Life, the Multiverse and Everything...
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 [...]
1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest. 2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be [...]
(This is the canonical black swan definition from the canonical “black swan” guy.) Dispatches from Extremistan (Nassim Taleb talk) A “black swan,” Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal [...]
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...]
