ClaimsNassim Taleb

“We analyze the robustness of our results to errors in historical reports, taking into account the unreliability of accounts by historians and absence of critical data.”

Nassim Taleb, paper author (abstract) 18 May 2015 On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts (arXiv) archived copy

Factual Science and research methods

The paper analyzes the robustness of its results to errors in historical reports, accounting for historians' unreliability and missing data.

Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

The second judge said mostly true; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

What would count as true or false

True: the paper in question (Cirillo & Taleb, 'On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts', 2015/2016) contains a robustness analysis that perturbs or reweights historical casualty figures to allow for errors or unreliability in historians' estimates, and addresses missing or incomplete data. Mostly true: there is such an analysis, but it covers either reporting error or missing data only lightly. Mixed: only one of the two (reporting error or missing data) is addressed. Mostly false: the robustness discussion is only a brief mention without real analysis. False: the paper has no such analysis.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (3)

  1. E1 [PDF] Long Peace.nb - Nassim Nicholas Taleb fooledbyrandomness.com (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) Own record

    “Using Monte Carlo methods we have shown that, if we assume that the real number of casualties in a conflict is uniformly distributed between the minimum and the maximum in the available data”

  2. E2 [PDF] Long Peace.nb - Nassim Nicholas Taleb fooledbyrandomness.com (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) Own record

    “As we have shown in Section IV, missing data are unlikely to influence our estimates of the shape parameter”

  3. E3 Are Wars And Violence Decreasing? Taleb's New Paper Reviewed William M. Briggs (wmbriggs.com) · 20 May 2015

    “Measurement error, as admitted by the authors, and is by now obvious, is a tremendous and incurable problem.”

Reasoning

The claim is true. The paper's text (E2) describes Monte Carlo tests in which each conflict's casualty count is drawn uniformly between the minimum and maximum figures in the available data. That is a perturbation test for errors in historians' estimates. The paper also refers back to a Section IV analysis showing that missing data are unlikely to affect its estimates of the shape parameter (E3). An independent review (E4) notes that the authors admit measurement error and argues the problem is incurable; this shows that the authors acknowledge the error, but does not by itself show whether the paper analyses it.

Cite this claim

Nassim Taleb, “The paper analyzes the robustness of its results to errors in historical reports, accounting for historians' unreliability and missing data.” (said 18 May 2015). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_a053612b3a08, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_a053612b3a08

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

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All of them

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