‘Black Swan’ Author Attacks Credibility of Lex Friedman, Gets Slammed by Cardano Founder

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On Monday (2 January 2023), Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder and CEO at Input Output Global (“IOG), the blockchain exertion steadfast liable for the improvement of Cardano ($ADA), made it precise wide clear what helium thinks astir Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best-selling writer of “Black Swan”.

Taleb is simply a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, mathematical statistician, and erstwhile quantitative trader. He is wide recognized arsenic 1 of the world’s apical experts connected probability and uncertainty.

Publishing institution Penguin Random House describes Taleb’s landmark five-book bid “Fooled by Randomness”, “The Black Swan”, “The Bed of Procrustes”, “Antifragile”, “Skin successful the Game”, which has been translated to forty-one languages, “an probe of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, quality error, risk, and decision-making successful a satellite we don’t understand.”

His steadfast goes connected to accidental that Taleb “spends astir of his clip arsenic a flâneur, meditating successful cafés crossed the planet,” adjacent though since 2008 helium has been serving arsenic a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering astatine New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.

In his 2007 publication “The Black Swan”, Taleb wrote that a “Black Swan” lawsuit is an lawsuit that has the pursuing 3 attributes:

“First, it is an outlier, arsenic it lies extracurricular the realm of regular expectations, due to the fact that thing successful the past tin convincingly constituent to its possibility.

“Second, it carries an utmost ‘impact’.

“Third, successful spite of its outlier status, quality quality makes america concoct explanations for its occurrence aft the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

“I halt and summarize the triplet: rarity, utmost ‘impact’, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

“A tiny fig of Black Swans explains astir everything successful our world, from the occurrence of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of humanities events, to elements of our ain idiosyncratic lives.”

On 20 December 2022, Taleb told his implicit 928K Twitter followers:

“Not each dimwits bash crypto, but each crypto radical are dimwits, that is, dumb successful a peculiar way: determination is simply a missing ligament determination successful (for some) an different functioning brain. You tin usage crypto connected an CV arsenic a marker for aboriginal blowup… Yes I had hopes for crypto but it did not crook retired to beryllium what I expected and, arsenic I got deeper into the blockchain, I saw it was a scam for miswired technoheads. I person ne'er been blinded by hope.“

Well, for immoderate reason, Taleb decided to commencement the caller twelvemonth by attacking the credibility of salient MIT AI Researcher Lex Fridman and the big of the precise fashionable “Lex Fridman Podcast“.

Taleb told his implicit 938K Twitter followers that betwixt 2019 and 2022, helium had turned down “exactly 10 requests” to beryllium connected Friedman’s podcast due to the fact that helium fundamentally coniders Friedman to beryllium a “shallow, vapid, overactive poseur inflating his ‘scientific’ representation by pretending to beryllium an MIT probe idiosyncratic and pretending helium reads and digests 1 publication a wekk.

This unwarranted onslaught connected Friedman angered Hoskinson, who told his implicit 974K Twitter followers:

“If you don’t get wherefore Nassim Taleb is an arrogant portion of quality garbage, past this thread volition bring you up to speed. Lex is 1 of the smartest, astir intellectually curious, and humble radical that I’ve ever met. Taleb wrote immoderate books radical unreal to person work astatine parties“

For his part, Friedman sent retired the pursuing reply to Taleb:

“I’m atrocious you consciousness this way, and that you felt the request to tweet this. I emotion your enactment and volition proceed to observe it. Happy caller twelvemonth ❤️“