At least they are biased consistently and they truly believe they are not. When you agree to say and protect a set of views and facts carefully described in a contract... it's another thing.

People take educated risks all the time, we do not calculate (and sometimes can't) every possible outcome of actions, saying we should stand still to avoid anything going wrong is just regressive at best. If you follow that train of thought you should use no modern medicine, the complexity of a living being is too high. We should and can take heavily educated guesses to improve our state of being.

In highly complex systems, educated guesses are no better than random picks. You just have to be aware what kind of system you're dealing with, and be prepared to deal with the consequences. Also, keep in mind time horizons – very important.

That's nonsense. Regardless of complexity of the system, a single bit of knowledge in your educated guess cuts the space of possible choices in half. Even a few bits of knowledge can let you avoid dangers that random selection will reliably hit.

Yes, but most decisions don't intentionally make permanent heritable changes to a species. It's not convincing to say the worst-case scenario associated with GMO monocultures is the same risk associated with, say, a person taking a new drug. One could only effect one person, and that person's consent is possible to obtain. The other could effect millions of people, and is almost impossible to obtain their consent. (Arguably, the anti-labeling campaign is an attempt to make getting such consent irrelevant).

It's never one person taking a new drug though. I also doubt any GMO can be as bad as say leaded gasoline or gun manufacturing.

Gosh, just read his first book. Black Swan. Where he shows that before Europeans discovered black swans in Australia it was a perfect "educated guess" to assume all swans are white.

Welp, Taleb's argument is "scientism", pure and simple.

A lot of interesting problems in real world seem NP-complete, and we deal with them just fine. NP-complete doesn't mean "any wrong step can kill you"; it means we need to be satisfied with almost, but not quite, optimal solutions.

It was one of Pascal main features in tape drive era: single pass compiler.

Taleb doesn't mean IQ doesn't test something real. He says this "something real" is irrelevant.

I was in the US military, and they used something called an ASVAB test to check your suitability for various jobs. It's one of the few skills tests I've encountered that seemed both reasonably accurate and useful.

I'd much rather see the results of that for a potential job hire than I would want to see their SAT scores, IQ, etc.

The ASVAB effectively is an IQ test. There's more of a breakdown than other tests, but you can calculate IQ from it.

The SAT isn't considered a proper IQ test.

Surely I am dating myself, but pre 1994 SAT tests were said to be better.

Total SAT (math and verbal scores), divided by 10,were supposed to be close to the measured iq.

FWIW my SAT divided by 10 was within two points of my mother's IQ testing from decades before.

The breakdown is what was useful. Mechanical aptitude separate from other concepts, for example.

I thought free software was about freedom, not how to monetize it. You can never trust a service - only your own hardware (it's not quite possible with modern mass-market CPU though, only on IBM Power or some dummy MCU or even FPGA-based RISC/MIPS/whatever ) with free software on it. When did Linux become about cloud and containers, not about desktop?

What other languages do you think "made it right" ?

And if foo(z) is consuming a generator somehow (e.g. it's next(g)) then you can't call it twice without side effects.

I don't understand what's wrong? People use software without knowing how it's coded under the hood all the time? The V8 code is here if you want: https://github.com/v8/v8

Polish is a Slavic language and Latin letters are not suitable for it. I'm Russian who speaks English and a bit French and I can understand some Polish words (common roots etc.) like dobrze, dzień dobry, wiedzieć, znać, but I have no idea how to write them (looked up this words in Google Translate).

P.S. And I like to play Witcher III with Polish voices and Russian subtitles.

Most Slavic languages use Latin as primary script. Polish took a few questionable decisions compared to other western/southern Slavic languages (not switching from sz/cz to s^/c^ for example), but it's almost fully phonetic and pretty consistent. I'd argue Polish pronunciation is easier to learn than Russian, because we have no movable stress (we always stress the penultimate syllable - easy).

The whole article is a statistical fallacy. You should never compare "average" growth rates but extreme outcomes. What is the best possible outcome and the worst one in case of renting and in case of mortgage?

P.S. Read Nassim Taleb (and Daniel Kahneman) for the sake of reason.