[YouTube] You are Hiring a Person Not a Subcontinent: A Basic Error in The Interpretation of Statistics.

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Outlining a basic error in statistical interpretation: statistics works on aggregates, not individual instances. You can only use statistical properties when dealing with groups not individuals –except when the variance is zero –in which case why use statistics?
Even if IQ worked outside of severe deficits, it wouldn’t be applicable to decisions concerning single individuals.
Applies to President Biden’s pancreatic cancer.
I use as example on IQ arguments by bullshit vendor Geoffrey Miller.

[Substack] Have Another Drink!

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I have been finding flaws in studies critical of alcohol consumption in low to moderate doses. The one I will examine is the following one used as “definitive” argument in the medical discussions.

George S, Naimi TS, Keyes K, Martinez-Matyszczyk P, et al. (including Shield KD). “Alcohol Intake and Health Study: No Protective Effect at Low Levels, With Mortality Increasing to 1 in 25 at 14 Drinks Per Week.” Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2026 (Vol. 87, Issue 4; DOI: 10.15288/jsad.25-00435). This analysis was commissioned by the US goverment. It has a deceiving title and a deceiving summary conclusion: “At low levels of consumption, no protective net effect of alcohol consumption on health was observed.”. Their claim is that lifetime alcohol-attributable mortality risk were >1 in 1,000 at around 7 drinks per week and reached ~1 in 25 (4%) at 14 drinks/week (the established upper guideline limit). It offers a guidance of no more than 1 drink per day (or less).

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[Substack] The Book is a Book, not Disembodied Information

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Believing that the book is just abstract information that can be merely held on a stick is an error we will call dimension overtrucation.

Definition: Dimension overtruncation is a Procrustean-bed in which the simplification of an object, phenomenon, or process proceeds beyond the level that can be justified without material loss. It applies to situations when the focus is confined to easily observable dimensions while less visible ones –while central –are ignored. Thus, an item may be assumed to be used for a stated purpose while its survival and persistence are attributable to other, unrecognized dimensions.

I read Victor Hugo’s Les misérables when I was thirteen. The book remained in our family library in Lebanon for years, then somehow strayed from it, as books tend to do, serially running away with each borrower. A few years ago, I found it again on the shelves of a relative. It was the Pléiade edition, printed in dense type on thin, Bible-like paper, and had survived for nearly half a century. I held it in my hands and did not need to open it to recover, in a flash, the gripping experience of reading it—particularly the passage in which Cosette suddenly felt the bucket she had been struggling to carry become light: Jean Valjean had taken hold of it and was helping her carry it.

Continue reading on Substack – nntaleb.substack.com/p/the-book-is-a-book-not-disembodied

[Substack] A Lebanese Technology Transfer

On By In Economics, Writing

Postface to Abi-Rached and El-Richani’s Lebanon: Anatomy of a Collapse

I would like to repeat an aphorism that Lebanon has twice the qualities found in the Mediterranean world, but twice the flaws. This can generalize beyond the Mediterranean: Lebanon can be a place to study both societal functioning and its maladies.

For the Lebanese crisis under discussion in this volume appears to be a rare confluence of three ailments hitting a country as if by some conspiracy of providence. And by some divine coincidence, the solution is also found in Lebanese (more generally North Levantine) history.

Continue reading on Substack – nntaleb.substack.com/p/a-lebanese-technology-transfer