Know-Nothing Know-It-All/Quotes

"What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. [...] Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry. [...] The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right."

- The Intellectual Yet Idiot by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Like Sean Carroll, Brian Cox pretends to be a scientist but in reality, he is confused about some very rudimentary facts about modern physics and science in general. It's not just the lunar phases or locality or the exclusion principle that he totally misunderstands (be sure that I haven't discussed every misconception of his that has made me very angry). He actually doesn't build on science [...] there is a gem in the next paragraph:   Cox, a physicist who works on the Large Hadron Collider where the Higgs boson was discovered, said that 95% certainty in science is effectively total. Wow. If he actually were a competent particle physicist rather than a pathetic environmentalist clown pretending to be a caricature of a scientist, he would know that the 95% confidence – also known as 2-sigma evidence – is almost equivalent to no evidence at all . [...] As all actual particle physicists would agree, 95% is just an insignificant hint. The hints only become evidence worth discussing when the confidence approaches the 99.7% or 3-sigma level and an effect is only claimed to be discovered when the confidence reaches 99.9999% or 5-sigma. This convention of hard science is no excessively demanding dream. If a new effect is actually there, collecting the 5-sigma evidence takes just slightly (6.25 times) more data than accumulating the 2-sigma evidence. If a 2-sigma hint refuses to grow to 5 sigma for a decade or two, you may be pretty sure that it was a fluke and the effect doesn't exist. And indeed, most effects that are, at one point, observed to be there at the 95% confidence level ultimately go away."

- "Brian Cox's incompetence" by Luboš Motl on The Reference Frame blog

"Trader: Amaranth blew up because they only had twelve risk managers. I hired thirteen. Assistant: Twelve died today poking wild bears in a pit filled with cobras. Assistant: It's weird because none of our risk models saw it coming."

- Offshorecomic #263

"The very first time I worked as a secretary at Politburo, my ear caught ironical sense of the term "educated marxist". It turned out that when it was said "an educated marxist", one should understand: "a dolt and babbler"."

- Boris Bazhanov, Memoirs of the former secretary of Stalin