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- Eric Falkenstein (crank and
superspreading liar): Same story initially, as Deb
Frish: after my article of 1996 on Value-at-Risk, Falkenstein developed some type of
progressive compulsion that kept going. So over the past
27 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 27 obsessive
years.
Falkenstein's technique:
1) Posing for a "quant" (he's not remotely capable of stat
101, makes elementary mistakes in probability), 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:
.
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
3-
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.
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.