The Wall

[wufwugy]

The gist of Taleb's argument against GMO as I understand it is that a small change in a number of small variables (i.e., genes) could have emergent multiplicative risks out of all proportion to their understood individual risks down the line, and that these could end up being catastrophically bad because ecology is all interconnected.

The problems with the argument imho is that a) it isn't at all obvious that these variables will necessarily interact, and b) if they do, it isn't obvious that such an interaction will be any more likely to be catastrophic than would be leaving things as they are. The variables as they exist now could still have a catastrophic effect at some time in the future (we'll never know until it happens because it's impossible to predict all the interactions, which is kind of Taleb's starting point for saying we shouldn't mess with the unknown).

It's like saying you have ten jars full of 100 marbles each, and each jar contains one or more marbles that fit into a piece that if combined becomes the 'giant doomsday marble'. You pull one marble from each jar simultaneously and if you pick 10 doomsday pieces at the same time you create the doomsday marble and the world implodes. His argument is analogous to saying that we COULD be increasing the number of doomsday pieces in each jar by GMO, thus increasing the chance of the world imploding. But with all the maths in the world it can't be measured objectively because it's impossible to identify the doomsday pieces' interactions by definition. Which he then uses as an argument that we basically shouldn't accept any risks with any GMO because it is akin to creating these potential doomsday marbles in different jars (I'm paraphrasing).

tl;dr Taleb seems to be talking out his ass a bit on this one.

It's funny, I think your explanation is fantastic and I don't think it suggests out-of-ass talking on his part.

Perhaps it's because I view the "we COULD be increasing the number of doomsday pieces..." statement as being more credible than perhaps you do. Lately I've been of the mind that "consensus" gets lots of stuff wrong, even when backed empirically with higher-than-standard rigor.

[Poopadoop]

It's funny, I think your explanation is fantastic and I don't think it suggests out-of-ass talking on his part.

Perhaps it's because I view the "we COULD be increasing the number of doomsday pieces..." statement as being more credible than perhaps you do. Lately I've been of the mind that "consensus" gets lots of stuff wrong, even when backed empirically with higher-than-standard rigor.

I probably shouldn't have said 'talking out of his ass' as if he never thought about it much and just spun out a paper one day cause he was bored. I'm sure he has thought about it and he may be making more sense than I realise.

OTOH, I still stand by my arguments a) and b) above. I think his argument is a bit of the old 'we're creating our own disaster because experts don't understand maths' argument that he used for economics. I think he may have gotten a big head about that and his hubris may have outran his knowledge a bit.

What this kind of reminds me of is about a dozen years ago when Francis Crick (of Watson and Crick, the structure of DNA Nobel prize winners) decided he was going to be a neuroscientist, and not only that but solve pretty much the biggest question in neuroscience which was how the brain creates consciousness. That did not end well for him.