Smear Campaign Superspreaders

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Overactive Smear Campaigners: Over the years I've had to deal with a few unstable web stalkers posting stuff outside their field of knowledge yet appear on the surface to the uninitiated to be competent and spread their comments by sheer repetition.


1- Debra Frisch: Strangely angered by a paper I wrote on the law of large numbers, (the central chapter in Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails),  she started posting and, posing for a specialist in probability (she has remote connection as a psychology professor), emailing stuff about my "competence" to all manner of people, including university officials (and strangely, to every prominent person she thinks connects to the fields concerned, such as Daniel Kahneman, Kenneth Arrow, seemingly anyone who ever dealt with probability).  She has been recently arrested for unrelated charges but the problem is that many people she wrote to (like the head of the department and various faculty at NYU) don't know about her background. I feel sorry for her (and her victims) but need to leave her name here so I no longer have to reply to people asking me about "my paper".

2- Phillip Tetlock  (mendacious, perfidious behavior): Phillip Tetlock and I tried to write a paper around the idea that one should never produce single point forecasts for fat tailed variables. In Extremistan events do not have a characteristic scale, something I exlained nontechnically in The Black Swan. At no point did Tetlock seem to disagree with any of my points –I basically wrote the entire thing myself using the points in Dynamic Hedging about binary vs vanilla (he just added some BS psychology references). I realized he was clueless but nice (he never grasped the differences between survival function and expected payoff and could not get elementary concepts about probability; he could not get my equations.) Worst, he never understood "his" paper, for he later contacted me as IARPA (some intelligence agency) was offering money to ... do binary forecasts for fat-tailed variables. But this was what the paper he "cowrote" said one should never do. I obviously declined on scientific and ethical grounds --and mostly, coherence (plus I do not take money from governments).

Then, worse, Tetlock started, along with another fellow, attacking me on my GMO tail risk analyses (worrying about tails of distributions for him are some obsessive disease); it turned out he cowrote a bullshit book Superforecasters with that other fellow, a Monsanto-style shill (his work is lobbying on behalf of big Agro & other companies to claim that their activities are not "risky" because "science"). Again, a book that contradicts the paper Tetlock claimed he "cowrote". He kept making clueless claims about the "tails" (he never understood the difference between a fat tailed distribution and a tail event). Tons of Twitter attacks on various issues (screenshots of my tweets without referencing me) and without contacting me first when I thought he was a "friend". I never commented publicly about Tetlock's bullshit book. My rule as I explained is that you should contact people you consider friends [someone you broke bread with >2 x] first to clear the point before going public. Tetlock was now a rat, Phil the Rat. When you stab a friend in the back, you are done. [Note an interesting point: I was stabbed in the back three times in my life. The three are academic psychologists.]

Tetlock is a liar, claiming that I made private disagreements public (there were none and I waited >2 years before countering, as Paavo Heitanen showed by looking over the tweet sequences). He also claims it was an "adversarial collaboration": it was not; it was not even a collaboration. So he started joining forces with IYIs I like to bust, such as Cass Sunstein, Nate Silver...even a finance self-promoter called Marcos Lopez de Prado who is seeking revenge against me (for humiliating him/Note that I am in a phase in life where the mere sight of a bull**tter makes me queasy). In the process, Tetlock is (still) making fortune cookie style pronouncements about subjects he knows nothing about, such as derivative trading disclosures, Ito processes, arbitrage-valued forecasts, ergodicity (time vs space probabilities), even stochastic integrals or factual matters (who does the cherry picking; Tetlock that idiot does not even realize that no institutional investor ever invests without seeing full data). And characteristically, he is misrepresenting stuff (say my encounter with Cliff Asness I was only technical, Asness was throwing names).

By the way my paper (I wrote it alone) is here and a chapter in Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails. Pasquale Cirillo and I made the same point in our Nature Physics article.

Morale: there is something to stress here beside Tetlock's smear attempts and lowly character. It is that one can only do scholarship when one is genuine. Do not write papers to rent-seek. Be an as**le (I am), but be honorable and genuine.

3- Eric Falkenstein (crank and superspreading liar): Same story initially, as Deb Frish: after my article of 1997 on Value-at-Risk, Falkenstein developed some type of progressive compulsion that kept going. So over the past  24 years, he spent time obsessively posting and stalking (perhaps as high as 50,000-100,000 words, the equivalent of 2 novels) full of the usual stuff, with strawman arguments and conflations of statistical concepts.  The volume led to much misinterpretation of my work by people who thought he was competent in probability, statistics, mathematical finance and reflected some expert opinion or "peer review" on the subject (the poor fellow is unqualified and hopelessly clueless). I was privately warned about him and the potential of his behavior based on an incident and took appropriate action.  Note: Falkenstein has been largely unemployed during the past 22 obsessive years.

Falkenstein's technique: 1) Posing for a "quant" (he's not remotely capable of stat 101), distort the argument in a highly dishonest technique called strawman, and quite often inverting the argument. He caused a mispromotion of my ideas (mistaking what I do for the VIX when it is the opposite), 2) Lying about what I write. 3) Expressing remote analogies between books he hasn't read and standard ideas so he can claim "nothing new" of "Dunning-Kruger" or something as portmanteau. See below:
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TYPICAL SMEAR BY FALKENSTEIN (one in 100s): He lies about what Taleb wrote


He didn't read the book which cites the 1888 discovery and where Taleb explains how he is generalizing into convexity


4 Peter Cotton: Some type of failed quant/mathematician with savantic attributes. Every post boast as sole attribute a degree in mathematics or background as chess player.  Like  Falkenstein, Cotton kept super-spreading strawman arguments, including the savantic version of the Black Swan problem (see the chapter on the savant's understanding of uncertainty) with a special site "quantapology" and posts that are either distorting or defamatory. 

5- Noah Smith

6- Eddy Elfenbeim (and Janet Tavakoli): False claims that they kept promoting while being aware that it is a false claim. In Principa Politica I discuss the ancient laws treating authors of calumnies as if they committed the violation themselves.

They created in bad faith an uproar about a mistake made by a journalist that I corrected (bad faith as they knew it was a journo's mistake not mine and that I actually corrected the journalist).

Background: An article in 2009 in Vogue with Will Self I explained that we had a delta (equivalent short) of $20 billion notional. Self wrote that I claim we made $20 billion. Clearly it is a lunatic claim. But it so happened that during the journalistic fack checking I corrected the claim, which was ignored by Self and I sent the emails to Felix Salmon then at Reuters. While Elfenbeim and Tavakoli were aware of their false claim they kept posting and superspreading the lie.