his book into propositions as in geometry, first demonstrating, for instance, the forces involved ..."

Cicero and Probability: Cicéron de Clara Auvray-Assayas. "... probabile" n'est pas une traduction du Grec mais un concept forgé par Cicéron; son usage ne se limite pas a la theorie de la connaissance, mais permet d'articuler la rhetorique et la philosophie ... une critique rationnelle de toutes les doctrines systématiques."

Apres avoir montré qu'il n'existe pas de representation telle qu'elle differe d'une fausse, l'academicien propose de se fier a ce qui est "persuasif", pithanon en grec, et que Ciceron rend par probabile. A premiere vue il s'agit donc de la traduction de l'adjectif grec "pithanon"... Reste la question du sens: non seulement le latin fait disparaitre l'element semantique essentiel, la persuatsion, au profit des valeurs de la preuve et de l'approbation contenues dans le verbe ˆprobare , mais le sens actif du grec pithanon (qui persuade) est occulté dans l'emploi de l'adjectif probabile dont tous les emplois attestes sont passifs ("qui peut etre prouvé/approuvé). [...] le sujet ne recoit plus passivement ce qui le persuade, c'est lui qui juge si une chose mérite son approbation.

[Cicero translated Plato's Timaeus λογος εικος [believable rationalization/explanation] & εικος μυθος [believable story] by probabilia, something we can give approval to.]

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This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere -- and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably ("it is all about money"). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate.

Thierry, veuillez recevoir l'expression de mon respect le plus profond.

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It entered the vocabulary in 1924 --but initially referred to the harm caused by the doctor in causing distress to the patient while informing him about his ailment. It was not until the 1960s that it became part of the culture --and until recently nobody considered the type 2 error. Practitioners who were conservative and considered the possibility of letting nature do its job were accused of "therapeutic nihilism". See Sharpe and Faden 1998, Medical Harm. The authors link skeptical empiricism to therapeutic skepticism. [ I encountered the same insults later with the charlatan Philippe Jorion who considers not wanting to be a turkey "nihilism". I also encountered the same with another intellectual fraud, Robert Merton with his "these are the best models we've got" (they never consider that "nothing" may be better that the best model). I also encountered resistance from another sucker, a certain physicist-but-critical-of-blind-use-of-physics-in-finance, who could not make the leap from the point that ludified models were impractical to a refusal of the supremacy of a top-down theoretical background--and that rigor might not resemble what he is used to, or that an "Enstein in finance" might be just a fat Tony (or, better, a Montaigne).]

Sadly, these iatrogenics were mere rediscoveries after science got too arrogant. Alas, once again, the elders knew better. Iatrogenics and harm were not strange to ancient medicine; they were even formalized - See : Medical Ethics of Medieval Islam with Special Reference to Al-Ruhāwī's "Practical Ethics of the Physician", Martin Levey, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 57, No. 3 (1967), pp. 1-100.

Church and Epistemic Arrogance: Lateran II, 1139 (pope Innocent II) bans the use of complicated weapons in battle "We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God" which denotes awareness that complex weapons can break the link action/planned consequence --but with a disclaimer: the ban is limited to action against Christians and Catholics. (Source: the jesuit scholar Etienne Perrot).

Other Discovery: An original Arabic language medieval commentary on Galen's discussion of the empiricists: by anonymous reviewer of the differences between the three schools :Feed43 service