Taleb made a career from stating the obvious and making it appear as a smart discovery. I've read some of his writings and have never found anything really new.
My favorite story when I hear someone dismiss an argument saying 'that is obvious':
Lazarsfeld was writing about “The American Soldier”, a recently published study of over 600,000 servicemen, conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the second world war. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings that he claimed were representative of the report. Take number two: '“Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.”
“Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I already knew?” Why indeed.
But Lazarsfeld then reveals the truth: all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place, they could just as easily have reconciled them with other things they already thought they knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing, etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But this is exactly the point Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious then, as he put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness'”
Oh yes, I hate this kind of thing so much. People have so many pseudoscientific explanations and theories to support whatever random products and practices they like.
I call these “huh, that makes sense” explanations, since that’s often what people say after hearing them. You even used the magic three words above.
The related phenomenon in biology is called the “just so” fallacy; e.g. “X species evolved Y just so that they could do Z”. It’s a comforting story, but it will often lead you astray.
The same is true of pg, but his discoveries seem obvious only in hindsight.
(I’m objecting to “the discoveries are obvious” as a putdown. The simplest discoveries are some of the hardest. Though I doubt this matters for political pundit analysis.)
I have no horse in this race, but with the rarity of a unicorn, it could be what amounts to luck.
Out of billion people flipping a coin 30 times, a few of them may guess correctly all 30 times; but the books they write on coin flip guessing amount to meaningless drivel.
My point is that success or failure in such a complex, edge-case, luck-based world may have very little to do with knowledge.
PG, if you’re reading this, of course I mean no disrespect and I know little of the topic and nothing of this person at hand except that he seems to have run a failed hedge fund.
