statistics
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Nassim Taleb seems like a very smart person but:
- book was exremely long, especially to present one main idea
- the style is quite arrogant, which I didn’t enjoy at all
I liked that he quoted a lot of people in his book, but because of 2 reasons stated above I’m not looking forward to read his other books. It was very painful experience and took me half a year to finish it.
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The evidence for the superiority of one method over another is usually given in the language of statistics, which, in spite of its abstract nature, is strangely referred to as “hard evidence.” This gives the profession a sense of making progress, and sometimes delusions of grandeur. I recently read an article in The American Educator in which the author claims that teaching methods based on research in cognitive science are “the educational equivalents of polio vaccine and penicillin.”
Neil Postman