His central thesis that models can't account for everything is............................painfully obvious. He's Malcolm Gladwell if Malcom Gladwell's selling point was that he predicted that, during obvious market bubbles, those bubbles would pop.

If it was so obvious, no institution would rely on the model, nor would people rely on institutions that use the models.

Objectively there would be a perpetual hedge - and that is how it is from the perspective of a scientist - but from the perspective of practitioners of theory, the model presents an accurate enough picture that it possesses a degree of truth which is illusory. But even with some arbitrarily defined 99% success, you can never predict when the 1% failure will occur, and if we allow Mandelbrot's postulate

Now in things like celestial bodies and their trajectories - it's relegated to some distant inanity that extraordinarily curious people have derived, getting it wrong doesn't change the way the planets revolve around the sun.

In the facets of civilization which they can affect, such as economics, they become a serious hazard, because they can and do affect the way the planet moves. It's a pernicious effect, that were it so known and obvious, would be forcibly relegated to oblivion. When probability is measured in infinitesimal fractions of continuous time a 1% fail rate becomes very substantial, and especially when it isn't accounted for in every dimension, to give an example:

"The “spreads” between brokers’ bid and ask prices widened sharply—as much as 19 percent above the industry’s norms (that translates into an instantaneous windfall to any broker who called it right, and near-ruin to those who got it wrong). The turmoil spread around the globe: The Hong Kong index fell 14 percent, London 9 percent. In the final twenty-four minutes before the New York market closed at 3:30, prices plummeted at an average rate of 0.10 percent a minute, or 6 percent an hour, the SEC calculated. Put that into perspective: The value of American business was falling $100 million a second. The next morning, prices roared in the opposite direction even faster. But the fastest action of all concentrated into three isolated minutes in the whole twenty-four hours: between 3:12 and 3:14 p.m. New York time, and between 3:24 and 3:25 p.m. This was no mere financial storm. It was a hurricane."

-Mandelbrot, The (mis)Behavior of Markets

Your position is also highly reductionist, Taleb covers a lot of broad ground, including his own models, which are duly hedged from his perspective as a staunch empiricist.

Classics are good reading because every new generation of readers can find there something valuable. Every new generation of readers can find something new, or at least rediscover something old. Everyone find in classics their own things.

If the author sees Dostoevsky through the lens of a modern author (Taleb), the better for Dostoevsky. It means he is still relevant.

The GP was a bit hyperbolic but I am inclined to agree with their viewpoint. The intellectual trend they are highlighting (which goes way beyond Taleb) has real consequences because it is so prevalent among tech workers and capital owners who have enormous influence on modern life.

Yeah. And then others will come to have no bearing on Dostoevsky's continued relevance.

Dostoevsky relevant while there are people to read him. If people didn't read him, then Dostoevsky would be irrelevant, wouldn't he? If all the people die for example, Dostoevsky would be irrelevant then. Isn't it a causal link? Modern people and their beliefs are a necessary cause of relevance of Dostoevsky.

> The intellectual trend they are highlighting (which goes way beyond Taleb) has real consequences because it is so prevalent among tech workers and capital owners who have enormous influence on modern life.

Didn't you considered a question: why techies and economists are so excited about Taleb? Why them? Why not plumbers for example? I can propose an answer. Techies and economists are two groups who rely on models the most. It is impossible to use math to solve a problem without conducting a math model of that problem first. So when Taleb had shown them that their models are not good enough, how did they feel? Their art failed them. Their methods can commit not just random blunders, they are guaranteed to blunder in unpredictable ways. Of course they are obsessed with Taleb.

And it is a good thing, exactly because "tech workers and capital owners [...] have enormous influence on modern life". Their blunders can hurt a lot.

I see as nonconstructive the attitude of scowling at techies discovering Dostoevsky and seeking there ways to refine their art of modelling. If you know better how to deal with a failure of a model, then help them kindly. Suggest them Shakespeare, or Plato, or something else to read that can help them to learn to walk without crutches of models. You can really try to see world their way, and you can really help them, if you are so good.

But I remember literature lessons from my youth, and history, and I hate them. I hated them then, I hate them now. I'm sure all these humanities' people are unable to understand a techie, and they are unable to explain themselves because of it. It doesn't surprise me that techies have difficulties when trying to understand people, but why humanities' people fail to understand tech people and moreover how they can be proud of it I cannot grasp. It is their specialty to understand others isn't it? Shouldn't they be obsessed with Taleb because they cannot understand why techies obsessed with him? Why they obsessed with Taleb more than with Judea Pearl? It is just because Pearl solves problems he stated, while Taleb does not propose a satisfying solution? Or maybe because Taleb's stated problem is more thrilling for them?

Why all these arts people think more about the relevance of long dead Dostoevsky than of people who live now? Dostoevsky was concerned of living people and of problems that were relevant at his time. Crime and Punishment is about a young man who had read too much of Nietzsche. More then it was good for him. Nietzsche was a thinker like Taleb. So now we have a lot of people who read too much of Taleb. More than it is good for them. Isn't it exciting? Isn't the best path is to help them and to write a novel predicting their punishment, than to scowl at them?

The problem isn't Taleb specifically. As it happens, I do like his books quite a bit. He just happens to be a common figure in the problem we are describing here. What is happening is that there is a strong trend in some parts of the tech and science crowd to apply a halo effect to themselves and to reject certain sources of knowledge on account of it. If this halo did not exist, Taleb might not have been the target of obsession because his audience would not have fallen into the belief that they could apply models to everything and call it a day in the first place.

It's true that we could be kinder to people such as the blog post author, and suggest more things to read. But at the same time, reading is not sufficient and a booster shot of self-awareness and humility is needed to move past the halo. To the author's credit, he does write about his rejection of certain types of scientism, but moving past viewing the non-STEM world through a filter is necessary and that in itself requires a shift that is more easily attained by direct confrontation such as what the GP attempted rather than reading your way out of it over a period of years.

Besides, the tech crowd won't be the ones suffering from their way of thinking: they'll have enough capital and surplus to fall back on. It's the rest of the population that is at the mercy of FAANGs and other assorted "move fast and break things" aficionados.

It will always be relevant and insightful, no matter the state of some human constructs, or new society standards - in the end human condition will always be with us.

Yeah, that's kind of my point. Of course he's still relevant, he's Dostoevsky. I'm in the middle of Moby Dick. Not because Taleb (or Jordan Peterson, or any other twitter "intellectual") told me about this cool 19th century author named Herman Melville, but because, you know, it's Moby freakin' Dick.

It is a theoretical prediction: Dostoevsky will be relevant forever.

When someone reads Dostoevsky and sees Taleb's ideas there, it is not an insult to Dostoevsky, it is an evidence supporting the theory.

The delivery of this nonchalant line in particular made me cringe hard.