Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war
This is an intellectually confused post.  It is so unclear and muddled that only a charitable reader would suppose the author understands the mathematical and modeling issues here.  I’m surprised the author published it in this form - you don’t want to jump into a controversy like this with such an unclear discussion.<p>As just one example, the whole digression on a “decision boundary” is conceptually mistaken.  Once you report a posterior probability, it’s up to the user to establish a simple real number threshold for  placing a bet (if we’re talking about means to put skin in the game).  The posterior you just learned holds all information, your only action is to threshold it.  That’s the Neyman-Pearson lemma.<p>If you allow generalizations to interval-valued probability, which might be sensible under these conditions, the situation gets more complicated.  But the writer of the post did not mention this.<p>Another place this came out is his initial discussion of aleatory vs. epistemic uncertainty — this can be done clearly, but here we read:<p>&gt; Aleatory uncertainty is concerned with the fundamental system (probability of rolling a six on a standard die). Epistemic uncertainty is concerned with the uncertainty of the system (how many sides does a die have? And what is the probability of rolling a six?).<p>This is just not helpful.  He has said “probability of rolling a six” twice.<p>Source: do UQ in day job.