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'Black Swan' author Nassim Taleb says bitcoin is an open Ponzi scheme and a failed currency
The "Black Swan" author Nassim Taleb doubled down on his view that bitcoin is an open Ponzi scheme and a failed currency in a CNBC interview on Friday.
"There's no connection between inflation and bitcoin," Taleb told CNBC, adding that everyone knows bitcoin is "a Ponzi."
Some analysts view the cryptocurrency, often referred to as digital gold, as a hedge against inflation, highlighting its similarities with the precious metal.
"If you want to hedge against inflation, buy a piece of land," Taleb said. "The best strategy for investors is to own things that produce yields in the future. In other words, you can fall back on real dollars coming out of the company."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/black-swan-author-nassim-taleb-says-bitcoin-is-an-open-ponzi-scheme-and-a-failed-currency/ar-BB1fYMY2
62 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Can never go wrong with that 
Stored in a cool dry place for a rainy day. Don't cha know it. 
past to being fairly hostile to some vaccines (saying that Big Pharma will push them too much just to profit off them) due to selective use of his pet theory of iatrogenics, and has a long history of attacking/mocking atheists, plus smears and libels people like Neil deGrasse Tyson (whom he, ironically, accuses of being a showman, not a scientist, and calls him a fraud), etc.
Link to tweet
Lots more info here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
Taleb also calls IQ a complete pseudoscientific swindle and uses (as he so often does) multiple strawmen and no sequiturs in his attacks (quote 'Finally figured out. "IQ" doesn't test for intelligence; rather how likely a person is likely to become a state-solution loving socialist.' end quote):
http://archive.is/nhGxk
Vani Hari aka Food Babe (a crackpot pseudoscience pusher) has praised Nassim Taleb on her Facebook page, quoting his quack conspiracy beliefs:
https://www.facebook.com/thefoodbabe/photos/1089566281078082/
From Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Friends, Ralph Nader called me recently to warn me that I was going to be subjected to a smear campaign by Monsanto and friends, throwing anything they can to undermine my credibility, "throwing everything except the kitchen sink". They care so much about their business there is nothing they wouldn't throw at me. Nothing. He, himself, was subjected to a nasty smear campaign by GM fifty years ago.
Fughedabout the "victim" business. And it is not about enemies building you up, that's not the point. There a *real thrill* feeling that you are risking something for your ideas. The more risk, the more skin-in-the-game, the more thrill. The more they attack you, the more skin-in-the-game, the more you feel honorable. I cannot describe the sentiment: all I can say is that it is the exact opposite of shame.
Fughedabout the "victim" business. And it is not about enemies building you up, that's not the point. There a *real thrill* feeling that you are risking something for your ideas. The more risk, the more skin-in-the-game, the more thrill. The more they attack you, the more skin-in-the-game, the more you feel honorable. I cannot describe the sentiment: all I can say is that it is the exact opposite of shame.
He is always pushing CT that Big Pharma and Big healthcare mainly want to just profit off the mildly ill as they live longer and are thus more viable profit centres than extreme ill people
Link to tweet
Nassim Nicholas Taleb now pro-homeopathy as well as anti-GMO
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/01/05/nassim-nicholas-taleb-now-pro-homeopathy-as-well-as-anti-gmo/
Link to tweet
You Are All Soft! Embrace Chaos!
A reader could easily run out of adjectives to describe Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.” The first ones that come to mind are: maddening, bold, repetitious, judgmental, intemperate, erudite, reductive, shrewd, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, provocative, pompous, penetrating, perspicacious and pretentious.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/books/antifragile-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb.html
snip
Some of his observations are no more than personal opinions. A wealth of details in architecture, he asserts “leads to inner peace,” and “almost everything built since World War II has an unnatural smoothness to it.” Some of his observations are overly broad generalizations, presented without detailed, substantive or persuasive evidence. He writes: “We are moving into the far more uneven distribution of 99/1 across many things that used to be 80/20: 99 percent of Internet traffic is attributable to less than 1 percent of sites, 99 percent of book sales come from less than 1 percent of authors ... and I need to stop because numbers are emotionally stirring.”
And some of his observations are just wilfully perverse. He suggests, for instance, that administering mammograms to “women over 40 on an annual basis does not lead to an increase in life expectancy,” because a doctor, seeing a tumour, “cannot avoid doing something harmful, like surgery followed by radiation, chemotherapy, or both — that is more harmful than the tumour.”
Mr. Taleb seems to revel in being contentious and controversial, perhaps betting that such notoriety will win him and his book some added buzz. He consigns television, air-conditioning, newspapers and economic forecasts to the category of “offensive irritants.” And he talks about rationing the supply of information because, he insists, “the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”
“Antifragile” is also riddled with contradictions. Mr. Taleb offers predictions about the future, though he keeps talking about the unreliability of predictions. He repeatedly attacks theorists and academics as the sorts of people who would presume to “lecture birds on how to fly.” And yet he’s an academic himself (whose main subject matter, his book jacket tells us, is “decision making under opacity”), and the book he’s written is nothing if not one big, hyperextended, overarching theory about how to live in a random and uncertain world.
And some of his observations are just wilfully perverse. He suggests, for instance, that administering mammograms to “women over 40 on an annual basis does not lead to an increase in life expectancy,” because a doctor, seeing a tumour, “cannot avoid doing something harmful, like surgery followed by radiation, chemotherapy, or both — that is more harmful than the tumour.”
Mr. Taleb seems to revel in being contentious and controversial, perhaps betting that such notoriety will win him and his book some added buzz. He consigns television, air-conditioning, newspapers and economic forecasts to the category of “offensive irritants.” And he talks about rationing the supply of information because, he insists, “the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”
“Antifragile” is also riddled with contradictions. Mr. Taleb offers predictions about the future, though he keeps talking about the unreliability of predictions. He repeatedly attacks theorists and academics as the sorts of people who would presume to “lecture birds on how to fly.” And yet he’s an academic himself (whose main subject matter, his book jacket tells us, is “decision making under opacity”), and the book he’s written is nothing if not one big, hyperextended, overarching theory about how to live in a random and uncertain world.
IS MEDICINE A THREAT TO YOUR ANTIFRAGILITY?
https://drug-dev.com/management-insight-antifragile-nassim-taleb-on-the-evils-of-modern-medicine/
Here is the infuriating part of this book. Taleb’s theory holds up well enough until he delves into specialized fields he knows less about. Biological entities fall squarely in his antifragile category. Because antifragile entities benefit from a little stress, he spends a great deal of time belaboring his wariness of “iatrogenic” effects (in which the treatment is worse than the original illness). To a point, most of us would agree. For example, if your blood pressure is only slightly outside of the range of normal, you might be wise not to choose medication as your solution. Slight stresses on the body are indeed natural. I’m not sure I’d agree that your higher reading will make you stronger, but certainly in this case the downsides of the medication may be considerable higher than the benefits it might provide.
Taleb argues that the side effects of medication are unpredictable. We simply don’t have enough history to truly predict outcomes. Medicine is like tobacco, which when it first was introduced was purportedly good for you. There was no “proof ” to the contrary as it took decades for the evidence to accumulate. Thalidomide was prescribed as an antinausea medicine but its side effects on the unborn fetus weren’t clear for a few years. He takes these anecdotal stories as fodder for his theory that medicine is only justified if it’s efficacy has been proven for thousands of years, or if the benefit is so great that any possible side effect is justified (ie, an oncology product that might save your life). Taleb started in the financial world, and he seems to view medication through the same lens as one might view a financial option. Does the upside outweigh the downside? Then he generalizes based on a few anecdotes that for every known side effect there are potentially countless horrific and quite possibly deadly unknown side effects that simply haven’t come to light yet. When he puts this huge potential negative on the scale beside the known side effects, giving it in effect more weight and value than the known side effects, it is a small wonder that his scale never balances. The result from this logic is that you would never take a pill unless you are certain it will save your life.
Somewhere between a minor blood pressure anomaly and a potentially terminal cancer lies the true balance. His accusation that physicians overprescribe may be true in some fields, particularly the use of psychotropic drugs in children, but most of his discussion of iatrogenics is anecdotal and relies heavily on outdated practices, including the practice of bleeding out patients – the death of George Washington in 1799, and a study of children in 1930. Apparently, because of these mistakes, we should throw out the vast majority of modern medical science. Given Taleb’s very biased approach to medical research, it comes as no surprise that he completely bypasses any discussion of the benefits of modern medicine. The Green Agricultural Revolution, for example, fed billions of people who would have starved if only natural agricultural techniques were used.
But the most glaring of all omissions is the complete or near eradication of smallpox, polio, TB, cholera, and the bubonic plague from our lives. These vaccines do not meet his criteria. Because it cannot be shown that a single vaccine will save your life, and because we cannot predict whether or not it will save you (not until we have a thousand years of evidence), vaccines should, by his logic, be avoided. It’s precisely this type of thinking that spurs anti-vaccination campaigns and has now caused the reintroduction of some of these midcentury diseases. Epidemics themselves are in fact nonlinear, and it is this fact that has taught us how to eradicate them. Take malaria, for example. It is ridiculous to think that we could get rid of this disease by eliminating all mosquitoes. There are simply too many. But because epidemics are non-linear, they have thresholds. We don’t need to get rid of all mosquitoes to stop the disease; we only need to reduce their population to below the epidemic threshold. This logic has led to the elimination of many diseases, and it is this logic that will save millions of lives going forward.
AN EDGY ARGUMENT GOES OVER THE EDGE
Somewhere along the way, Taleb takes a well-reasoned argument and pushes it off a cliff. Nothing can be trusted if it hasn’t been tried through the millennia. Not even papayas. Taleb avoids all fruits without a Greek or Hebrew name because his ancestors would not have eaten them. Not even fruits that other cultures have eaten for thousands of years pass his threshold for reliability. He drinks only beverages that are at least a thousand years old. By his logic, most of our industry might just as well close up shop right now, because unless your molecule will save a life from a very imminent death, it’s just not worth the risk.
Taleb argues that the side effects of medication are unpredictable. We simply don’t have enough history to truly predict outcomes. Medicine is like tobacco, which when it first was introduced was purportedly good for you. There was no “proof ” to the contrary as it took decades for the evidence to accumulate. Thalidomide was prescribed as an antinausea medicine but its side effects on the unborn fetus weren’t clear for a few years. He takes these anecdotal stories as fodder for his theory that medicine is only justified if it’s efficacy has been proven for thousands of years, or if the benefit is so great that any possible side effect is justified (ie, an oncology product that might save your life). Taleb started in the financial world, and he seems to view medication through the same lens as one might view a financial option. Does the upside outweigh the downside? Then he generalizes based on a few anecdotes that for every known side effect there are potentially countless horrific and quite possibly deadly unknown side effects that simply haven’t come to light yet. When he puts this huge potential negative on the scale beside the known side effects, giving it in effect more weight and value than the known side effects, it is a small wonder that his scale never balances. The result from this logic is that you would never take a pill unless you are certain it will save your life.
Somewhere between a minor blood pressure anomaly and a potentially terminal cancer lies the true balance. His accusation that physicians overprescribe may be true in some fields, particularly the use of psychotropic drugs in children, but most of his discussion of iatrogenics is anecdotal and relies heavily on outdated practices, including the practice of bleeding out patients – the death of George Washington in 1799, and a study of children in 1930. Apparently, because of these mistakes, we should throw out the vast majority of modern medical science. Given Taleb’s very biased approach to medical research, it comes as no surprise that he completely bypasses any discussion of the benefits of modern medicine. The Green Agricultural Revolution, for example, fed billions of people who would have starved if only natural agricultural techniques were used.
But the most glaring of all omissions is the complete or near eradication of smallpox, polio, TB, cholera, and the bubonic plague from our lives. These vaccines do not meet his criteria. Because it cannot be shown that a single vaccine will save your life, and because we cannot predict whether or not it will save you (not until we have a thousand years of evidence), vaccines should, by his logic, be avoided. It’s precisely this type of thinking that spurs anti-vaccination campaigns and has now caused the reintroduction of some of these midcentury diseases. Epidemics themselves are in fact nonlinear, and it is this fact that has taught us how to eradicate them. Take malaria, for example. It is ridiculous to think that we could get rid of this disease by eliminating all mosquitoes. There are simply too many. But because epidemics are non-linear, they have thresholds. We don’t need to get rid of all mosquitoes to stop the disease; we only need to reduce their population to below the epidemic threshold. This logic has led to the elimination of many diseases, and it is this logic that will save millions of lives going forward.
AN EDGY ARGUMENT GOES OVER THE EDGE
Somewhere along the way, Taleb takes a well-reasoned argument and pushes it off a cliff. Nothing can be trusted if it hasn’t been tried through the millennia. Not even papayas. Taleb avoids all fruits without a Greek or Hebrew name because his ancestors would not have eaten them. Not even fruits that other cultures have eaten for thousands of years pass his threshold for reliability. He drinks only beverages that are at least a thousand years old. By his logic, most of our industry might just as well close up shop right now, because unless your molecule will save a life from a very imminent death, it’s just not worth the risk.
Neil deGrasse Tyson's Epic Reply to Nicholas Taleb's Condescending Tweet.
https://ginosblog.home.blog/2016/01/25/neil-degrasse-tysons-epic-reply-to-nicholas-talebs-condescending-tweet/
And the people who are getting rich off it are people who you who you wouldn't trust with 15 cents, let alone $15 million. 
