Life, the Multiverse and Everything...
At the New Yorker summit Robert Shiller and Nassim Taleb discuss what to do in such times when the spirits aren’t brave at all. Shiller, a Yale economist who famously predicted the last two booms also wrote a book called “Animal Spirits in which he posits that shifts in the economy follow the irrational actions of [...]
After all, we are witnessing the Waterloo of Wall Street. So, ironically, it was in the Canadian province of Ontario, in the small town of Waterloo, that a meeting was convened to shed new light on the world’s financial debacle. In a densely packed conference schedule, the general approach was to take measure of the [...]
Voor als de schemering precies de juiste gloed van roze heeft; raadpleeg deze essay van Taleb. Het gaat het over allerlei ‘fallacies’ (drogredenen) en valkuilen waar men te maken heeft in sociale situaties: o.a. de problemen met het bepalen van de juiste distributies (in bepaalde sociale situaties waar men foutief de normale distributie veronderstelt) confirmation bias ‘silent [...]
This is exactly the phrase that crosses my mind when reading the critics of Taleb’s Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world, mostly from ‘distinguished’ financial ‘experts’. But the dog can bite in this case! I can feel their wrath, often mere desperation and basically, a persistent lack of objective argumentation against Taleb’s postulated theory of inherently unpredictable [...]
Okay, let’s try to elect the mediocre thinking to a higher level and see what it is that constitutes the human understading of the world. Or rather, what it is that doesn’t. But, isn’t that a bit too enthousiastic, one might ask?! Well, it depends who you ask I guess. Nassim Taleb, a Greek amongst [...]
The Role and Nature of High Impact Events (Black Swans): Technical Commentary and Empirical Data - Written by N. N. Taleb This is an appendix to the Edge piece. It is striking how some simple, simple tests (of stability of the 4th moment and failures of stress testing) can invalidate tens of thousand of research papers [...]
Since Tim Geithner did not predict the economic crisis, Nassim Taleb has no interest in listening to him talk about it now. The author of The Black Swan, a book about risk and … [Read More...]
A leaked internal memo from physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva reports a … [Read More...]
The more one probes the universe at smaller and smaller scales, the weirder matter and energy seem … [Read More...]
Can you recall a moment when you could honestly say 'I told you so', but when no one listens? Well … [Read More...]
