Nassim Taleb: How to React to Pandemics (Coronavirus)

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1221486205847646208

by tosh • 6 years ago

47 26 6 years ago

His argument is to reduce mobility in the short term to combat the uncertainty and unknowns associated with the Coronavirus. The R0 (reproductive ratio) of the virus is increasing and it’ll probably take longer to know how much havoc it’ll reap.

It’s unclear to what level the paper is referring (reduce flights on a global level, between cities in China or people leaving areas where the contagion started)

remus• 6 years ago

Call me cynical, but this seems like little more than an attention grabbing paper aiming to leverage press coverage to increase the authors' fame.

buzzkillington3• 6 years ago

Yes, that's why it's from Nassim Taleb.

kqr2• 6 years ago

Direct link to Nassim's Taleb paper: https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_...

nootropicat2• 6 years ago

tl;dr This old Pandemic II meme fluffed in scientific jargon: https://files.catbox.moe/lenadr.jpg

The only actual purpose of this paper is to advertise Taleb (and his books): Wuhan virus worse than current predictions? He's definitely going to remind people about his "genius" prediction that it could be worse. Turns out to be not such a big deal? Nobody is even going to remember he wrote this.

armitron• 6 years ago

That’s not what I got from it at all. The precautionary principle and fat-tailed processes that come with extinction-level risks are real. He makes valid and salient points.

salty_biscuits• 6 years ago

Valid points that are hand wavey, non specific and non quantitative. Basically, you can't estimate parameters because of fat tails so what people are doing is inadequate. Seems trite to me

nemoniac• 6 years ago

Is the paper available without signing up for academia.edu?

thecleaner• 6 years ago

5 references and no quantitative treatment of a very very serious topic like nCoV. Taleb can publish whatever, but why is this grabbing HN front-page ?

curiousgal• 6 years ago

His writing style is the most vexing thing ever!

SomeHacker44• 6 years ago

Try reading _A New Kind of Science_. But only if you like many "sentences" starting with conjunctions. :)

arkitaip• 6 years ago

This is scary: "We estimated that the mean R0 ranges from 3.30 (95%CI: 2.73-3.96) to 5.47 (95%CI: 4.16-7.10) associated with 0-fold to 2-fold increase in the reporting rate."

sdinsn• 6 years ago

MERS had a small R0 and yet killed more than SARS, which had a R0 range of 2-5.

aaron695• 6 years ago

Since there literally nothing of substance here, just awesome sounding words, normal Taleb, lets go meta.

The new cool of 2020 seems to be is to make things look like journal articles and blog them. I almost wish for the days of peer review.

I have no idea what a "general" or "non native" "precautionary principle" is. I assume a Markov chain suggested it to them.

But if you believe the precautionary principle then you are pretty much anti-science. Anti-Vaxxers are precautionary principle enthusiasts for instance.

You could go all philosophical and say the precautionary principle is a new science, but that just sounds off alarm bells to me.

cortesi• 6 years ago

Taleb's prominence is baffling to me. I've read all his books, and tried hard to figure out why people I respect believe he's an important thinker. I just can't see it. Almost everything he says sets off my bullshit alarm.

Here we have him in typical form. The point of the paper seems to be to argue that we can reduce transmission by reducing contact (obvious), and concludes that we should do this pre-emptively at large scale worldwide (never going to happen, only good for alarmist headlines). This is exactly his formula when treating risk: start with a total platitude (rare events happen), and spin it out through huge over-reach into a headline-grabbing book (black swan! boo!).

The other thing about Taleb is that he's frequently way out over his skis on on the facts. Here, he states that the "selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens" makes "extinction certain" as if he's stating an undisputed fact. But instead of citing a virology paper, he cites an interesting but not very relevant evolutionary dynamics paper that draws on a particular mathematical model. In fact, the real world is complicated, and if anything virology tells us the opposite: zoonotic viruses tend to become less virulent over time, as the tradeoff between transmission and lethality is optimised. Almost nobody working in the area of virology would agree with the alarmist nonsense that this paper takes as axiomatic.

If anyone is interested in hearing how actual virologists talk about this outbreak, the superb This Week In Virology podcast has just released an episode that dives into this in depth:

http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/

nootropicat2• 6 years ago

I think what he's mostly selling is a feeling of superiority. "I'm so much smarter than those sheep. Muh black swans and fat tailed distributions". A person susceptible to this is definitely going to buy more books to find new ways to feel superior to the "masses".

To be fair, I agree with his view on the need to have skin in the game and occasionally he has interesting insights like the decisive stubborn minority.

SkyMarshal3• 6 years ago

start with a total platitude (rare events happen),

That's not exactly what he says. He doesn't care about whether an event is rare or frequent, but only in combination with its consequences/impact. His main point is that we're not good at assessing the risk/costs of rare but high-impact events, that our statistical and modelling tools are insufficient for that domain too, and thus we tend to be complacent in our decision making about them. He implicitly argues it's not a platitude because we keep getting it wrong on large scales.

Fwiw his best short problem statement may be this essay in Edge.org from ~10yrs ago: https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-the-...

pillefitz3• 6 years ago

So basically value at risk? I don't quite see how our current tools are insufficient

buzzkillington3• 6 years ago

He is wrong in just about every case, yet he is right in the aggregate. We are terrible at predicting high impact low probability events and waste our time worrying about low impact high probability events.

Put another way, if we were Turkeys our risk analysis would be modelling how much food the farmer is bringing us every day. And we don't know about Thanks Giving.

pillefitz3• 6 years ago

With a basic world model + scenario analysis they should have become aware of the possibility of a Thanksgiving Event

aazaa• 6 years ago

I never understood this guy's following. Everything I've seen from him is intellectual bro-flexing, physical bro-flexing, or buzzword bingo.

Here's the bottom line, from the conclusion:

Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.

In other words, isolate the infected. This is not new, nor is the idea of today's highly connected world causing diseases to spread faster than in the last century.

Nassim Taleb: How to React to Pandemics (Coronavirus)

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