Found posts: 1599, comments: 6403
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2018 12:48:16 PM UTC
Bingo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2018 12:48:26 PM UTC
Good man
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2018 7:53:38 PM UTC
Excellent!
https://www.academia.edu/37221402/TECHNICAL_INCERTO_VOL_1_THE_STATISTICAL_CONSEQUENCES_OF_FAT_TAILS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 19, 2018 3:21:46 PM UTC
Replaces!
Monsanto lost the case. (People around me were wondering which soccer game I was watching).
1) This is a victory for science. It is not about Glyphosate. It's that the manipulation of science by corporations, the bullying of scientists does not pay!
2) This is also a victory for liberty. The legal system (tort laws) is protecting citizens, while regulators were in collusion with industry: the EPA/FDA let Monsanto ghostwrite their rules.
Regulators are indirectly owned by industry as they get hired later as payback (same with Wall Street where pple good to industry get a job at 5-20 x their previous salary).
3) This will open the floodgates: hundreds of lawsuits against Monsanto.
4) We are compiling a list of Monsanto shills involved in the protracted smear campaign against yours truly, particularly that we have documents from the "Monsanto papers".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 11, 2018 9:38:05 AM UTC
A couple of years ago we blocked close to 2000 Monsanto shills and bots who flooded this page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 11, 2018 10:56:12 AM UTC
The point is that Monsanto LIED about the test. Nothing was done. Gabish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 11, 2018 1:51:34 PM UTC
Žygintas Beručka Exposed during the trial but we knew abt it long before.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 15, 2018 11:34:13 PM UTC
Blocked a few shills posting the Monsanto mantra “science”. This is not about science but corporate manipulation of the scientific process.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2018 12:26:07 PM UTC
Marc Milanini Marc, ce sont des gens de Monsanto, ou leurs amis des facs de biologue... il en reste encore un peu.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2018 12:26:28 PM UTC
biologie
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 11, 2018 12:10:07 PM UTC
Hi Steve! I remember you told me you read War and Peace in one summer at Cornell while waiting to get a job. True?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 13, 2018 4:30:07 PM UTC
Trying to explain the precautionary principle
https://overcast.fm/+MApFBBGos
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1015928573411119104
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 21, 2018 9:44:43 AM UTC
Almost by definition, what makes it to a video is suspicious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 21, 2018 9:45:09 AM UTC
ha!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 21, 2018 11:30:00 AM UTC
Karin Reimertz, your nitpicking is incoherent: the article is not about the example but the phenomenon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 21, 2018 12:14:51 PM UTC
Looking for more situations-without-a-name to aid in debunking intellectual scams.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2018 10:28:32 AM UTC
Tres bon!
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2018 12:39:32 AM UTC
Are you in Malta?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2018 10:05:24 AM UTC
Same thing ("sepia")
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 4, 2018 11:44:04 AM UTC
I will be in Malta Saturday and Sunday. Coffee?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2018 11:59:24 AM UTC
La7 kun honik ba3d Malta. Fi mat3am honik?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 8, 2018 7:31:44 PM UTC
I am there now!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 8, 2018 9:20:14 PM UTC
So far, thanks to Luca Lixi
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/money/a19181300/nassim-nicholas-taleb-money-advice/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 5, 2018 10:52:02 PM UTC
Yes I corrected it on Twitter.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/989481241337614336.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 27, 2018 12:31:58 PM UTC
A lot of commentators are slow at getting it. It has ALREADY been established that formal education = mostly signaling with little knowledge one one controls for all other things.
I discussed the literature in Antifragile, and Bryan Caplan's book thoroughly reviews the evidence. The point is that knowledge used in professions != formal education.
Gabish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 27, 2018 1:05:50 PM UTC
Not the point. Reread.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 28, 2018 12:17:45 AM UTC
The main idea is that colleges tell you that they are training you at *something*. This is not true. They train you at nothing.
http://www.opindia.com/2018/04/economists-bullshit-for-a-living-nn-taleb-gives-kaushik-basu-a-lesson-on-skin-in-the-game/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 5:47:15 PM UTC
Best solution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2018 1:57:21 PM UTC
The point is not there.
Scholarships are available for the 8th program.
Full scholarships are available for women, Syrian students, and unemployed people.
http://realworldrisk.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2018 12:28:53 PM UTC
Never!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2018 12:29:09 PM UTC
Please explain what you mean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2018 5:22:23 PM UTC
Susan you need to come back for the remaining 3 days
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2018 8:02:10 PM UTC
When are you coming back?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 6, 2018 8:23:03 PM UTC
Corn=wheat corn, not corn maize
Friends, in case I close this Facebook page (or FB goes out of business), my posts can be found at:
MEDIUM (INCERTO) (for longer ones)
and
Twitter (for shorter ones)
https://medium.com/incerto
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 24, 2018 3:08:34 PM UTC
Any details?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 24, 2018 3:08:45 PM UTC
Medium is a newspaper.
So Skin in the Game made the NYT Bestseller's List without a single US book review, with a single book lecktchur in NY. All thanks to my twitter/FB friends (and enemies).
So Skin in the Game made the NYT Bestseller's List without a single US book review, with a single book lecktchur in NY. All thanks to my twitter/FB friends (and enemies).
Characteristically, these NYT idiots still managed to mis-describe the book.
Thanks friends for the help in the writing of the book.
We don't need the press to be elected, to get books to people ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 8, 2018 7:02:12 PM UTC
Usually trash books are in the top 10.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 5, 2018 3:39:04 PM UTC
They didn't realize they were questioning Evolution
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/03/nassim_nicholas_2.html
https://youtu.be/ezhjumayRsg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 28, 2018 7:32:38 PM UTC
Phoenician
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 1, 2018 3:08:16 AM UTC
We need to fact check the accuracy of the event
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 1, 2018 3:08:51 AM UTC
Was it just you or a group ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 1:23:48 PM UTC
2nd was parody
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 1:26:04 PM UTC
Journalists are used to people being terrorized by them; they viciously try to bully them. They aren't used to someone defiant enought says f** you to them & hound them back one by one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 4:55:59 PM UTC
Barry Purcell, nitwit, you need to say PRECISELY what is wrong in an argument in the book, not just say "accept criticism" to just be a victim. And you learn to train for reading comprehension. Gabish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 4:58:03 PM UTC
And you need to get that the Guardian has MILLIONS of readers against my tiny social media. Imbecile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 11:35:41 AM UTC
Why don't you give advice to another author? Gabish?
Well, iIt turned out Matthew Syed was a doer before writing about things.
(The picture is old, before... I lost weight)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-skin-in-the-game-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb-down-with-the-intellectual-idiots-f2hp5gvd3
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 24, 2018 1:18:15 PM UTC
Weightlifting
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 25, 2018 11:06:54 AM UTC
Not always.
https://twitter.com/Douglas9162/status/965904588846051328
Smart astrologists become economists
Smart serial killers become Op-Ed columnists
Smart bullshitters become psychologists
Smart rent-seekers become professors
and smart bankrobbers become bankers
All that without Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 15, 2018 12:41:10 PM UTC
Serial killers Op-Ed journos: Thomas Friedman (Iraq war), etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 17, 2018 9:55:00 AM UTC
I have started blocking idiots here. That smart drug dealers become pharmacopsychiatrists doesn't mean pharmacopsychiatrists = drug dealers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 17, 2018 10:00:08 AM UTC
Idiots.
I am not sending SITG to journalists, bypassing the media (except in France) and skipping the book tour (except for 3 lecktchurs in London & NY). Reason isn't just media incompetence; mostly because they don't grasp a book as a chapter in a larger construction.
http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/29/01/2018/importance-taleb’s-system-fourth-quadrant-skin-game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 2, 2018 3:02:59 PM UTC
Foie gras
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 2, 2018 5:38:38 PM UTC
What are you bullshitting? There has been NO coverage. Why are you bullshitting here?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 3, 2018 12:32:22 PM UTC
Jorge Carlos Berny The French spent only 20 y in Lebanon. The link is much earlier.https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/when-did-lebanese-christians-start-speaking-french-771603969932
Engineering offers effectiveness but not certainties.
Social Science offers neither certainties nor effectiveness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 1, 2018 1:09:17 PM UTC
And probability teaches us how to rigorously handle uncertainties...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 1, 2018 1:55:41 PM UTC
A technical paper showing how "empirical" research in psychology & other social sciences isn't quite empirical: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07532.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 1, 2018 5:07:07 PM UTC
Social sciences have formed to BS on things.
Amazon discounted my book. I am even thinking of buying a copy.
https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily/dp/042528462X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 29, 2018 2:40:05 PM UTC
I know the "NYT bestselling" is vulgar. Publishers are difficult, so I may start my own house next time.
It may fail, but we now know how to do it.
https://t.co/eDRnaY7yLd
A social media strategy: write-off any person psychopathologizing another (say, use of such accusations as “narcissist”, “inf/superiority complex”, etc.), particularly when there is political divergence or some unrelated disagreement.
Remember: psychology has largely been junk science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 15, 2018 11:27:34 AM UTC
P hacking https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/936563894339948544
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 16, 2018 7:09:41 AM UTC
Neuroscience is the last refuge of the charlatan, as it looks like science. Some of it works; most is flawed because of dimensionality. In Antifragile was discussed as "brain porn" as putting MRI stuff makes BS look convincing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 17, 2018 4:01:26 AM UTC
Christopher Chabris Again that neuroscience lends itself to brain porn doesn't mean that it is all bad. Just that it can be more easily exploited by charlatans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 22, 2018 1:51:58 AM UTC
They were Lindy: in classics for 4000 y
And why one needs statistical rigor to do science and understand the world.
PS- Also illustrate to what extent probability is part of information theory.
PPS- Doing linguistics without information theory is like doing physics without calculus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBztYP9tQ5o
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 7, 2018 8:00:18 PM UTC
Jelinek's comment!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 7, 2018 11:24:09 PM UTC
Excellent!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 8, 2018 1:29:01 AM UTC
I am!
The head of the Royal Statistical Society made the elementary mistake of comparing terrorism to lawnmowers (it turned out that he is not a statistician but a "science communicator" but people don't know). I reacted on twitter with an angry comment which was picked up by probability professionals and led to the paper below. (See also my video about pseudo-empiricism).
The fact that a twitter comment (which takes 10 seconds to write) can bust statements such a these to shame a royal academy shows the power of social media. In the old days I would have had to write a long letter which would have been ignored.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/papers/lawnmowers.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 4, 2018 1:32:49 PM UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 4, 2018 8:19:24 PM UTC
What do you mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 4, 2018 8:20:12 PM UTC
Actually the deeper point is that descriptive statistics SHOULD NEVER be used to compare time series, particularly if one is not stationary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 5, 2018 10:49:50 AM UTC
NdT makes the same mistake
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 8, 2018 11:47:36 AM UTC
Neil Gerace How do you know?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 2:18:58 PM UTC
Hahahaha. Try again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 2:21:12 PM UTC
You didn't read the graph correctly. This not descendance but flow. Gabish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 2:26:31 PM UTC
You did NOT show any flaw in the argument. You just posted attributed to me something I am not saying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 3:07:26 PM UTC
https://twitter.com/oldlevantine/status/948206901828997121
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 3:28:07 PM UTC
Scholarship and Science = questioning common orthodoxy, particularly when politically driven.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 3:52:06 PM UTC
Mohammad Ahnouch I am glad this is irritating you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 4:21:28 PM UTC
The languages DESCEND from Latin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 4:22:42 PM UTC
Basically I am getting emotional responses from Arabists with some anecdotes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 5:19:41 PM UTC
Slowly accepting it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 6:11:14 PM UTC
Basically the answers to this piece can help understand why Arabism has been such a glorious project.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 2:34:18 AM UTC
Mr Al-Jeloo, first do not use the word "scholarly" then come tell me to "stick to my discipline", then have the nerve to provide a circular answer: we speak Arabic because we speak Arabic or because experts said so. Answer details in the article.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 2:53:29 AM UTC
2/ Also stick to my point abt rel with Arabic not the other dialects of the area.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 3:02:04 AM UTC
BTW I have 3 copies of your dict.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 10:50:16 AM UTC
You are assuming that others too speak Arabic => we speak Arabic. This is circular.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 11:07:14 AM UTC
Basically you need to learn to start by discussing the point at hand avoid "this is scholarly" because you don't seem to know what scholarly is. If "others" speak a continuum of languages, it is becauses they too speak a patois that is not that of Arabic but on the other languages around (on the patois in a minute).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 11:07:53 AM UTC
And the patois-French analogy is flawed because there is NO other language than French that is RELATED TO IT (from same family) involved.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 1:20:17 PM UTC
Many are conflating areal influence (i.e. how langues transmit by similarities with neighbors and genetic ones (i..e. descendence). cc David Boxenhorn.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 1:58:57 PM UTC
The flaw in Nicholas Al-Jeloo's reasoning is imparting descendance to similarities that can be areally transmitted. There is indeed a cluster of languages from the fertile crescent to Egypt that allows people to communicate in similar dialects. Making the leap that the original binding language is Arabic is highly unrigorous. We can't even
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 1:59:26 PM UTC
assert that it was Arabic, not a North Arabian patois that spread West with the early invaders.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 2:00:19 PM UTC
So my problem is not similarity but DESCENDENCE that I am questioning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 2:46:07 PM UTC
Mohammad Ahnouch I am ignoring your points as they are random. I am addressing Nicholas Al-Jeloo for now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 3:47:11 PM UTC
1) Trolls get blocked, particularly when they insult others. 2) blocking on my site doesn't mean not allowing legal protection. 3) Stop the sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 3:48:19 PM UTC
Nicholas Al-Jeloo BTW " as someone with a PhD in Syriac Studies and a BA in Semitic Languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Akkadian) from the University of Sydney and an MA in Syriac Christianity from Leiden University" is NEVER something a scholar writes. If you have to tell us your undergrad, you are not a scholar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 4:25:21 PM UTC
You think I did not consult with a scholar of higher grade than you before the discussion?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 4:33:32 PM UTC
The only rigorous comments I got was from professional linguists. I missed another argument in favor of Arabic: the w instead of y יֶרַח
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 3, 2018 10:13:08 PM UTC
Nicholas Al-Jeloo when you take jabs at someone not being "scholarly" by showing your undergrad credentials, you can expect some reply. And to be schooled into what science means and doesn't mean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 4, 2018 1:39:56 PM UTC
Closing with the thread explaining how Semitic linguistics works with general statements without the slightest understanding of the notion of scientific evidence --evidence requires significance, absence of cherry picking. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/948875735065858048
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 4, 2018 6:25:33 PM UTC
Emilio El Dib ...et la traduction francaise?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 4, 2018 6:26:11 PM UTC
It would be harder if you only spoke class. Arabic
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 6, 2018 12:53:28 PM UTC
Reducing a rich problem to a simplified binary classification is highly unscientific. The way to look at languages as a spot with 2 or more independent compents (PC) and look at distance between them. Given that Arabic is not independent from Akkadian, it is improper to say "this is Arabic not Akkadian".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 10, 2018 11:46:50 AM UTC
Alex Tomic this is a standard instance of sophistry, as it can apply to anything while skirting the argument, by shifting to the intentions of the agent. Like telling the victim of a robbery: "it is what we often see with people who want to cash on their insurance". Learn to think.
(en francais)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzBdTV8Qwo8
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 1, 2018 12:04:15 AM UTC
J'ai revu un peu. Helas je n'ai pas eu le temps.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 1, 2018 12:04:29 AM UTC
L'anglais, cher ami.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 2, 2018 2:04:10 AM UTC
Grazie
And make sure your holiday greetings reach those lonely people who need it the most.
Scholarship are not based on "academic" stuff, but on more general attributes.
http://realworldrisk.com/comments
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 18, 2017 3:23:32 PM UTC
Hi. This page is not for applications. Pls write to Alicia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 18, 2017 6:30:40 PM UTC
Are you coming?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 18, 2017 7:57:02 PM UTC
Hihi Please not here, write to alicia
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 15, 2017 1:45:53 AM UTC
In other words, so long as the majority people call Bitcoin a bubble, you can be safe it isn't.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 15, 2017 3:33:45 PM UTC
Marie Assali You get banned accusing people of dishonesty. Delete your comment. Kapish?
(note that GQ is John Gray)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 30, 2017 12:51:12 PM UTC
I could not avoid the WSJ quote and the bestseller mention...
Hopefully such a model will eventually replace universities (or become an archetype for them) as academics have no hope competing against practitioners in real world disciplines, and academia is too immersed in politically correct BS to get things done.
http://realworldrisk.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 20, 2017 4:42:09 PM UTC
Write to Alicia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 20, 2017 4:43:06 PM UTC
Easier to stay local for us. We are setting up a model for others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 20, 2017 7:51:19 PM UTC
Why do I have a PhD? certification is not an honor system nor a prison. Gabish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 20, 2017 7:51:34 PM UTC
Thanks will look.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 20, 2017 7:52:07 PM UTC
Watch out. If you are good at arguing with us, you end up hired!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 20, 2017 7:53:02 PM UTC
Come back for a visit... many drop by for lunch.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 21, 2017 12:47:50 PM UTC
Please send resumé to Alicia
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 21, 2017 12:48:47 PM UTC
Guru, write to Alicia.
Never trust the thought & science of anyone who is not free. Being free means no honors, no position, nothing other than one's own thought.
Jean-Paul Sartre's refusal of the Nobel.
----
(...), a bold new work that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility.
“Skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their neck they are putting on the line.”
In his most provocative and practical book yet, [...] redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one's own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.
As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights:
• For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations.
• Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general.
• Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities asymmetrically imposing their tastes and ethics on others.
• You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low carb diets.
• Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines.
• True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe is only manifested by what you’re willing to sacrifice for it.
The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard, but have rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly complex worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to literally all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of Skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 5, 2017 3:00:59 PM UTC
yes
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 5, 2017 6:34:38 PM UTC
I revised a bit.
Skin in the Game is coming out Feb 27.
(reposting because accidentally deleted)
https://www.amazon.com/Skin-Game-Hidden-Asymmetries-Daily/dp/042528462X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509105559&sr=1-1&keywords=skin+in+the+game+nassim+taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 29, 2017 5:32:18 PM UTC
This is Volume 5 of the INCERTO
Someone in a transaction asked me for a picture of a document to make sure a certain assertion I made was right. I blew him away, saying "if you don't trust me, f** off and do business with someone else". His answer was: "We trust you but..."
Was he trusting my understanding of the document, or my ethics? When you say "trust", it can be both.
Skin in the game clears both fools and crooks out of the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 11:30:44 AM UTC
Blocked a few people commenting here without even understanding the context. It was trust in a business transaction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 11:34:16 AM UTC
You ONLY do business with people you trust. PERIOD.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 11:58:19 AM UTC
You caught me!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 3:08:20 PM UTC
A side point is never trust someone who doesn't trust you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 4:13:17 PM UTC
Enea Hoyos, I remember seeing your birth announcement in Lorient-LeJour... mother Lebanese?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 4:14:03 PM UTC
BTW, Enea Hoyos, the reason this page works is because I block people I don't trust.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 4:15:47 PM UTC
No lawyer will EVER protect you from someone not worth trusting. No document beats a handshake with a person of honor...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 5:55:04 PM UTC
The new introduction
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 21, 2017 5:58:11 PM UTC
Fuck off. Never tell people how they should express themselves.
Change for the sake of change, as we see in architecture, food, and lifestyle, can be the opposite of progress. As I have explained in Antifragile, too high a rate of mutation prevents locking-in the benefits of previous changes: evolution (and progress) requires some, but not too frequent variation.
-----
(Excerpt)
Let us return to mathemata pathemata (learning through pain) and consider its reverse: learning through thrills and pleasure. People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none. Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it, cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.
But there is an even more vital dimension. Many addicts who normally have a dull intellect and the mental nimbleness of a cauliflower or a foreign policy expert are capable of the most ingenious tricks to procure their drugs. When they undergo rehab, they are often told that should they spend half the mental energy trying to make money as they did procuring drugs, they are guaranteed to become millionaires. But, to no avail. Without the addiction, their miraculous powers go away. It was like a magical potion that gives remarkable powers to those seeking it, but not those drinking it.
A confession. When I don’t have skin in the game, I am usually dumb. My knowledge of technical matters, such as risk and probability, did not initially come from books. It did not come from lofty philosophizing and scientific hunger. It did not even come from curiosity. It came from the thrills and hormonal flush one gets while taking risks in the markets. I never thought mathematics was something interesting to me, until, when I was at Wharton, a friend told me about the financial options I described earlier (and their generalization, complex derivatives). I immediately decided to make a career in them. It was a combination of financial trading and complicated probability. The field was new and uncharted. I knew in my guts there were mistakes in the theories using “Bell Curve” and ignoring the impact of the tails (extreme events). I knew in my guts that academics had not the slightest clue about the risks. So to find errors in the estimation of these probabilistic securities, I had to study probability, which mysteriously and instantly became fun.
When there was risk on the line, suddenly a second brain in me manifested itself, and the probabilities of intricate sequences became suddenly effortless to analyze and map. When there is fire, you will run faster than in any competition. When you ski downhill some movements become effortless. Then I became dumb again when there was no real action. Furthermore, as a trader the mathematics we used was adapted to our problem, like a glove, unlike academics with a theory looking for some application. Applying math to practical problems was another business altogether; it meant a deep understanding of the problem before putting the equations on it.
But if you muster the strength to weightlift a car to save a child, above your current abilities, the strength gained will stay after things calm down. So, unlike the drug addict who loses his resourcefulness, what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk, stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you’ve learned . This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, to spot its misapplications.
When the beard is gray, you may take both reasoning and conclusion.
When the beard is white, ignore the reasoning, but you may take the conclusion.
(Lindy effect)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 10, 2017 8:13:42 PM UTC
This is the conclusion of the book. I have one or two paragraphs left.
For personal reasons, we had to move RWRI-6 (Real World Risk) to November 13.
Thanks.
http://realworldrisk.com/pictorial_view_of_the_program_by_dhaval …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 13, 2017 10:45:02 AM UTC
Yes.
Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me, asking: “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level. My suggestion is:
1) never engage in virtue signaling;
2) never engage in rent seeking;
3) you must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.
Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (what is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to make (bounded) bets. The entire idea is to move these kids away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, that social engineering that bring tail risks to society.
Doing business will always help; institutions may help but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming).
Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.
(From the chapter on vertue in Skin the Game)
https://medium.com/incerto/the-merchandising-of-virtue-b548762658f0
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 6, 2017 4:24:49 PM UTC
Few are getting that the essence of starting a business is risking failure.
Actually the marker for a group to be fascist-shmascist-smthng_ist regardless of whether they call themselves left, right, or diagonal: control of public expression.
"The very idea behind the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is to establish a silver rule style symmetry: you can practice your freedom of religion so long as you allow me to practice mine; you have the right to contradict me so long as I have the right to contradict you. Effectively, there is no democracy without such an *unconditional* symmetry in the rights to express yourself and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people’s feelings. Such restrictions do not necessarily come from the state itself, rather from the forceful establishment of an intellectual monoculture by an overactive thought police in the media and cultural life."
Prologue of SKIN IN THE GAME
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 29, 2017 1:58:32 PM UTC
Never. An assault is when an assault is committed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 29, 2017 1:59:38 PM UTC
The problem is that UNCONDITIONAL is UNCONDITIONAL, you can't mess with it without opening floodgates.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 29, 2017 2:35:00 PM UTC
It falls precisely under SYMMETRY
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 29, 2017 3:07:03 PM UTC
Rahim Sajan No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 28, 2017 3:04:28 PM UTC
"...nec alte cadere nec graviter potest" Publilius
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 28, 2017 4:07:39 PM UTC
Don't admire.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 25, 2017 5:42:32 PM UTC
I don't trust Camerer's research.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 26, 2017 2:22:45 AM UTC
Rory Sutherland He is not. Plus there are no good guys in that neuroBS.
https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality-432e96dd4d1a
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 22, 2017 12:24:34 AM UTC
Feb !
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 22, 2017 7:55:56 PM UTC
Survival across generations. At the end.
2- A statement with Zalloua about Arab genes in Lebanon.
https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/something-nordic-supremacists-will-not-like-44d99e8a4188
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 19, 2017 12:51:17 PM UTC
You are not so Northern, for Med genes in your parts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:20:30 PM UTC
J1e not J1 is peninsular
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:59:00 PM UTC
It is incredible how upset people get when DNA & hard science contradicts everything they believe.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 19, 2017 2:06:58 PM UTC
You can use J1e as a marker for Arab invasions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 19, 2017 2:08:38 PM UTC
Ninus Kanna Anatolia is Near East, not Middle East.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 20, 2017 3:24:31 PM UTC
Thomas, great point. But we figured out that If modern Greeks share so much with Minoans & Mycenians, that the rest had to be smaller, perhaps residual, or else close to the Mycenians.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 20, 2017 3:25:37 PM UTC
Invadors who leave languages don't always leave blood. Look at Turkey. So later invaders perhaps transmitted more culture than blood, most probably because of their size.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 16, 2017 1:14:11 PM UTC
From the beginning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 15, 2017 9:39:54 AM UTC
He always comes to mind as the villain
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 14, 2017 2:13:36 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita hahaha
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 15, 2017 8:47:45 AM UTC
Northern Eurasian
Next Session Oct 2-6
Scholarships Available
http://realworldrisk.com/pictorial_view_of_the_program_by_dhaval
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/comment-on-klueless-massimo-s-comments-massimo-pigliucci-of-the-mary-beard-twitter-debate-4c99a36de40
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 9, 2017 4:52:12 PM UTC
Interesting. But bullshit is a scientific term
(h/t to the hero of the Google Memo).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 11:10:07 AM UTC
An italian fellow nailed it
https://twitter.com/SiamolaGente/status/894856398806409216
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 11:52:51 AM UTC
Widen the distributions
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 12:11:20 PM UTC
My point is either ignore or if you talk about it do not binarize.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 2:39:47 PM UTC
Note the above distribution widened after antiquity. So the distance between Nubian and Med saw overlap.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 2:40:03 PM UTC
That is what I am saying. Over time distributions broaden.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 2:40:13 PM UTC
Happened later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 2:41:18 PM UTC
Killian, I am trying to treat the English Middle Class the way they have been treated by their bosses.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 8, 2017 11:24:16 PM UTC
He is klueless.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 9, 2017 10:29:06 AM UTC
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/comment-on-klueless-massimo-s-comments-massimo-pigliucci-of-the-mary-beard-twitter-debate-4c99a36de40
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/quand-les-chrétiens-du-liban-ont-ils-commencé-à-parler-français-faedb960cbdb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 7, 2017 8:22:27 PM UTC
Shoukran vient de l'arabe. En libanais: yeslamo, sallem ideyk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 5, 2017 11:25:46 AM UTC
Ghassanides didn't come to Leb. No j1e genes
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 5, 2017 1:36:23 PM UTC
Not ammiya, but neoAramaic. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 5, 2017 1:37:21 PM UTC
We were there first. Not invaders!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 5, 2017 4:56:15 PM UTC
Added
Lesson: Studying courage doesn’t make you couragous, no more than eating cow-meat turns you into a cow. All these intellectuals know is to either shut up or be part of a lynch mob. This explains why all these “classicists” (who know in intimite details what people of courage such as Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Julian, Leonidas, Zenobia, etc. ate for breakfast) can’t have a shade of intellectual valor. Is it that academia (& journalism) is fundamentally the refuge of the stochastophobe tawker? That is, the voyeur who wants to watch but not take risks? It appears so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 5, 2017 6:21:30 PM UTC
Posted on wrong page...
https://medium.com/incerto/something-is-broken-in-the-uk-intellectual-sphere-7efc9a1f154a
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 1:47:47 PM UTC
Added: God Bless America.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 2:20:38 PM UTC
Right! But there is no structure to protect freedom of expression.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 2:21:10 PM UTC
David Peter Newton Please define "permanent" since it requires renewal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 2:22:22 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 2:22:55 PM UTC
Lucas Dos Santos Exactly, Lucas. You cannot voice an opinion without ostracism!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 2:23:21 PM UTC
Nobody is denying it. It is the typicality. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 2:38:47 PM UTC
And you can be sacked for saying something deemed "incorrect" in public, no?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 3:14:51 PM UTC
Yes, my institute!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 3:16:38 PM UTC
I've met many UK academics (45-55 years old) nervous about their "review".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 4, 2017 3:44:41 PM UTC
This bullshit got debunked.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 9, 2017 10:29:34 AM UTC
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/comment-on-klueless-massimo-s-comments-massimo-pigliucci-of-the-mary-beard-twitter-debate-4c99a36de40
My checkboard theory of genes is that once people settle in an empty land, their genes tend to stay there, hard to displace. I got the hunch seeing that Turkey was genetically not... Turkish but Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Hittite, etc.
In fact, the population of the Ancient Levant (dominated by J2 haplogroup with R1a-b mixtures) is very close to the so-called "Indo-Europeans" ; they (like the Assyrians) may have acquired a Semitic language late, some time during the late Neolithic, or early Bronze Age, from Mesopotamian influence. (Babylonians, Southern Mesopotamians and "Semites" such as Yemenis are usually J1 Haplogroup). So the similar looks one finds between the Lebanese, Mizrahi Jews, Western Syrians on one hand and Greeks, Etruscans, and Anatolians on the other DOES NOT COME from invasions, but from the fact that they were the same people (the commonality harks back to the early settlement).
https://medium.com/incerto/peace-neither-ink-nor-blood-4657956c82ac
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 1:04:39 PM UTC
We are rebuilding from remains original genes. A wonderful rewriting of history!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 1:21:11 PM UTC
We can look at mitocondrial. But if the Turkic it is not on the male side...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 1:43:39 PM UTC
very small... and I am not sure they were allowed to marry...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 1:44:01 PM UTC
This is the Zalloua article.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 1:44:36 PM UTC
They were *sort of* empty in places.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 2:23:13 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 2:23:43 PM UTC
The term "Middle Eastern" is misspecified. They mean Levant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 2:24:24 PM UTC
Anyway, "colonization" is so rare after people have settled an area.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 29, 2017 9:06:25 PM UTC
Bingo! This was improperly marketed that way. The essential is that there was continuity of population, and that's key.
There are two ways to make citizens safe from large predators, say big powerful corporations. The first one is to enact regulations –but these, aside from restricting individual freedoms, lead to another predation, this time by the state, its agents and their cronies. More critically, people with good lawyers can game regulations (or, we will see, make it known that they hire former regulators, and overpay for them, which signals a bribe to those currently in office). And of course, regulations, once in, stay in and even when they are proven absurd, politicians are afraid of repealing them, under pressure from those benefiting from them. Given that regulations are additive, we soon end up tangled in complicated rules that choke enterprise. They also choke life.
For there are always parasites benefiting from regulation, thanks to what is called rent seeking. These are situations where the businessperson uses government to derive profits, often through protective regulations and franchises. The mechanism is called regulatory recapture.
The other solution is to put skin in the game in the transaction, in the form of legal liability, and the possibility of an efficient lawsuit. The Anglo-Saxon world has traditionally had a predilection for the legal approach instead of the regulatory one: if you harm me, I can sue you. This led to the very sophisticated, adaptive, and balanced common law, built bottom-up, via trial and error. When people transact, they almost always prefer to agree (as part of the contract) on a Commonwealth (or formerly British ruled) venue as a forum in the event of a dispute: Hong Kong and Singapore are the favorites in Asia, London and New York in the West.
If a big corporation pollutes your neighborhood, you can get together with your neighbors, and sue the hell out of it. Some greedy lawyer will have the paperwork ready. And the potential costs of the settlement would be enough of a deterrent for the corporation to behave.
Now, it doesn’t mean one should never regulate. Some systemic effects require regulation (say hidden risks of environmental ruins that show up too late). If you can’t effectively sue, regulate.
But beyond the convenience, I have a strong belief in deontic libertarianism: freedom is one’s first most essential good, including the freedom to make mistakes; it is sacred to the point that it must never be traded against economic or other benefits.
Skin in the Ruling
Now someone might ask: well, what do you do with the judge? He can make mistakes with impunity. Not quite. A friend, Daniel H. showed me a Dutch painting representing The Judgement of Cambyses. The scene is from the story reported by Herodotus, concerning the corrupt Persian judge Sisamnes. He was flayed alive on the order of King Cambyses, a a punishment for violating the rules of justice. The scene of the painting is Sisamnes' son dispensing justice from his father's chair, upholstered with the flayed skin as a reminder that judging comes with skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 21, 2017 9:56:40 AM UTC
I am not saying no regulation. I am saying: only for tail risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 21, 2017 11:28:18 AM UTC
Barrett Wolfe Yes, following the Ostrom model. TK
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 21, 2017 11:29:38 AM UTC
Have you heard of something called an "Insurance Company"? Next time, try to think before replying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 21, 2017 11:30:13 AM UTC
Typically, it is the insurance company that does the suing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 21, 2017 4:26:24 PM UTC
Added:"Now, it doesn’t mean one should never regulate. Some systemic effects require regulation (say hidden risks of environmental ruins that show up too late). If you can’t effectively sue, regulate."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 22, 2017 7:19:41 PM UTC
Yes, it depends about what.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 22, 2017 7:20:30 PM UTC
Very good!
I have NO MERCY on people who wreck countries because they are clueless. No more. And I am writing these lines from Northern Lebanon.
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/887971800411324418
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 20, 2017 11:25:31 PM UTC
Ad hominem is not a fallacy except inside an argument. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 20, 2017 11:26:03 PM UTC
If ad hominem were a fallacy we would not require doctors to be credentialized before an opinion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 20, 2017 11:26:23 PM UTC
Recall Kristoff pushed for the Iraq war. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 20, 2017 11:35:09 PM UTC
Vitaly Sorkin Read the linked article on interventionistas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 20, 2017 11:48:40 PM UTC
Now, about a decade later, I can say it. Hitchens I liked in person but never respected.
Starting a collection of my insults to the journalist & archetype of the BS vendor, Joe Nocera who somehow had the great idea to start hounding me on twitter.
1-I posted about" iatrogenics" (harm done by the healer, which constitutes most of the discussions of Antifragile), the first rule of which is "Primum non nocere" (First, cause no harm).
Nocera: "Classic Taleb. Grandiose and unintelligible all at once."
REPLY: Primum non nocere Nocera.
2- About Nocera making pronouncements about public intellectualism:
REPLY "Nocera, more people will mistake the Newark N.J. waterfront for the Grand Canal of Venice than you for an arbiter of anything related to intellect".
More to come.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 19, 2017 12:16:32 PM UTC
Yes most journos are scared, Nocera keeps digging which allows me a repository of insults.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 19, 2017 3:44:24 PM UTC
Where?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 19, 2017 5:59:53 PM UTC
This is old.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 20, 2017 9:05:25 AM UTC
Another insult to a fellow: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/885567452230320128
The journo, James B. Stewart took a cohort of *already* successful people and looked for "failures". One of the "failed" persons sold his company for billions.
Then he has the nerve to say that Ayn Rand is "dismissed by most *serious* academics."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/business/ayn-rand-business-politics-uber-kalanick.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 18, 2017 5:30:03 PM UTC
What we see is the fundamental underpinning of fake news: "The facts are true the news is fake".
Modern life creates Sunday night blues.
Flaneuring, thanks to its beneficial uncertainty, removes such a specter.
(Unless we work under randomized work time --as our ancestors did.)
Owing to the funding and current venture capital mechanisms, many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to sell the company to someone, or “go public” by issuing in the stock market. The true value of the company, what it makes and its long term survival are of small relevance to them. This is a pure financing scheme and we will exclude this class of people from our “entrepreneur” risk taker class.
We can easily identify them at their ability to write a convincing business plan.
1) People equate wealth with rent seeking; they feel that getting rich is taking something away from someone else.
2) Power, prestige, and wealth are associated with a high ranking government position, such as minister.
3) There are no affordable good Chinese restaurants in the largest city.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 7, 2017 5:10:01 PM UTC
Rome has exemptions. You know, the eternal city may not need Cinese.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 7, 2017 5:10:45 PM UTC
Yes...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 7, 2017 5:23:16 PM UTC
but I need to verify the Chinese restaurant situation.
https://medium.com/incerto/why-each-one-should-eat-his-own-turtles-revised-8a4be2f11e61
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 1:56:33 PM UTC
Hihi please ignore copyedits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 2:46:06 PM UTC
That unless there is a club, things fail to aggregate
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 2:46:35 PM UTC
Thanks
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 4:40:30 PM UTC
Antipater... Got it backward.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 4:40:45 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 9:55:59 PM UTC
No. It assumes no dominance of a group over another.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 9:56:26 PM UTC
Tangents is the reason people still read me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 1, 2017 9:57:09 PM UTC
Right. This is the chapter where I put that stuff. Rest of book is new territory.
-----
(It is analog to the "fooled by randomness" style overfitting.")
---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iw9oqnhVKQ
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 12, 2017 5:39:22 PM UTC
Not really. I am using statistical theory that accommodates both. It is a flaw even for frequentists. There is a bias. Frequency != anecdote!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 27, 2017 12:08:56 PM UTC
I am and discuss later on in the context of Pascal's wager.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 27, 2017 12:10:01 PM UTC
A zillion people are likely to do so. It is still virtuous but more so if it is costly and requires some sacrifice beyond the payoff. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 27, 2017 12:13:26 PM UTC
Thanks Pietro but i have been influenced by friends like you. Long walks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 27, 2017 1:12:16 PM UTC
Dimitrios Gazis Assholes don't know they are assholes. They fooled themselves into virtue.
One speculation. Nature seems to have a way to tame strong people, those to whom it gave strength and potential destructive powers. It makes them nicer. Stronger but nicer. A robust result shows that men with elevated testosterone levels tend to be more generous and peaceful, but get much, much more aggressive when insulted –as per Fat Tony’s ethos, they take no crap but give no crap. This is well known in the military and in weightlifting circles. Put someone through an Olympic-style weighlifting regimen and he will be less likely to be startled.
It is no wonder that when you see a warmonger in the bureaucrato-journalistic class, you will notice something jarring: many look like nerds who have been bullied on schoolgrounds, or, worse, skinny-fat marathon runners on a vegetarian diet, your local college teacher who specializes in gender history or postcolonial theory, or some political forecaster still whining about the election results.
Jarring it is. It is quite offensive for nature to have people without the means impose their will on others, and technology allows such aggressiveness without the breaks spontaneously brought about by organic systems.
---
Eddie Hall (picture). Not a warmonger.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 12, 2017 2:57:47 PM UTC
Many commentators are skinny fat (or, worse, skinny), so they don't like it and ... comment aggressively.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 12, 2017 2:58:28 PM UTC
Even if contradiction, looks like the exception that confirms the rule.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 12, 2017 2:59:54 PM UTC
Yes otherwise we would have blown-up. But we didn't/
https://medium.com/incerto/the-skin-of-others-in-your-game-3f51d8ccc3fb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 6, 2017 10:42:38 AM UTC
The shills who are paid to search for "Monsanto" will show up here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 6, 2017 11:15:27 AM UTC
Guaranteed income.
"We are largely collaborative –except when institutions get in the way. I surmise if we put those “people wanting to help” in the State Department on paid vacation to do ceramics, pottery or whatever low-testosterone people do when they take a sabbatical, it would be great for peace."
https://medium.com/incerto/peace-neither-ink-nor-blood-4657956c82ac
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 30, 2017 5:06:21 PM UTC
Not before next February.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 1, 2017 11:21:14 AM UTC
Impala = elk, no?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 1, 2017 11:22:45 AM UTC
It was a battle, that's what I mean, and a lot of soldiers died. Massacre leads to believe in one-sided executions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 1, 2017 11:23:13 AM UTC
OK, OK, elks = "Impalas".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 30, 2017 3:12:03 PM UTC
Voila!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 30, 2017 6:01:14 PM UTC
Glad you got it!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 30, 2017 6:01:50 PM UTC
The larger the effect, the less noise, exponentially.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 30, 2017 9:01:18 AM UTC
Never explain why something important is important.
https://twitter.com/garyruskin/status/856677879601545216
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 25, 2017 6:38:52 PM UTC
If GMO worked or Glyphosate was not a problem, they wouldn't have to do this.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 25, 2017 8:51:39 PM UTC
Some trolls showed up ... here. And of course got blocked.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 25, 2017 9:07:02 PM UTC
No trolls here... hehe
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 26, 2017 6:09:00 AM UTC
Our precautionary principle paper. Anyone bullshitting that we have been modifying plants misses everything about systemic risk http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.html
Our Mini-certificate Real World Risk Institute RWRI-5 on June 5-9, NYC.
We have issued >200 certificates so far.
We have a few scholarship slots reserved for applications.
http://www.realworldrisk.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 21, 2017 9:10:28 PM UTC
Generalized from neocons to interventionistas
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/no-worship-without-skin-in-the-game-70b4aa341092
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 15, 2017 2:03:19 PM UTC
They are not genetically Arabs. Very very little J1 haplogroup, meaning Italy has more Arab blood than Leb and Syrian Christians.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 15, 2017 2:03:46 PM UTC
It is both
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 15, 2017 8:01:10 PM UTC
Look up Zalloua for genetic studies. As to Jordan, many of the Christians are of North Arabian origin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 15, 2017 8:11:30 PM UTC
I was yesterday in Belarus. No "post" food anywhere, although I was told many were observant. Ended up eating tomatoes.
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/real-life-is-risk-taking-ac424efd5fcc
When you read criticism of a policy or an idea or a person, be on a lookout for wildcard expressions, always platitudinous, that can apply to anything. "Narcissistic", "you think you know everything", "trying to get attention", "self-promotion", for instance. "Tyrant" and "Nazi" have been devalued now to become wildcards as well.
With book reviews, ask yourself if the review can work equally if applied (after removing specific details) to another book. Or, how many other books it can cover.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 8, 2017 9:41:47 PM UTC
Polymath
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/why-each-one-should-eat-his-own-turtles-equality-in-uncertainty-e2b2ee3bcddf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 30, 2017 12:34:34 PM UTC
Not at all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 30, 2017 12:46:52 PM UTC
Within one class of randomness, more time means LESS Turkey. By how much depends on the type. We need much more time for some than others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 30, 2017 6:23:28 PM UTC
Gharar is about equal uncertainty not equal information or equal understanding.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 4, 2017 11:42:51 AM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 18, 2017 3:13:56 PM UTC
Hormones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 18, 2017 3:14:22 PM UTC
91% is good enough. Trolls get filtered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 20, 2017 2:20:39 PM UTC
Dan Rasoi, Bullshit.
https://twitter.com/VergilDen/status/842354148079214592
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 16, 2017 1:18:00 PM UTC
From Bed of Procrustes
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 12, 2017 6:36:51 PM UTC
Tim Timo Bloggers do not depend economically on having one or another opinion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 12, 2017 6:54:13 PM UTC
Maximilian Hirner Yes one should be one's own translator.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 12, 2017 6:54:38 PM UTC
Incerto is already 4 volumes.
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/only-the-rich-are-poisoned-the-preference-of-others-c35ddf65cf68#.kyjl0m1bg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 4, 2017 6:28:36 PM UTC
Which ruler?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 7, 2017 3:19:23 PM UTC
I would!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 2, 2017 9:57:38 PM UTC
The Mongolian genes are too low to explain mass murder of males/replacement, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 2, 2017 11:10:52 PM UTC
Are you aware that this is part of a chapter that is part of a section that is part of a book that is part of the Incerto?
Real World Risk RWRI 5 is on June 5-9 2017.
www.realworldrisk.com
I am participating in NECSI'S Complexity Workshop on May 3-4 (or 4-5)
http://necsi.edu/education/strategicdataanalytics.html
This is a comment from someone on this page about RWRI 4
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 2, 2017 7:00:52 PM UTC
Quote from previous participant of NECSI program:
"Given how much I have personally benefitted from exposure to the work of Yaneer Bar-Yam and Nassim Taleb, I would highly recommend this Strategic Analytics course from the New England Complex Systems Institute” http://necsi.edu/education/strategicdataanalytics.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 2, 2017 10:24:55 PM UTC
Ask Yaneer Bar-Yam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA_3RwEIqzI&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 27, 2017 8:19:52 PM UTC
No matter, you just consider it a variable.
https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surgeons-23b0e2cf6d52#.uuit2cfos
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2017 4:00:29 PM UTC
We get the surgeon/butcher problem in real life... but not when it comes to science!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2017 4:11:39 PM UTC
Thanks: You saw policymaking!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2017 10:35:51 PM UTC
Here is the graph for those who want to see science. It is in Log on the vertical scale
The tiniest mammal, the etruscan shrew, has 1500 bpm (hearbeats per minutes), the largest ones, 30 and 20 ( the elephant and the whale, respectively). Strangely, as a result of scaling, the small mammal lives 1-2 years while the elephant and the whale live 70 and 80 years. So, 1) larger animals live longer and 2) have fewer hearbeats, and their beats per minute decreases with size. Animals tend to cluster around a total of 1 billion heartbeats per lifetime, within a range of 800 million to 1.4 billion, most animals clutering arounf 1 billion. We are the outliers as we can get to 2 billion, but still nothing compared to our size difference (the shrew weighs 1.8 grams) and this may come from civilization or an artificially high bpm. The heartbeat effect has to do with the plumbing of animals and the scalability of the circulatory system, see Antifragile for an explanation.
Interestingly, *animals age not in years, but in heartbeats*! (Or in number of breathing sequences). The variance of the lifetime number of heartbeats across all animals (with a circulatory system) is much much lower than their variance seen in terms of a) lifespan, 2) weight, 3) metabolism. In other words, you calculate the age of an animal in terms of "young" or "old" by just counting their past heartbeats.
This leads me to believe that convex exercises, whereby I bring my pulse to 180 bpm for a short period of time, and spend the rest doing nothing or debunking some BSer on twitter, is more natural than doing long bicyle excursions at 100 bpm, or running marathons, or spending hours at the gym watching the Sopranos while on the stationary bike. Actually not only that, but sprinting lowers the resting heartbeat for a net gain. A higher volatility of your bpm should be more beneficial than a stable one at higher level. This reasoning is still at the level of a hunch, but it can explain why long distance running is so rare among animals.
Finally, the way to think about it: it may not be the bpm per se that *causes* aging, but it maps very well to something else that causes such aging, so reducing one may reduce the other.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2017 1:53:30 AM UTC
The other effect of nonlinearity is that large mammals are more fragile: dinosaurs were a short lasting aberration. And their bpm would have been very very low.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2017 2:07:11 AM UTC
Variance within species, with a bias the other way. Small humans live longer than bigger humans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2017 2:29:42 AM UTC
Oxydation is a problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2017 4:06:29 PM UTC
I wonder if someone sedentary but with fitness episodes (most white collar people) lives longer than a manual laborer for that reason. The book "Longevity Pill" documents that life expectancy is shorter for people who spend their energy working. Any referencesa?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 27, 2017 2:23:52 PM UTC
Here is the scale showing humans as outliers. Note that the vertical is in log so constant heartbeat would be the line.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 21, 2017 9:00:11 PM UTC
Thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM
Amos Tversky once said that he didn't care about *artificial intelligence*, his mission was to study *natural stupidity*.
I find it better to study *artificial stupidy*.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 4, 2017 4:46:50 PM UTC
Artificial stupidity is that confident stupidity that is only acquired through what we call studies, that leads to consider that something can be both natural, have survived yet be stupid.
Or maybe that's what the "left" has always been about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 3, 2017 3:43:29 PM UTC
Good.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 3, 2017 3:43:49 PM UTC
Yes!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 3, 2017 11:08:46 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita, we had to zap the fellow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRN_KT17mNo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 1, 2017 2:50:41 PM UTC
BTW I have nothing to do with the video. The fellow tweeted it to me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 31, 2017 1:38:28 AM UTC
Virtue signaling is virtue without courage, without skin in the game, which is why it is getting more common.
Should I switch topic and talk about the ancient Mediterranean instead?
http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/67301
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 26, 2017 7:14:07 AM UTC
Actally R1a
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 28, 2017 6:32:40 AM UTC
Thanks for coming! We had >900 people with the additional rooms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2017 9:16:18 AM UTC
Do I look like i give a fuck?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2017 9:19:11 AM UTC
No Mt Leb from Amioun
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2017 3:06:29 PM UTC
Subito!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 17, 2017 6:36:53 AM UTC
It is NOT in the Middle East. THis is the NEAR East. Kapish?
https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf#.8mctf3byd
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2017 3:29:15 PM UTC
You didn't get it. It affects innovations. Covered in Antifragile, so please don't discuss further here unless you've seen the arguments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2017 3:30:23 PM UTC
Please don't tell my publisher it's here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2017 3:30:36 PM UTC
Voila.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2017 4:12:37 PM UTC
Adding; The question with IYIs is: we have experts. Who does monitor the experts? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Lindy does.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2017 6:35:51 PM UTC
Yes! It was actually a mistake (wrong chapter). You are the first to notice. Congrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2017 6:36:00 PM UTC
Substituted it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 10, 2017 7:25:09 PM UTC
Bingo. They are in the private sector. It is REAL research, not just credentialization. That's the point of the chapter. Kapish?
(see also my note on how use of thermodynamics leads to thin tails).
https://medium.com/@yaneerbaryam/brief-comment-on-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics-in-human-affairs-885105dc8419#.sl3qj8wzu
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 6, 2017 4:16:38 PM UTC
How they lead to thin tails (something I explained in The Black Swan)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 6, 2017 5:18:47 PM UTC
Lauri Lyly Constraints from thermodynamics lead to thin tails
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 6, 2017 6:22:50 PM UTC
Exactly the point of Antifragile
Hope the new year delivers to you something you deserve but did not dare to wish for.
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46#.fe59w8hf5
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2016 3:37:11 PM UTC
Thanks! Ordered it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2016 11:27:50 PM UTC
Is there something wrong about being old?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2016 11:29:40 PM UTC
Thanks Jason Manolopoulos! Who are the "second-handers" more precisely?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2016 3:25:40 PM UTC
Interesting! I call them (temporarily) ersatz, i.e. people who have all the cosmetic attributes but without the substance.
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46#.kjfh474x5
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2016 10:15:49 PM UTC
You are not getting it. Inequality is zero sum by definition. Wealth is not. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2016 10:45:54 PM UTC
Yes, problem with IYI
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2016 10:46:52 PM UTC
No, on risk taking. Quality is ex post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2016 2:28:05 AM UTC
Elsewhere, and see FBR.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2016 1:29:30 PM UTC
Not really. Revolutions retained the previous structures.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2016 1:27:04 PM UTC
THis site and my writings are not for you. You need to leave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 26, 2016 3:49:46 PM UTC
Scientism has KILLED hundreds of million of people. Not Ponzi schemes. Pietro Bonavita you are right, maybe he conflates it with science, a common error.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 26, 2016 4:23:56 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita, more simply Sascha Heylmann should never post here as it confuses things for others. Should we zap him?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 26, 2016 6:06:45 PM UTC
Excccccccccccccccccccccellent! Who wrote this?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 26, 2016 6:08:50 PM UTC
For those who are familiar with the term, look up "Scientism" as defined by Friedrich Hayek.
I believe the "identity politics" thing to be incoherent and used for selfserving purposes.
https://medium.com/opacity/no-jesus-was-not-a-nonwhite-refugee-who-would-have-voted-for-43779209eea4#.2iuwbatbg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 24, 2016 11:54:17 PM UTC
Ironically Christmas was mapped to Sol Invictus, a celebration brought to Rome by its hight priest Elagabalus when he became emperor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 12:15:06 AM UTC
Came from "proche orient"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 12:16:05 AM UTC
Kurds are Mediterraneans, Afghans are often Northern.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 12:26:12 AM UTC
Yasmine Rukia Badaouski Disliking Salafascists is not "Islamophobia".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 12:26:41 AM UTC
Yasmine Rukia Badaouski And Salafifobia is healthy and necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 12:27:49 AM UTC
No, idiot, there are thousands of funereal busts. Read the article.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 12:29:19 AM UTC
For a long time Italians were not white.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 12:33:04 AM UTC
Colin Newman Did you do a web search before posting this?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 1:53:52 AM UTC
This is the picture the "scientists" showed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 1:54:50 AM UTC
Asiatic is not modern, it initially simply meant Eastern Med. Not anything beyond, just as Africa just meant the southern shore.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 1:58:53 AM UTC
Lucas Sousa Good point. But we know that although poor, Jesus came from a noble line down from David.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 2:35:44 AM UTC
Probably apocryphal, but still the description matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 3:00:33 AM UTC
Another point; it looks like assuming he existed that the Judean connection was contrived; that's why the Roman inscription poked fun at him. And pple know him as the Galilean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2016 2:06:20 PM UTC
You have so many degrees of freedom in forensic anthropology that one can put political prejudices into it. It is not physics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 2:52:31 PM UTC
There is no reason to even read Vox & Pinker, so no second opinion is necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2016 11:35:25 PM UTC
Waynak?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2016 11:36:37 PM UTC
This visibly doesn't apply to all trades; few are seeing the problem of interventionism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2016 11:42:09 PM UTC
Exactly it is a skin in the game problem
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 2:29:25 AM UTC
Νικολάου στην ελληνική
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 4:26:40 PM UTC
I can't believe how dumb some commentators are here. This aphorism is about CINCINNATUS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 4:27:21 PM UTC
No, no, no. THink before posting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 4:27:51 PM UTC
I don't give a f***. Which might explain it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 4:28:20 PM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 4:29:21 PM UTC
Shd I zap people who didn't get it? Just to filter commentators?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 4:29:32 PM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 10:49:15 PM UTC
Do you want to be zapped? No sophistry here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2016 11:29:48 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita You good
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 24, 2016 3:02:59 AM UTC
Pietro Bonavita zapped your guy to clean up for future refs
We keep tinkering with the program to include more complexity theory & (some) cybersecurity.
Scholarships are never 100% to force some skin in the game (in past sessions the only people who have missed some classes were those on 100% scholarship).
http://www.realworldrisk.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 2:58:24 PM UTC
Thanks Alfredo Morales but you are not commenting on the entertainment!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 2:58:32 PM UTC
And the food.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2016 9:42:23 PM UTC
Write to Alicia. Thx
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.x8tg9o174
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 9:24:09 PM UTC
I never saw that coming!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 11:26:40 PM UTC
Someone made a false analogy. When a doctor says he has a degree, he has skills. Not so a political scientist. Further, medicine is micro and heuristic, not theoretical and micro.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2016 1:50:06 AM UTC
Joe Prosciutto NonKapish.
https://medium.com/opacity/the-syrian-war-condensed-a-more-rigorous-way-to-look-at-the-conflict-f841404c3b1d#.pqmm8g91o
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:20:51 PM UTC
Exactly my point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:22:33 PM UTC
The "left" you mean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:25:55 PM UTC
There is nothing more despicable that this "left" as they masquerade as if they were on the right side of morality. It gives them all rights, including supporting a reversion to the middle ages...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:34:33 PM UTC
Bingo!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:39:51 PM UTC
In fact I am certain that if Saudi Arabia was not supporting the rebels and forcing its Sharia agenda, the conflict would have been different...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:46:18 PM UTC
Looks like as in anything, it may have started as a legit thing, then drifted under pressure. Their current activities are very, very suspicious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:51:03 PM UTC
Martin Dietschi is referring to the condition of women.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:52:51 PM UTC
How about the use of human shields by the rebels? The "left" is not bothered that the asymmetry in the death of civilians is 100 to 1 in Gaza, because of the human shield idea, but not in Syria.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:05:48 PM UTC
Nobody is getting the point. The idea is JUXTAPOSITION: you can only discuss one party RELATIVE to the other. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:08:57 PM UTC
As we did in Iraq? or Lybia? Are you on drugs?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:29:50 PM UTC
This is the kind of crap that got us here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:29:53 PM UTC
This is the kind of crap that got us here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:29:54 PM UTC
This is the kind of crap that got us here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:30:12 PM UTC
This is the kind of crap that got us here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:30:14 PM UTC
This is the kind of crap that got us here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:33:58 PM UTC
There is a mechanism by which anyone who comments is pathologized or demonized.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:35:00 PM UTC
There is a mechanism by which anyone who comments against AlQaeda is pathologized or demonized. And anyone who questions the statistics as they repeatedly use "dead children" as argument.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:40:17 PM UTC
MAke sure before commenting to read this https://medium.com/opacity/syria-and-the-statistics-of-war-910eb1a00bbd#.1y6edjaae
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:43:15 PM UTC
I am fed up with people citing casualty numbers that have been pulled out of a hat.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:57:11 PM UTC
It was effectively the State Dept under Hillary that pushed for regime change.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:19:33 PM UTC
Tania Nasr You seem to be clueless about science (and about everything else). I am working from ABSENCE of reliable statistics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:45:20 PM UTC
Counter-insurgencies (Army vs insurgents/terrorists, etc.) commands higher rate of civilian casualties regardless of whether the army belongs to a liberal democracy or an autocracy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:58:59 PM UTC
Paul Chammas never use Trump into this!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 3:02:55 PM UTC
Anyone who accuses someone else of being a "Trump supporter" here as if it were a pathology gets zapped. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 3:07:06 PM UTC
The Aleppo "final messages". True or False? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVavSHSAN48
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 3:14:49 PM UTC
Nader Haddad Your "oversimplification" comment is not very intelligent. I am making a comparative table, so show a flaw instead of sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 3:24:15 PM UTC
To summarize and bring some logical discipline. Some trolls came here to show that "Assad is evil". Fine; the table *does not deny it* and it is not the point of the table.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 4:50:42 PM UTC
Not at all Eleni Panagiotarakou. These remarks do not contradict the table,charybdis <-> scylla
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 4:56:26 PM UTC
This reminds me of my trading days. I would go long A short B, focusing on the difference (called a spread trade). And people would not get it and discuss the merits of B or demerits of A. It is the DIFFERENCE that matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2016 7:56:58 PM UTC
Excellent!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2016 1:51:35 AM UTC
Igor P. Jaramaz Igor this is important can you put it in its own line (it is now a sub-comment not a comment). Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2016 12:38:18 PM UTC
We indeed found suspicious data by Clinton before his intervention in Kossovo. Overstatement of casualties by between 2.5 and 10x. The model is DEMONIZE => INTERVENE , get backing from Saudi financed PR. Then when the data is cleaned, too late.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2016 4:51:34 PM UTC
Maybe it has a thing against you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 17, 2016 4:40:44 PM UTC
I zapped Paul Volosen discussing "honesty"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 18, 2016 12:02:47 AM UTC
Hope all are OK, Pierre Madani
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 18, 2016 1:30:24 AM UTC
I fucking explained it was an autocracy. They have elections. Anything else?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 18, 2016 11:11:18 AM UTC
Thanks Pierre. Are they Syriac Christians?
What is unacceptable is that other authors complied.
This is the minority rule: only intransigents count.
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3050598
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 13, 2016 2:13:18 PM UTC
Intellectual hence craven
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 13, 2016 2:13:48 PM UTC
It was the censor not the editor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 13, 2016 2:14:55 PM UTC
This annoyed me. As if reaction on twitter was an indicator ot anything of significance. Journos are goons and it was a substitute for his own explicit approval.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 18, 2016 12:47:00 AM UTC
Explain the "coward" part, fucking idiot.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 8, 2016 12:35:03 AM UTC
In many countries wealth is associated with rent seeking. In others it is just fair game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 8, 2016 3:20:19 PM UTC
Many don't realize that wealthy people have more to lose; they have more downside *are* are more of a target.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 29, 2016 8:29:22 PM UTC
Globalization
LIFE IN THE SIMULATION MACHINE--WHY TRUMP WON --WHAT'S THE POINT, ALL THIS BICKERING ABOUT THE TRINITY
I once sat in a dinner party on a large round table across from a courteous fellow called David. The host was a physicist, X who was honoring an author, a former secretary of the great Borges, so, except for the fellow David, everyone was dressed like people who read Borges. As to David, he was dressed like someone who lives in the Park Slope side of Brooklyn. At some point during the dinner he unexpectedly pulled an ice pick and made it go through his hand. I had no clue what the fellow did for a living –nor was I aware that X was into magic. It turned out that David was a magician (his name is David Blaine), and that he was very famous.
I knew very little about magicians, assumed it was all about optical illusions –the central inverse problem that makes it easier to engineer than reverse-engineer. But something struck me at the end of the party. David was standing by the coat check using a handkerchief to sop us drops of blood coming out of his hand.
So the fellow was really making an icepick go through his hand –with all the risks it entailed. He suddenly became another person in my eyes. He was now real. He took risks. He had skin in the game.
I met him again a few months later and, as I tried to shake hands with him, noticed a scar where the icepick came out of his hand.
HOW TO BICKER LIKE A BYZANTINE BISHOP
This allowed me to finally understand the entire business of the Trinity. The Christian religion, throughout Chalcedon, Nicea, and other ecumenical councils and various synods of argumentative bishops, kept insisting on the dual nature of Jesus Christ. It would be theologically simpler if God were god and Jesus were man, just like another prophet, the way Islam views him, or the way Judaism views Abraham. But no, he was both man and god; the duality is so central it kept coming back though all manner of refinement: whether the duality allowed sharing the same substance (Orthodoxy), the same will (monothelites), the same nature (monophysites).
The founders wanted the Christ to really have skin in the game; he did actually suffer and sacrifice himself. A god cannot have such a skin in the game, cannot really suffer (or, if he does, such a definition of a god with a human nature would back up our argument). It would be like a magician who performed an illusion, not someone who actually bled after putting his icepick.
THE MATRIX
Philosophers, unlike the equally argumentative but more sophisticated bishops, don’t get the point with the so-called experience machine. Simply, you sit in a machine and someone plugs a few cables into your brain, and you undergo an experience. This experience will never be real –only a modernistic academic philosopher who never took risk can believe that nonsense. Why?
Because life is sacrifice and risk taking. If you do not undertake a risk of real, reversible or potentially irreversible harm from an adventure, it is not an adventure. The argument can lead to niceties about the mind-body problem, but don’t tell your local philosopher.
TRUMP
I have a tendency to watch television with the sound off. When I saw Donald Trump in the Republican primary standing next to other candidates, I became certain he was going to win that stage of the process, no matter what he said or did. Why? Because he was real and the public –composed of people who take risks, not the lifeless nonrisktaking analysts we will discuss in the next chapter –would vote anytime for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand than someone who did not.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 27, 2016 2:01:16 PM UTC
This was written way BEFORE the elections.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 27, 2016 2:03:42 PM UTC
Still expanding... remarkable how many "heresies" were reverted!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 27, 2016 2:09:14 PM UTC
Constantine Sandis and I are planning to write something about the Matrix along these lines: survival.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 27, 2016 3:42:37 PM UTC
Strange: while the troll detector lands people all the time, it is a surprise to see a mature plastic surgeon engage in the kind of abusive and substance-free venting of a 10 year old on a tantrum. We learn every day. https://www.facebook.com/pg/lotuscosmeticct/posts/?ref=page_internal
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 27, 2016 3:43:48 PM UTC
I said for general election Trump at 50%, but was much much more certain for primary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 27, 2016 4:22:55 PM UTC
Svetozar Stankov I disagree. &6grt ehu4 7dh 5ims w'all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 27, 2016 5:18:08 PM UTC
Yes.
This is my 36th: I came to America to embrace the system and pledged to defend it from everything I ran away from.
I will keep defending it.
With Gratitude.
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/syria-and-the-statistics-of-war-910eb1a00bbd#.ahsjv1z5p
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 22, 2016 3:06:18 PM UTC
Very good book!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 22, 2016 8:47:04 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 22, 2016 8:50:36 PM UTC
THanks Sharmine this is invaluable!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 23, 2016 12:31:45 AM UTC
Andre Yanpolsky psychologists academic "accolades" don't count in real scientific circles. Find something else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 23, 2016 1:26:59 PM UTC
In my world "psychologist" is synonymous with "bullshitter".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 23, 2016 2:47:07 PM UTC
So a more valid estimate of Hama would be 2000, not the 30-40,000!
The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate tried to revert to ancient paganism, after his father's cousin Constantine the Great made Christianity a state religion, almost half a century earlier.
The problem is that, having been brought up as a Christian, he imagined that paganism required a structure similar to that of the Church, ce genre de trucs. So he tried to create positions of pagan bishops, synods, and all these things. He did not realize that each pagan group had his own definition of a religion, that each temple had its own practices, that by *definition* paganism was distributed in execution, rituals, cosmogonies, practices, and "beliefs". Pagans did not have a category for paganism [see my note on "what people call religion" isn't the same thing across "religions", time, and place].
Julian, a brilliant general and valiant warrior managed to die in another one of those battles against the Persians, so the dream of returning to ancient values ended with him.
Now the same applies to Libertarianism. It does not fit the structure of a political "party"-- only that of a decentralized political movement. The very concept eludes the structure of an association with strong party line and unified policy with respect to, say, court locations or relations with Mongolia. Political parties are hierarchal, they are designed in a way to subtitute someone's own decision-making with a well-defined protocol. This doesn't work with libertarians. The nomenklatura that is necessary in the functioning of a party cannot exist in a libertarian environment fraught with fractious and vehemently independent people.
Nevertheless, we libertarians share a minimal set of beliefs, namely substitute the rule of authority with the rule of law. They believe in complex systems. Since libertarianism is a movement, it can still exist as splintered factions within other political parties.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 20, 2016 12:58:13 AM UTC
They have recourse to lawsuits. Same thing in the end in their opinion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 20, 2016 1:00:23 AM UTC
Sawsan Gad There is a central poin: LOCALISM. Outside coersion by large firms (that are weak without state support) things organize themselves locally. Large firms in such a framework are more fragile. Unconditional globalization makes little sense outside of large corporations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 20, 2016 12:37:51 PM UTC
Very naive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 4, 2016 4:56:04 PM UTC
If you want!
For comments on paper. Basically, a more technical version of the book Antifragile.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medicine.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 18, 2016 7:46:54 PM UTC
Note that this is not making any standalone empirical point, rather gluing various phenomena under the convexity argument, with necessary connections (if... then necessarily).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 18, 2016 9:37:23 PM UTC
Paper is linked up here.
Pretty much everything forecasters, subforecasters, superforecasters, political "scientists", psychologists, intellectuals, campaigners, "consultants", big data scientists, everything they know is now shown to be a hoax.
My mischievous dream of putting a rat inside someone's shirt (in The Black Swan) is suddenly coming true.
IYI: Intellectual yet Idiot
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 17, 2016 12:40:13 PM UTC
The IYI class https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.faahohvbm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 17, 2016 12:41:18 PM UTC
J'ai modifié le texte.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 17, 2016 12:58:36 PM UTC
BTW this is what I wrote about Idiot Nate Silver https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/binary%20forecasting%20538.nb.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 17, 2016 1:00:06 PM UTC
He forecast 000 times. All his forecasts need to be evaluated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 17, 2016 2:21:29 PM UTC
I was fooled by his book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 17, 2016 4:24:53 PM UTC
Thanks Oded Wolff
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 17, 2016 10:20:02 PM UTC
Suzanne Parks Yes, it is an empirical description of people who designate themselves precisely as the opposite of idiots. Any problem with that?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 18, 2016 10:51:07 AM UTC
Petr Paščenko Fucking idiot, read the paper. He kept forecasting and you account for ALL forecass.
Some random person in Heathrow, right when I am trying to wake up from a long flight: "Hello sir, can I take a picture with you?"
Me - "You didn't know abt the curse"?
Him - "Which curse?"
Me - "Many people who take selfies with strangers, people they have never met before, have died the same year. I think it could be safe but, you know..."
The person vanishes.
https://www.amazon.com/Incerto-Fooled-Randomness-Procrustes-Antifragile/dp/0399590455/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479131654&sr=1-1&keywords=incerto
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 14, 2016 3:11:08 PM UTC
The idea is to "converge" by taking a topic and zooming-in on it in all its aspects, rather than disparate subjects. The INCERTO also has a single technical companion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 14, 2016 3:26:56 PM UTC
Logan Esculape No update, just periodically edited backwards the books, except for Bed of Procrustes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 14, 2016 3:40:01 PM UTC
Fuck Kindle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 7, 2016 8:22:13 AM UTC
The further in the tails the most muscles you recruit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 7, 2016 9:34:06 AM UTC
Thinning tails of f(x)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 7, 2016 6:02:47 PM UTC
Hi, not really. Naturalistic fitness is more dangerous in the tails because you can't push to the limit without huge risk of injury. But you can do naturalistic movements for therapy, existential reasons... much lighter weights.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 7, 2016 8:55:08 PM UTC
Not in the very tails: someone who deadlifts 500 will always beat up someone who deadlifts 300 regardless of the latter's training... because of such universality of muscle recruitment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 8, 2016 10:58:45 PM UTC
I often lift at the end of a fast
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 8, 2016 11:00:43 PM UTC
Blood pressure goes to 300+/150+. So, of course, but unsure what the role of the filtering.
(slip: "preferences for principles")
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000565038
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2016 8:41:36 PM UTC
Yes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2016 9:10:20 PM UTC
Nobody is getting that this is Kantian ethics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2016 10:24:02 PM UTC
Exactly. Your ethics is a long term repetition of a policy not seeing things as a one-off deal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2016 10:40:04 PM UTC
Just a simple follower here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2016 10:43:02 PM UTC
Anyway I despise consequentialism as it blows up systems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 4, 2016 7:31:30 PM UTC
For those into deontological ethics, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 4, 2016 7:50:10 PM UTC
Fucking idiot, this is the golden rule.
You have to consider that those people on the ground with skin in the game, as in Lebanon, the objective is to make things work and have a life, not sacrifice their existence for the sake of grand geopolitics. People are interested in commonalities and peace, not conflicts and wars.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 6:42:49 PM UTC
Thanks. But minister of what?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 6:45:00 PM UTC
I like this expression "virtue signaling".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 9:07:03 PM UTC
I feel for the Yemenis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 11:02:26 PM UTC
Squid ink!
https://www.amazon.com/Bed-Procrustes-Philosophical-Practical-Aphorisms/dp/0812982401/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 12:38:51 PM UTC
Fucking idiot it is a book of APHORISMS not a text. You compare aphorisms to aphorisms and books to books. If aphorisms are not for you, go read something else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 1:46:59 PM UTC
Note that it is a book of APHORISMS not a text. Aphorisms are a different animal; one should not look for "explanations" in poetry, aphorisms, paintings, or parables.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 3:24:45 PM UTC
Wee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 3:25:41 PM UTC
This is excellent! I have about every book on scaling & have been interested in bones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 1, 2016 11:43:12 AM UTC
It is like saying that the price of medication is poisoning. Sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 10:50:58 PM UTC
I see people focusing on the task not just the fruit of the task. This is refreshing. (Tokyo)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 27, 2016 1:43:36 PM UTC
Because of jet lag I sleep during most of the day and read all night.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 7:33:05 PM UTC
Stanislav Yurin Please explain "single word"
RWRI-4
www.realworldrisk.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2016 7:16:17 PM UTC
We give scholarships!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2016 8:33:58 PM UTC
You go run around the block 5 times. Then do 6 pushups. Then look in the mailbox to see if it is there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2016 8:55:22 PM UTC
Just kidding. Look on the site and ask Alicia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 11:23:54 PM UTC
I can safely say: never, or, to be conservative, not in the next 25 years.
(Antifragile)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2016 5:17:30 PM UTC
So when people ask me what I am resting from... it is mainly from the book tour for Antifragile, from interviews with journos. Other than that, nothing really.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 20, 2016 1:01:00 PM UTC
Intellectuals, it can be shown, are idiots who hide behind complication.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 21, 2016 12:44:07 AM UTC
I see that all the time at conferences. Keynote speakers abusing the security people who do not recognize them, and ask them for credentials.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 19, 2016 12:49:20 PM UTC
It is true... conversation in Lebanon is very hierarchical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 19, 2016 2:07:53 PM UTC
An exception!
http://hsiftokyo.hitachi/invitation/hsif2016_invitation_en_001.pdf
https://www.facebook.com/hitachi.global/videos/1271582432887087/
This said, I treasure Bob Dylan's songs. He is the best of the best. He was the symbol behind my dream of settling in America. But, to me, literature is something holy and consecrated, not something exclusively played to audiences in Las Vegas and similar places, the equivalent of Holywood. And I cannot possibly believe in sanctification from a prize denied to Borges.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2016 4:02:08 PM UTC
The friends were Russian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 19, 2016 11:07:53 AM UTC
This is gold!!!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 19, 2016 11:10:10 AM UTC
Who is the idiot interviewing Bob Dylan?
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/foreword-to-ed-thorps-memoirs-a-man-for-all-markets-6beba78cd2b#.ofnypirpf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 5, 2016 3:07:43 PM UTC
I don't know what they do but I am no longer there. Pulled my stuff out.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 6, 2016 12:49:04 AM UTC
I never wrote FOR evonomics. They just posted a chapter for a limited period.
I wish a Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics ("Nobel") to one of the people I dislike so he feels the insecurity of a pedestal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 5, 2016 12:40:48 PM UTC
Some people are not getting it. It does not mean that worthy people are never honored, or that ALL Nobels went to bad people. Logical mistakes...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 5, 2016 12:51:25 PM UTC
Comme ton pere!
(addition)
A probabilistic argument in favor of the minority rule dictating societal values is as follows. Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for pleasure; do not gratuitously beat up passers by for training, use instead a boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolving over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”. You cannot keep Kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork on Sunday barbecues.
Now it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority that the majority. Why? Take the following two theses:
- Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to be emerge independently across populations.
- What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be be black-and-white.
An example. Consider that an evil person wants to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority”-style poison; it requires more than half the liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party, and you need to investigate the cause. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the first not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival.
The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue.
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15#.o9dgpamky
---
I will be doing the same with the Technical Incerto.
---
The quality of the paper is excellent. Note that the 2nd Edition of the Bed of Procrustes (50% longer) is part of it, and also published separately as paperback.
---
https://www.amazon.com/Incerto-Fooled-Randomness-Procrustes-Antifragile/dp/0399590455/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475235494&sr=1-3&keywords=incerto
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 30, 2016 12:29:25 PM UTC
Thanks Patrick McGarry and sorry for your sister.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 30, 2016 12:29:50 PM UTC
It seems to work better in paperback.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 30, 2016 12:30:14 PM UTC
Random sequence!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 30, 2016 1:14:11 PM UTC
Oui, soon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 30, 2016 1:15:11 PM UTC
The Technical Incerto is developing here http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 1, 2016 10:45:26 AM UTC
Yes paperback edition here and UK
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 1, 2016 10:47:48 AM UTC
Some imbecile was complaining about the "continuously updating" of the books.
The fellow had been married four times.
---
Another aspect of *skin in the game* is that people do not learn from the experience of others --as we saw with the professor, they don't even learn from their own experience. People who make mistakes --and harm others -- when they have skin in the game, are filtered out of the system, which lets evolution operate properly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 23, 2016 11:45:33 PM UTC
Evolution has no direction but the filtering is asymmetric, so locally there is a direction.
[New Version]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2016 3:09:09 PM UTC
All comes down to how much one lifts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2016 4:19:47 PM UTC
Near Sopher you are an imbecile hanging on on idiosycratic use of words. The article DOES NOT mock intellectualism, but idiots like you who think they understand but don't.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2016 4:41:58 PM UTC
Just added: does not naturally detect sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2016 9:31:40 AM UTC
OK, OK, just edited the piece.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 20, 2016 6:47:50 PM UTC
This is sarcasm, Susan Rooney Pfannenschmidt, fughedabout deadlifting.
The modern one is to technologically change the world.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 12, 2016 11:42:26 PM UTC
Yes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 11, 2016 4:34:38 PM UTC
It is! volatility matters.
There is this formidable scene in the Godfather when the Hollywood executive wakes up with a dead horse in his bed. It was a threat, and not an empty threat.
Threats reveal weakness, except when they are real. The method of conveying real threats was perfected by the sect of the Assassins, an 11th-14th C. sect that specialized in political assassination (they always spared civilians and people who were not directly targeted). Just as with the Godfather scene, legend has it that the head of an army moving against them woke up to find a dagger and a message near his head. It was a "recommendation" to stop the war (he promptly took the advice). They could have killed him, but they were too strong for that and proved it. They supposedly did the same with Saladin, informing him that the cake he was about to eat was poisoned... by them.
The Assassins were often associated with the Templars as they fought frequently on the side of the crusaders --they were part of a branch of Shiite Islam that was violently anti-Sunni.
The method of putting skin-in-the-game in political leaders started with the sicarii who used similar method of targeted assassination by means of a dagger (as opposed to the sword which entails battles).
They were exactly the opposite of Salafi terrorists: as I said, they killed leaders, not civilians, hence unlike wars their methods focusing on precision avoid the civilian "colateral damage". Comparisons with Jihadis get it backward: they were targeted (Salafis are not discriminating, going after anything that moves, even their own). Much of what we read about the Assassins can be smear by their enemies (including their name linked to Hashish).
And the dagger-near-the-pillow scene is signaling at its best: the most effective way to deal with an enemy is to prove to him that you own him. You are so strong that you keep him alive.
The New York Municipality has been trying for 70 years to change 6th Avenue to "Avenue of the Americas", unsuccessfully.
Place names are sticky, we should be able to get back 6000 year old languages... from the names. Or the timing of the settlement. I speculate that the placename is likely to correspond to the time of the first settlement and sticks throughout. Cartagena in Spain was a Carthaginian settlement (itself from Kart-7adash). All villages in the Levant bear either ancient Semitic (Canaanite or Aramaic) or Greek names ("Kfar-something", "Beit-something"). It is when a new settlement is made, such as Laodikeia (during the Seleucids, 3-4th C BC) that a new name appears, or when one part near a small town is rebuilt as a government center such as Caesarea. When the Romans give a placename, it is usually a corruption of the originial: Berytus to Beirut (small well in Canaanite), Apamea from 7ama (though it is not in the same location), etc.
Now let us speculate. Knossos, the Minoan center, maps most certainly to to a Semitic root (meaning gathering, like Knesseth, Knisse, etc.), so I conjecture whether Linear B=>Canaanite or reverse.
I also speculate that there is a deep connection of pre-Canaanite for my ancestral village Amioun: 3am Yawan "the Ionian people's settlement" in Canaanite (we have same genes and genetic diseases as Cretans).
And Marseilles, in France, while its inhabitants claim a Phocaean origin (Greeks of Asia Minor), makes me suspect a Phoenician connection, since "Marsa" means port in Canaanite and a nearby hilltop village is called Ramatuelle, from "Ramat El", Hill of God, which is certainly Phoenician placename.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 4:02:52 PM UTC
Yes I meant Minoan. i am at the gym, not easy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 5:07:06 PM UTC
Interesting. Could be the Semitic root KNS comes from Minoan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 5:08:31 PM UTC
Why are you nitpicking? It could be a language, and Hebrew is a dialect of it. No?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 5:09:10 PM UTC
Canaanite is very close to Hebrew (Hebrew is a Canaanite dialect). Aramaic is very different, splintered into many dialects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 5:09:46 PM UTC
They removed all signs saying Triboro. They learned from 6th Ave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 5:11:05 PM UTC
I have never heard of Istanbul. Where is it? You perhaps mean the city known in my circles as Constantinople?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 5:25:39 PM UTC
Anyway the distance Canaanite-Hebrew is tiiiiiiiiiiiiiny.
The more you compare yourself to others, whether favorably or unfavorably, the worse off you will be.
(This continues the odometer story).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 5, 2016 10:37:34 AM UTC
Bingo. Success for the collective is eliminating hierarchies, except for the functional.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 5, 2016 10:40:45 AM UTC
BTW complex systems are minimally hierarchical. Yaneer Bar-Yam
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 5, 2016 1:37:36 PM UTC
Finally note that rankings (from comparisons) are zero-sum by definition; real life is not so.
This is what happens with systems that becomes "modernized".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 11:51:43 AM UTC
Bingo!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 1:57:55 PM UTC
BS. BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 3:06:39 PM UTC
Even more BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 3:07:49 PM UTC
It is as if we broke things just by ...measuring them. In other words, things work until we start measuring.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 3:21:47 PM UTC
Actually there is a law... believe it or not made by an economist: GOODHART'S LAW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 3:22:36 PM UTC
These two fail to think in 2nd order effect. It pains me to see people repeat Business School BS on this page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 5:12:29 PM UTC
Both wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 2, 2016 5:37:45 PM UTC
Note the difference between measuring everything, and having rationalm heuristic, aims s.a. "no more than 100 carbs a day this week", or make more than "x".
In fact, not only most people know more about the past 100 years, but they knew even more about the past 100 days.
Further, history is not geopolitics (who met whom) or wars, but an understanding of what people used, ate, produced, thought, and argued about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 1, 2016 6:55:02 PM UTC
Exactly. You need to filter in inverse weights...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 1, 2016 6:56:05 PM UTC
Thanks John!
https://medium.com/@nntaled/commencement-address-american-university-in-beirut-2016-a5c6d57984b#.6gxjkg8n4
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 30, 2016 12:08:49 AM UTC
Marie Helsmoortel Joelle Weiss Quel commentaire?
Business on the other hand creates business.
That's the only career advice I feel compelled to give.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 28, 2016 12:45:44 PM UTC
Note that people who think that business is zero sum tend to come from countries with rent-seeking and patronage.
https://medium.com/@nntaled/we-dont-know-what-we-are-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-religion-3e65e6a3c44e#.k4vv97r2g
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2016 6:35:03 PM UTC
BS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2016 6:35:53 PM UTC
Iran has 200K Christians (Armenians, mostly), >100K Zoroastrians, ~ 35K Jews.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 26, 2016 3:09:09 AM UTC
Indeed one can be Taoist and something else, hence not excluse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 24, 2016 1:05:22 AM UTC
I was expecting your comment, John Faithful Hamer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 24, 2016 1:06:11 AM UTC
That was the wrath of Achilles!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 24, 2016 12:35:53 PM UTC
The episode is the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles vs Agamemnon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 24, 2016 3:30:17 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer Ignore every single utterance by Martha Nussbaum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 24, 2016 4:41:22 PM UTC
I bought something years ago about stoicism from her and it was just ornamental academic sentences looking for problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 24, 2016 4:41:37 PM UTC
Then I read more and realized there was no depth, just rituals.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2016 12:25:34 PM UTC
Excellent!
This applies to all scales: Sicilians, Maronites, Cretans, and Corsican families, with their culture of vendetta, fight one another when they run out of enemies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 19, 2016 12:21:54 PM UTC
A dumb enemy will harm himself, which is very dangerous to both of you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 19, 2016 1:05:51 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn Excellent point David!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 17, 2016 2:09:00 PM UTC
Envy prevents you from feeling sorry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 16, 2016 5:19:55 PM UTC
Do musicians get upset by bad notes?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 16, 2016 5:20:01 PM UTC
Cacophony?
So, if you are self employed, the discipline is to be in your office if and only if you have something very, very specific to do. If you are employed, the same works indirectly: the more ritualistic your function, the more probable is your eventual redundancy.
There is another dimension: noise. The shorter the time-scale of information, the more noise you will be getting in the office (or online), relative to the signal. Reducing the physical presence is protective in that sense.
https://medium.com/@nntaled/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15#.t401j4kyh
[Trying a new venue to post chapters. ]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 14, 2016 11:51:09 PM UTC
It's what they don't put into it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 7:52:16 PM UTC
Seneca: You will never be as strong as an ox
There used to be a distinction between an athlete representing virtus (human-ness*) and ἀρετή (the quality of being what you are made to be) on one hand, and, on the other the circus acrobat selling uniqueness and deformity. Mediterranean ideals, as opposed to the Egypto-Babylonian ones, were about scale and balance: even the Gods were brought down to human scale. (Yet homines sumus, non dei: we are men, not gods)
Today's Olympics, by dint of specialization and overoptimization, thanks to the media and the huge financing involved, have transformed the athlete into a circus acrobat, a mutant selling deformities.
Let me insist: anything overoptimized, or even barely optimized, is no longer human.
Hominem te esse memento!
* manliness in PC terms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:03:14 PM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:14:23 PM UTC
Great! Thanks for the reference.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:14:51 PM UTC
Voila.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:21:32 PM UTC
I see them as half-monsters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:22:05 PM UTC
The more humans try to be half-gods, the more they become half-monsters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:29:27 PM UTC
COrrected spelling (from Italian) and footnoted! Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:32:01 PM UTC
Does it correspond to a real story?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 5:52:44 PM UTC
Which is why "achievement" is not a virtue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 6:58:39 PM UTC
Deadlift 400 and you are a mensch. Deadlift 800 and you are a deviant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 13, 2016 6:59:19 PM UTC
OK ok
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 11, 2016 2:17:15 PM UTC
Bureaucracy is the anti-social equality. =>Elitism.
The problem of the verbalistic (and the journalistic) is expressed in an aphorism earlier in the Incerto: mathematicians think in (well precisely defined and mapped) objects, philosophers in concepts, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators (...), and idiots in words. We saw that risk and tail risk are mathematically separate objects, conflated by the IYI (intellectual yet idiot) crowd. Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they mean by what they said –hence philosophy was born as rigor in discourse and disentanglement of mixed up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric. But, since Socrates we have had a long tradition of mathematical science and contract law driven by precision in mapping terms. But we also have had many pronouncements by idiots using labels.
***
People rarely mean the same thing when they say "religion", nor do they realize that they don't mean the same thing. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals –the word religio was opposition to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East . Law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing, and early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its foundations, had an uneasy relation with it. The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses a different word: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come”, only merged with this one in the eschaton. Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely-spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor.
For Jews today, religion became ethnocultural, without the law --and for many, a nation. Same for Syriacs, Chaldeans, Armenians, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians religion is aesthetics, pomp and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief with no aesthetics, pomp or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, cosmogony). So when Hindu talk about the Hindu "religion" they don't mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian.
When the nation-state idea came about, things got more, much more complicated. When an Arab now says "Jew" he largely means something about a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew is someone whose mother is a Jew. But it somewhat merged into nation-state and now means a nation.
In Serbia-Croatia and Lebanon, religion means something at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war.
When someone discusses the “Christian minority” in the Levant, it doesn’t mean (as Arabs tend to think) promoting a Christian theocracy (full theocracies were very few in Christian history, just Byzantium and a short attempt by Calvin). He just means “secular” or wants a marked separation of church and state. Same for the gnostics (Druids, Druze, Mandeans, Alawis).
The problem with the European Union is that the naive IYI bureaucrats (these idiots who can’t find a coconut on Coconut island) are fooled by the label. They treat Salafism as just a religion –with its houses of “worship”—when in fact it is just an intolerant political system, which promotes (or allows) violence and refuses the institutions of the West –those that allow them to operate. As we saw with the minority rule, the intolerant will run over the tolerant; cancer requires being stopped before it becomes metastatic.
We will see in the next chapter that “belief” can be epistemic, or simply procedural (pisteic) –leading to confusions about what sort of beliefs, are religious beliefs and which ones are not, disentangled through signaling. For, on top of the “religion” problem, there is a problem with belief. Some beliefs are largely decorative , some are functional (they help in survival); others are literal. And to revert to our metastatic Salafi problem: when one of these fundamentalists talks to a Christian, he is convinced that the Christian is literal, while the Christian is convinced that the Salafi has the same oft-metaphorical concepts to be taken seriously but not literally –and, often, not very seriously. Religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and, to some extent Shiite Islam, evolved (or let their members evolve in developing a sophisticated society) precisely by moving away from the literal –in addition to the functional aspect of the metaphorical, the literal doesn’t leave any room for adaptation .
PS We classicists can invoke Graeco-Roman ethics, that is, virtue ethics, and claim wisdom of the ancestors, or distillation of 3000 years of Mediterranean wisdom and benefit from the Lindy effect. The Salafis are trying the same thing (Salafi means ancestral) --and failing to do anything ... actually going backward as we keep advancing. Why? Because Graeco-Roman ethics was never literal, but about principles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 6, 2016 7:03:45 PM UTC
You can tell someone is an ISIS or Salafi sympathizer when he says "terrorism is bad...BUT" and of course brings up something either anachronistic or, worse, of a different scale as an excuse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 6, 2016 7:04:00 PM UTC
You can tell someone is an ISIS or Salafi sympathizer when he says "terrorism is bad...BUT" and of course brings up something either anachronistic or, worse, of a different scale as an excuse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 6, 2016 7:05:09 PM UTC
Rony he is clearly defective intellectually, like all Salafis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 6, 2016 7:05:59 PM UTC
Many such posts come from PR firms in DC.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 6, 2016 7:53:17 PM UTC
There is no greater difference than the one between Orthodox Islam and Classical ethics. Why? Because Classical ethics is never about the letter. Principles are never blanket ones. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 6, 2016 8:11:19 PM UTC
We classicists can invoke Graeco-Roman ethics, that is, virtue ethics, and claim wisdom of the ancestors, or distillation of 3000 years of Mediterranean wisdom and benefit from the Lindy effect. The Salafis are trying the same thing (Salafi means ancestral) --and failing to do anything ... actually going backward as we keep advancing. Why? Because Graeco-Roman ethics was never literal, but about principles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 29, 2016 4:02:29 PM UTC
When you have skin in the game, boring things like checking the safety of the aircraft cease to be boring.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 28, 2016 5:02:45 PM UTC
BTW shouting is promoting via ads, claims, PR firms, etc.
For me it is anyone I run into at a party and can't remember the first name.
It takes some training; rehearse in the privacy of your living room before doing it in public.
(Aldo Maccione, Jacques Brel, etc...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTm0X93l8vk
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 24, 2016 5:45:46 PM UTC
I have been practicing all morning. Now I am heading to the beach.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 24, 2016 6:01:23 PM UTC
What do you mean? This is not philosophical?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 25, 2016 1:24:52 AM UTC
Part of the charm is that Aldo Maccione speaks French with a very thick Italian accent.
Iran has, somewhat, the opposite situation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 21, 2016 11:49:33 AM UTC
Iran flipped from top-down secularization to top-down theocracy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 21, 2016 11:55:12 AM UTC
Actually I've had problems attending church service in Russia because of the crowds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 21, 2016 12:30:40 PM UTC
It is a problem of the IYI class.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 21, 2016 12:42:21 PM UTC
France had many many hickups after the revolution. It only became secular recently.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 21, 2016 12:43:39 PM UTC
I was told that Iran, officially a theocracy, is (nearly) the most secular coutry in the Near and Middle East. Note that I separate Near from Middle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 22, 2016 2:30:27 AM UTC
What we mean by "religion".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 23, 2016 7:13:10 PM UTC
Re: Turkey. It seems, BTW that the recent crack-down isn't about secularism but a purge of the Gulenists, another brand of (sort-of) Islamists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 24, 2016 4:41:08 PM UTC
Aatif Ahmad I ...hope so.
An illustration of the notion of minimal type 2 error (no false negative): At the Congress of 1934, for the critical confidence ballot, a minority of the 1288 delegates (perhaps a quarter) voted against Stalin.
Stalin ended up trying to eliminating, during the great purge, not just those who were presumed to have voted against him, but all the delegates who were present.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 20, 2016 9:41:30 PM UTC
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 21, 2016 11:51:08 AM UTC
I confess I somewhat apply the same method on social networks, because of the risk of trolls (we've had 1000s in the GMO debates) the bot zaps people based on profiling, with minimal type 2 error.
It shows why GMOs are *not* traditional breeding. Few people trained traditionally get complex systems (i.e. those with interractions). But there is a growing number of young people who "get it", particularly when familiar with P/NP in computer science.
Finally I looked at Monsanto's financials and it shows GMOs are contracting; as a "technology" GMs are dying and no complicated technology survives unless it is multiplicative. Meanwhile organic is growing rapidly.
The PP page is here
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.html
---
Rahul Gotswani commented on the drawing by Joe Norman for our paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 15, 2016 12:33:30 AM UTC
Indeed turned out that Natura non facilt saltus ..."of a certain kind". Only within the original green zone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 15, 2016 12:34:21 AM UTC
Looks like you didn't get it AT ALL. It is not quantitative, but qualitative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 15, 2016 12:47:12 AM UTC
So some pretty big jumps can take place, but only within the domain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 15, 2016 12:36:20 PM UTC
Bingo: if nature did these types of leaps, why GMOs?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 15, 2016 6:40:41 PM UTC
Killian. You are not getting it. These are not THE SAME fucking leaps. Kapish?
Some may believe that *armies create wars* but nobody sane believes that *police create robberies*.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 7, 2016 5:44:13 PM UTC
Jaffer Ali Jaffer is the master; I follow his opinion on many subjects, including this one.
Since more and more of academia is becoming a ritualistic publishing* game that maps less and less to real research, we should force people who want to do "research" to first have a Real World day job, or at least spend 10 years as: lens maker, patent clerc, mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, uber driver, militia member, social security clerc, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high volume waiter, firefighter (my favorite), lighthouse keeper, etc., while they are doing their initial research.
It is a filtering, BS expurgating mechanism.
I for my part spent the first 21 years in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful job while studying, researching, and writing my first 3 books at night, and it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research.
*I borrow from Saifedean Ammous the apt description "ritualistic game".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 6, 2016 3:35:59 PM UTC
Yes, restaurants are high pressure and have a high rate of uncertainty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 6, 2016 5:23:24 PM UTC
It is WHILE doing research. Can explain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 6, 2016 7:13:11 PM UTC
Exactly. Many became cab drivers. When funding dries out, the system becomes more intelligent and only those that are worth it stay in it.
And many can't even drive an uber today. I would not use an economist for anything, not even to wasn my car.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 8, 2016 3:24:38 PM UTC
Laura Meyerovich not true.
1) Changed location to a huge room rented from... the Masonic Lodge in NYC, on 23rd St between 5th and 6th Ave.
2) Changed the date of RWRI 3 to October 3-7 2016
3) Changed the non-Antifragile part of the program to add Information, Cybersecurity, Big Data, Complexity (in place of technical finance)
4) Added more scholarship slots.
http://realworldrisk.com
PRINCIPLE: it is easier to macrobullshit than microbullshit.
So your car mechanic, sushi chef, house painter, espresso machine repairperson, plumber, barber, dentist, Apple genius bar attendant, sanitation engineer, translator of Greco-Aramaic texts, guitar player, ..., these are, to some degree, experts.
Mixing this with the concept of skin-in-the-game and the idea of complexity, we can build political structures that are immune to expert problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 2, 2016 12:59:44 AM UTC
They don't know it is a mistake. Because the Macro.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 4, 2016 11:56:24 AM UTC
The Great John Gray on Brexit:
"Those on the left clinging to the hope of a second referendum are like bedraggled courtiers fleeing Versailles after the French Revolution, unable to process the reversal that has occurred”: . . . there will be no going back. The vote for Brexit demonstrates that the rules of politics have changed irreversibly. The stabilisation that seemed to have been achieved following the financial crisis was a sham. The lopsided type of capitalism that exists today is inherently unstable and cannot be democratically legitimated. The error of progressive thinkers in all the main parties was to imagine that the discontent of large sections of the population could be appeased by offering them what was at bottom a continuation of the status quo. As it is being used today, “populism” is a term of abuse applied by establishment thinkers to people whose lives they have not troubled to understand. A revolt of the masses is under way, but it is one in which those who have shaped policies over the past twenty years are more remote from reality than the ordinary men and women at whom they like to sneer. The interaction of a dysfunctional single currency and destructive austerity policies with the financial crisis has left most of Europe economically stagnant and parts of it blighted with unemployment on a scale unknown since the Thirties. At the same time European institutions have been paralysed by the migrant crisis. Floundering under the weight of problems it cannot solve or that it has even created, the EU has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it lacks the capacity for effective action and is incapable of reform. As I suggested in this magazine in last year (“The neo-Georgian prime minister”, 23 October 2015), Europe’s image as a safe option has given way to the realisation that it is a failed experiment. A majority of British voters grasped this fact, which none of our establishments has yet understood."
But the problem is that it may be about authority--in reverse. The ONLY one of the august people who ever had anything to do with risk was Robert Merton from the blown up firm LTCM who deemed such risk to be in the order of 1 in many trillions (see my books for his description as perfectly Black Swan blind). They picked the wrong PR firm.
The broader problem is that a typical aged Nobel today is someone who had his formative work in the 60s, 70s, maybe 80s, and (unless he is Murray Gell-Mann) clueless about complexity and the difficulty in interractions. And not one has done a day's work or engaged in real world activity to have the presence of mind to verify the track record of golden rice, or realize that hunger is a problem of DISTRIBUTION not technology --you don't advocate risky brain surgery when a good night rest could do --primum non nocere. Likewise better give people rice + vitamin rather than open the Frankenbox to fatten the pockets of Biotech.
We throw away one third of our food. Find a Nobel Prize in food distribution.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/107-nobel-laureate-attack-on-greenpeace-traced-back-to-biotech-pr-operators/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 1, 2016 7:34:53 PM UTC
Tom Schelling
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 1, 2016 7:46:07 PM UTC
Yes, and returnless risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 1, 2016 8:24:09 PM UTC
Alfonso Payno De Las Cuevas No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 1, 2016 10:30:57 PM UTC
The average signatory's Nobel year: 1997. Average age at Nobel: 62. Do the Math: average age, 80s. These people are 40-50 years behind cutting edge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 1, 2016 11:08:14 PM UTC
Luis Tavares One of the 3 did.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 1, 2016 11:08:50 PM UTC
Killian Denny KIllian they are deriving their credentials from work that is not adapted to the modern world. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 1, 2016 11:57:06 PM UTC
The point is that these people haven't done research in decades, and no relevant work in years. Kapish? It would be fine if one is evaluating WORK but here all they are doing is offering a NAME. Then AD HOMINEM is the game they are playing. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 2, 2016 1:46:15 AM UTC
Interesting... And not one familiar with complexity theory
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 2, 2016 2:17:46 AM UTC
Please no sophistry on this page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 2, 2016 2:20:36 AM UTC
Michele Giudilli no sophistry here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 2, 2016 11:38:12 AM UTC
Note to newcomers: anyone who repeats some proGMO in an argument that has been debunked below or shown to be one of the fallacies will be zapped. We can't keep going backward in a discourse. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 5, 2016 2:16:17 AM UTC
Marc Milanini and Phillip F. Crenshaw The Ukrainian bot is zapping them as they may have been detected to be connected scientism etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 5, 2016 3:46:24 PM UTC
http://www.gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/17091-nobel-laureate-who-signed-letter-promoting-gmos-presided-over-firm-that-lost-billions
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 6, 2016 11:40:29 AM UTC
Amartya Sen did not sign! Good news.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 29, 2016 2:10:49 PM UTC
Samir EL Zein ejetne Talab laltarjame 3al 3arabe min-el-kuwait. Bass la7 5alle el-tarjame lal-Shami (mashriki).
Intellectual Yet Idiot: semi-erudite bureaucrat who thinks he is an erudite; pathologizes others for doing things he doesn't understand not realizing it is his understanding that may be limited; imparts normative ideas to others: thinks people should act according to their best interests *and* he knows their interests, particularly if they are uneducated "red necks" or English non-crisp-vowel class.
More socially: subscribes to the New Yorker; never curses on twitter; speaks of "equality of races" and "economic equality" but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver; has considered voting for Tony Blair; has attended more than 1 TEDx talks and watched more than 2 TED talks; will vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable; has The Black Swan on his shelves but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence; is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist uses statistics without knowing how they are derived; when in the UK goes to literary festivals; drinks red wine with steak (never white); used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; takes statins because his doctor told him so; fails to understand ergodicity and when explained forgets about it soon later; doesn't use Yiddish words; studies grammar before speaking a language; has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; has never read Frederic Dard, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, or Joseph De Maistre; has never gotten drunk with Russians and went breaking glasses; doesn't know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; doesn't know that there is no difference between "pseudointellectual" and "intellectual"; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past 5 years; knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.
But a much easier marker: doesn't deadlift.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:20:22 AM UTC
No, just Intellectual.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:24:15 AM UTC
Done!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:44:55 AM UTC
IYA?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:45:41 AM UTC
Thanks. Adding "has jogged x miles a week at least six months over the past 20 years"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:47:23 AM UTC
That's the real intellectual.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:58:01 AM UTC
Sorry yes it was corrected
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:44:53 PM UTC
The IYI look down at the great unwashed Plebes who haven't read Foucault in college and treat them like crap--as if they were inferior forms of life incapable of directing their own affairs. But when you make them feel uncultured, lacking in intellect, and unlearned, like all bureaucrao-journalists, being all tawk, they get very queasy: hit them where it hurts.
They are arrogant down, they will be arrogantified from up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 26, 2016 3:20:00 PM UTC
Kamal Kharrat Zaki Bass 7mar!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 27, 2016 12:34:17 AM UTC
Paul Wehage Paul it is thinking that those who didn't read Foucault are animals.
----
Warwick Cairns, a fellow similar to Jane Jacobs, has been fighting in courts to let market farmers in Britain keep selling bananas by the pound, and similar matters as they have resisted the use of the more “rational” kilogram. The idea of metrification was born out of the French Revolution, as part of the utopian mood, which includes changing the names of the winter months to Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, descriptive of weather, having decimal time, ten-day weeks, and similar naively rational matters. Luckily the project of changing time has failed. However, after re- peated failures, the metric system was implemented there—but the old system has remained refractory in the United States and England. The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead. (Likewise, the “modernization” of the Arabic alpha- bet from the easy-to-memorize old Semitic sequence made to sound like words, ABJAD, HAWWAZ, to the logical sequence A-B-T-TH has cre- ated a generation of Arabic speakers without the ability to recite their alphabet.)
But few realize that naturally born weights have a logic to them: we use feet, miles, pounds, inches, furlongs, stones (in Britain) because these are remarkably intuitive and we can use them with a minimal expendi- ture of cognitive effort—and all cultures seem to have similar measure- ments with some physical correspondence to the everyday. A meter does not match anything; a foot does. I can imagine the meaning of “thirty feet” with minimal effort. A mile, from the Latin milia passum, is a thousand paces. Likewise a stone (14 pounds) corresponds to . . . well, a stone. An inch (or pouce) corresponds to a thumb. A furlong is the distance one can sprint before running out of breath. A pound, from libra, is what you can imagine holding in your hands. Recall from the story of Thales in Chapter 12 that we used thekel or shekel: these mean “weight” in Canaanite-Semitic languages, something with a physical connotation, similar to the pound. There is a certain nonrandomness to how these units came to be in an ancestral environment—and the digital system itself comes from the correspondence to the ten fingers.
As I am writing these lines, no doubt, some European Union official
of the type who eats 200 grams of well-cooked meat with 200 centiliters’ worth of red wine every day for dinner (the optimal quantity for his health benefits) is concocting plans to promote the “efficiency” of the metric system deep into the countryside of the member countries.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 25, 2016 4:32:54 PM UTC
French fucking Revolution. You would do better reverting to Roman metrics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 25, 2016 4:42:29 PM UTC
Jonathan Andrews Didn't come from the revolution!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 25, 2016 5:20:22 PM UTC
But I am sure you could do better. Help. Something with an edge to it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 25, 2016 11:19:04 PM UTC
There is a term, philosophaster. I am sure it can be generalized.
The Nobel Symposium is a 3d retreat that takes place in Norway every 2 years, for the President of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, the secretary of the Prize, a few out of the 5 committee members and 20 scholars. I presented the paper on violence (the translation into English of our technical paper). Bear Braumoeller presented another one similarly critical of Pinker. After our session, the audience was split into:
1) Those who thought that Pinker was wrong
2) Those who thought that Pinker was not even wrong (i.e. not worth discussing).
And the agreement was to not talk about his thesis any further. Further, the organizer was told by Pinker that he did not wish to rebut our papers.
Our Non-technical paper:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pdf
Pinker builds his thesis on works by Richardson in a way that is NOT compatible with the way Richardson [which is compatible with our result] and without showing the derivations. This it turned out is a CRITICAL flaw. Words and words and the central point is pulled out of nowhere.
In our paper: "As we also find out in our data analysis, consistent with Richardson (1960), there is no sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis of a homogenous Poisson process, which denies the presence of any trend in the belligerence of humanity. Nevertheless, Pinker refers to some yet-unspecified mathematical model that could also support such a decline in violence, what he calls a “nonstationary” process, even if data look the way they look."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 22, 2016 4:45:21 PM UTC
No, he invented non "stationarity" while pointing to a "stationarity" paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 22, 2016 5:14:27 PM UTC
He was offered and refused. He is "busy".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 22, 2016 5:18:20 PM UTC
Also "busy" to write a rebuttal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 23, 2016 2:53:37 AM UTC
Fucking idiot you don't build a theory saying one thing and its opposite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 23, 2016 10:33:52 AM UTC
Philip Schröder Fucking idiot why do you say to "read his stuff?" assuming I didn't read it? The problem is that I READ his stuff.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 23, 2016 10:37:28 AM UTC
This is NOT an academic dispute: the risk of war is NOT trivial and much policy is built citing the Pinker crap. Kapish? Think before repeating clichés about academic disputes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 23, 2016 12:00:50 PM UTC
Please stop posting here I have no patience for idiots.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 23, 2016 3:17:48 PM UTC
Saying there is no basis for statement
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 23, 2016 3:34:29 PM UTC
Homicide is small contribution since heavy tails: wars kill. Read our paper before this. And no BS statements on this page.
The marker of the character of a person, detectable from childhood, is whether they generalize from local disagreements to other traits when they get upset. Example from real life (told by a Colombian Jew): children are playing, a small dispute erupts over something, one turns antisemitic: "you are a Jew", throwing all what he can at the other kid. The kid did not change ethnicity during the dispute; being a Jew was not bothersome to the Catholic kid before; it is just meant for the upset party to use all possible weapons. This is why lurking prejudice is bad because it doesn't show up on sunny days --when scapegoats are needed.
And one doesn't have to bring ethnicity; any trait such such as "it is well known that you have a reputation of...", anything meant to demean the person, an information that was not brought up before, only brought during the dispute.
Which is why it is a good idea to upset people and see how they react before engaging in business (or getting socially dependent) -- just to see whether they generalize. You would be surprised at the number of people who don't. And observe what people tell you about others when they are upset with them.
It would not be ethical for me to call someone a charlatan if we engage in a fight unless I've called him a charlatan without a fight, or if the fight is about him being a charlatan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 14, 2016 12:21:30 AM UTC
David E. Gallaher, tell Tom Dorrier what you think!
A similar thing applies to acquisitions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 13, 2016 9:11:01 PM UTC
A similar thing apllies to acquisitions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 8:37:40 PM UTC
Billionaires
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 8:38:39 PM UTC
It is not looking and behaving the way you were at 18, but the way you wanted at 18 to be when you grew up.
Translating our technical results into more common language.
Draft of our report to the Nobel Foundation, for comments before we submit it Monday morning. Thanks in advance.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/violence-nobel.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 1:52:49 PM UTC
Check the PHYSICA A paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 2:32:37 PM UTC
Never comment on a post about a document WITHOUT having read it. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 2:34:21 PM UTC
Îl Ÿês
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 2:36:28 PM UTC
The number of victims is not correlated to probability of conflict.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 2:57:42 PM UTC
the entire package is fat tailed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 2:58:03 PM UTC
Cafeteria study?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 3:00:08 PM UTC
Check http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 3:28:17 PM UTC
The bottom of the distribution plays no role. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 3:48:25 PM UTC
These numbers are shoddy ... 13th C numbers keep being revised.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 3:49:14 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 6:55:52 PM UTC
Edward Craig Cafeteria study is very very apt description!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 8:23:30 PM UTC
Fundamentally we are saying in a polite way that Pinker is NOT EVEN wrong. We figured it out immediately after we saw his book. In mathematics there is no "gray" area, no 2 sides to the story. So all the rest was painful to write because it is not necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 5, 2016 8:50:25 AM UTC
Daniel A. Nagy Yes the An Lushan rebellion did not kill that many... 31 mil or 3 mil!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 5, 2016 10:29:49 AM UTC
Jannes Gritter why don't you take your bullshit elsewhere? We ban trolls here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 5, 2016 5:55:53 PM UTC
Thx! You mathematician? Only mathematicians appreciate inequalities and their consequences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 8, 2016 9:15:51 AM UTC
I put the paper on hold at the request of the Nobel organizers
[CITIZENS vs GAWKER and CITIZENS vs JOURNALISM]
Journalists –as any guild, care about their peers and their community more than the general public. Except that we cannot afford to have such a community engage in a conspiracy against the laymen since they represent our interests, us the lay crowd; they are supposed to stand for the general public against inner circles of power. Journalism arose from the need to expose falsehood, take risks in exposing matters detrimental to the public; in short, counter the agency problem of the powerful. But, it is turning out, the journalism model can also work in the opposite manner: members have been effective in escaping having skin in the game –only whistleblowers and war correspondents currently do.
So one can see how this severe agency problem can explode with the Gawker story. The English tabloid machine came to the U.S. in full force with Gawker, founded by a firm that specializes in dirt on the internet. By dirt I don’t mean a fraudulent transaction abetted by some power: no, the kind of dirt that takes place in bedrooms (and even in bathrooms).
They sell voyeurism, predator voyeurism.
In other words they want to harm citizens by disclosing their private information and posting their videos without their permission in the interest of selling information. And without being accountable for it.
Gawker having posted a video of a celebrity having sex without his permission incurred a monstrous judgment of $140 million. The suit will bankrupt Gawker. Most of all, the judgment revealed that such a predatory business model will not survive, not because it is immoral, but because it has tail risks. For America has tort laws and a legal mechanism by which people harmed by corporations can be compensated for it –a mechanism that flourished thanks to Ralph Nader. It, along with the First Amendment protect citizens by putting skin in the game of the corporations.
Gawker is trying to make a First Amendment argument and unfortunately journos appear to find this justified –while normal citizens are horrified. Liberty in the thoughts of the founding fathers was not about voyeurism, but about public matters.
Gawker argued that because the person committing sex on the video they posted was a public person, that it became a “public” matter exempted from privacy protection. People failed to see that should that argument be true, then next someone spying on any public figure should be allowed to post their bedroom activity (including Hillary Clinton, Obama, anyone)... (Gawker has ruined the lives of 21 year olds posting their sex tapes and their reaction was outrageous; in one instance their lawyer Gaby Darbyshire e-mailed the woman who was in a revenge sex tape, defending the video as “completely newsworthy” and scolding her about how “one’s actions can have unintended consequences.”)
Peter Thiel, a billionaire with a vendetta against Gawker funded a law suit. Revenge motives perhaps, but this is how the market works: Gawker tries to make money therefore they need to live with the risk of someone trying to make money from their demise.
(You make money from the demise of a 21 yo, someone will make money from yours. You make yourself a vehicle for revenge porn; you become the subject of someone's revenge. You engage in bullying someone financially weaker than you; someone stronger will bully you. There is no reason Gawker should be the only one to use asymmetry given that their very business is asymmetry against weak people--and this is general as the media is asymmetrically strong against citizens, what is commonly called "bullying" ).
I would have personally shorted Gawker (if they were publicly listed) to make money from their collapse. And I am ready to fund lawsuits against journalists who break some intellectual rules and distort people’s positions (strawman arguments).
Any journalist who supports Gawker in the name of the First Amendments fails to understand that they as a community are committing suicide because they are trivializing the reasons behind the First Amendment –and they make it conflict with other fundamental rights. And a corporation trying to warp our sacred values should go bankrupt. And anyone, like Peter Thiel, who accelerates such bankruptcy, should be thanked.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 31, 2016 4:52:16 PM UTC
I did not put it in the piece above but journos, except for rare exceptions, combine low IQ, low practical sense, absence of erudition, shallow buzzword driven understanding, and a high sense of entitlement. These don't work together.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 1, 2016 7:25:54 AM UTC
This will be part of a more general chapter in Skin in the Game on Asymmetry over Citizens
ADDED (You make money from the demise of a 21 yo, someone will make money from yours. You make yourself a vehicle for revenge porn; you become the subject of someone's revenge. You engage in bullying someone financially weaker than you; someone stronger will bully you. There is no reason Gawker should be the only one to use asymmetry given that their very business is asymmetry against weak people--and this is general as the media is asymmetrically strong against citizens, what is commonly called "bullying" ).
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/AUBCommencement.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 28, 2016 12:14:54 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 4, 2016 8:48:02 AM UTC
The 18 y.o. would like his projected self to be different, not an 18 y.o.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 27, 2016 6:36:18 AM UTC
Fetishism!
Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, squeeze more "efficiency" out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you hate it.
So let us open the discussion: how do you inch closer to an artisan? First, a new definition of an artisan:
1) does things for existential reasons,
2) has some type of "art" in his/her profession, stays away from most aspects of industrialization, combines art and business in some manner (his decision-making is never fully economic),
3) has some soul in his/her work: would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because what people think of his work matters more than how much he can make out of it,
4) has sacred taboos, things he would not do even if it markedly increased profitability.
From my side, It is easy to see that a writer is effectively an artisan: book sales are not the end motive, only a secondary target (even then). You preserve some sanctity of the product with taboos (Fay Weldon put ads for Bulgari in her books which led to disgust; we do not like advertisement inside the book). You would not hire a group of writers to enter the process and "help" (some have tried, say Jerzy Kosinsky, none has seen his work survive).
Academics are also artisans. Even those economists who claim that humans are here to maximize their income, express these ideas for free, not seeing the contradiction.
DISCUSSION - Will we revert to an artisan society? Which jobs can be made artisanal? Please comment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 12:12:34 AM UTC
Alienation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 12:19:53 AM UTC
No, but he has some attributes: his ego is in his buildings. He derives some pride from the product.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 27, 2016 10:39:21 AM UTC
Compendaria res improbitas, virtus longa.
It is still a draft
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/medicine.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 22, 2016 10:38:00 PM UTC
It seems to me that, although your comment is interesting and useful, it misses a key component of my paper: "over a set time period $\Delta t$" and how the properties are FOR a specific time window, every time window has ITS OWN curve.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 23, 2016 7:18:52 AM UTC
Depends... But sure if you need spikes.
mix a $2,000 bottle of wine with a $10 one. The 2 bottles will be worth less than $1,005 each.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 16, 2016 1:10:12 AM UTC
No human I know can spent an entire week there. I am in NY then Beirut.
We added a quantitative certificate to the qualitative one we already have. The quantitative certificate is August 15-19 in Stony Brook. More advanced, deeper.
Note that the June 6-10 program has ~ 50 people registered. Note that we gave a certain number of scholarships (more than universities!)
www.realworldrisk.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2016 1:48:12 PM UTC
Didn't we tell you we were "artisanal" not traveling optimizing salespeople?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2016 2:42:00 PM UTC
Ask for a scholarship.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2016 6:08:47 PM UTC
Then come to NY!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2016 6:49:04 PM UTC
I have degrees, I display my degrees, but I am not "greedy for credentials". Eating is one thing, greed is another. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2016 11:25:07 PM UTC
Our partner in RWRI Robert Frey is a big giver. The idea for us isn't the money but the fun first money later. http://tbrnewsmedia.com/suffolk-man-gives-1-million-to-community-college/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2016 11:25:28 PM UTC
He also gave tons and tons to Stony Brook.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 14, 2016 12:39:56 AM UTC
I am not that interested in my own life. I am less bored playing with mathematica.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 14, 2016 12:00:52 PM UTC
I will be in room entire week
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 14, 2016 12:01:55 PM UTC
It is already at ~40% less than exec MBA
This is how salespeople and con men operate. They make you crave their company because you do not feel threatened.
As you can observe, not one of them is wearing a tie.
Note that, in a globalized world, municipal rule is central. We are inching back to the autonomous Phoenician city states.
PS- I do not vote in Beirut (I am registered in my ancestral village Amioun although my grandfather moved to Beirut in 1922).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2016 11:46:46 AM UTC
Why the fuck do you have to qualify "I don't agree with all your viewpoints but..."? This is what imbeciles who have nothing to say do. Make you point or criticize something specific.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2016 1:44:13 PM UTC
Alberto Cabello Sánchez Excellent!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2016 1:45:04 PM UTC
Autonomous city states: ma bi 7ikkak illa difrak.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2016 2:32:42 PM UTC
Apoorv Bajpai This Olivier Novel should not post here for lack of logical faculties. I am allergic to BS operators.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2016 2:35:52 PM UTC
Olivier Novel Didn't you read in FBR that "all members of the Smith family are tall" is different from "all tall people are members of the Smith family?". Which is why you should take your BS elsewhere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2016 8:57:05 PM UTC
Ron Blumenthal You are not getting that being intolerant of BS is being intolerant of BS. There are mistakes, and there is BS, and the two are different.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 8, 2016 12:01:44 AM UTC
Boof TheRabbit All the empty suits in Lebanon wear ties. You can make a fortune selling expensive ties.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 8, 2016 12:25:53 PM UTC
The competitors!!! No kidding.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 8, 2016 1:34:31 PM UTC
You still need ties to signal submission.
This continues the previous conversation and connects the commons to skin in the game and golden and silver rules.
What I picked up from Elinor Ostrom is that the private and the public are not the only two entities. There is something called a "commons" in between. As with any complex systems, people behave differently at a different scale. This explains why the municipal is different from the national. It also explains how tribes operate: you are part of a specific group that is larger than the narrow *you*, but narrower than humanity in general.
People share some things *but not others* withing a specified group. And there is a protocol for dealing with the outside. Arab pastoral tribes have firm rules of hospitality towards nonhostile strangers who don't threaten their commons, but get violent when the stranger is a threat.
The "public good" is something abstract, taken out of a textbook. Everything abstract fails. To repeat, scale, rather than type of regime, is the prime explanation of the flop of communism.
PS - One of the themes in SKIN IN THE GAME is that the "individual" is ill-defined an entity. "Me" is more likely to be a group than a single person. Note that the scale transformation (a group doesn't have the preferences of an individual) brings us to the flaw in the "selfish gene" theory, which was shown to be mathematically shody by E.O. Wilson and Nowak as well as Yaneer Bar-Yam.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 10:02:55 PM UTC
Rich small towns in the suburbs practice municipal socialism: high taxes and high level of public services.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 10:08:23 PM UTC
Doxa in the sense of glory of the commons or belief of the common?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 10:14:03 PM UTC
You mean his madness of crowds? BTW is doxa used today as belief?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 10:20:08 PM UTC
Yes!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 10:35:09 PM UTC
Stefan Rusen That is Nordic socialism: exclusive clubs for small countrmies
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 11:05:29 PM UTC
George Dimos Great Doxology is translated into Arabic using an Aramaic word "Majdala" (M-Gadol) to aggrandize.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 11:09:42 PM UTC
Actually the chants mix Greek and Arabic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh5Pvkymk_0
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 11:45:20 PM UTC
George Dimos Kavod means "strong" in Semitic lang.; Gadol means big. So Doxa => big. And I grew up hearing Doxa Soi as Al-Majd'(u) Laka.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 11:46:52 PM UTC
The way I see it is the Greek doxa WAS a translation of the Semitic. Will check as many early liturgies in Antioch were Aramaic and the New Testament was written in Greek by Aramaic natives.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 11:47:42 PM UTC
Related. But one can do more formal stuff.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 11:48:23 PM UTC
Đorđe Trikoš You answered Greg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 4, 2016 12:11:10 AM UTC
The idea of scale transformations is that the change is abrupt, not very progressive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 4, 2016 9:23:34 AM UTC
George Dimos REmarkably Kavod (stong) =>Doxa =>Gadol (al majd laka for doxa soi) =>Allah Akbar . So Allah Akbar is direct translation of Doxa soi.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 30, 2016 11:33:38 AM UTC
Diderot: "people tell me that I have the air of a man perpetually seeking something he lacks".
(Secrete amicos admone; lauda palam.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 28, 2016 11:22:09 AM UTC
Most likely originate from a pseudo Seneca https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicum_secreto_admone,_palam_lauda
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 28, 2016 11:33:20 AM UTC
The reverse!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 19, 2016 11:30:16 PM UTC
A virtuous thinker is someone who takes risks with his/her reputation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 20, 2016 1:15:48 AM UTC
I truly believe what Marx said about Bentham: philosophy as seen by a grocery store operator.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 20, 2016 10:11:27 PM UTC
Corrollary: We keep hearing "crime doesn't pay" as an incentive to be honest. Not necessarily true and not a good incentive.
This is the minority rule: it takes only a few very very intolerant and tenacious people to make the system more honest.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SmithBSVendor.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 18, 2016 2:16:06 PM UTC
This is the minority rule: it takes only a few very very intolerant and tenacious people to make the system more honest.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 18, 2016 2:24:49 PM UTC
James Compton I have always been intolerant, even before the F$ck you money. But never rub people the wrong way in the process. Be smooth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 18, 2016 3:09:14 PM UTC
Stanislav Yurin Trick: when you attack, DO NOT Give a F$ck about your reputation, how you look. Just go with the fight, regardless.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 18, 2016 3:45:20 PM UTC
What is a uniformed loser?
Accordingly I have asked for a formal retraction of an article by Noah Smith (someone who has been spreading nonsense for years) and who apparently has not read the book.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-15/everyone-worries-too-much-about-black-swan-events
Added a page:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SmithBSVendor.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 15, 2016 10:10:58 PM UTC
Some not all. That's the precautionary pple.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 15, 2016 10:28:12 PM UTC
The problem is NOT that Smith disagrees, but that he MISREPRESENTS my work, something called straw man. And misrepresenting is unethical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 16, 2016 12:43:14 PM UTC
He is one. He was thrown out of academia for publishing nothing but uses academia to give himself credibility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 16, 2016 3:32:04 PM UTC
Here is the Breach of Ethics
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 17, 2016 6:14:13 PM UTC
Nobody noticed this elephant in the room?
Another flaw which most certainly explains Noah Smith’s failing his academic career. He takes a book published in 2007 discussing events until 2006, then says “Taleb is wrong” about market estimation of probability between 2007-2016. Perhaps the participants adjusted to events of 2007, the book, or something else. The claim by Noah Smith is about market value of risk, not the structure of risk, which is something subsequent to the book. That his editor missed it is also strange.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 17, 2016 7:01:57 PM UTC
Corey Law A rebuttal is weak. I will do it on my own where I have more readers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 18, 2016 1:38:02 PM UTC
Added a page as public service (he will leave me alone, this is to protect others) http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SmithBSVendor.html
If you take the risk --any risk -- *repeatedly*, the way to count is in exposure per lifespan. You get diverging results.
It turns out that your grandmother is more rational and more *scientific* than Cass Sunstein who advised Obama on "behavioral biases" of humans, trying to "nudge" us out of them. I am fed up with the class of people who think they know better than us what is in our best interest.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/ppArXiv2.pdf
*(By entire I mean *entire*, no exception. They may handle biases differently but their equations have the same flaw.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 12, 2016 4:46:07 PM UTC
The point is even worse: any risk, whether only cigarettes or some cigarettes PLUS some other risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 12, 2016 5:00:57 PM UTC
My thing is a bit technical but clearly psychologists do not know how to use "probability".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 12, 2016 5:28:47 PM UTC
Kahneman is a rare bird. Not representative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 1:26:44 AM UTC
I am (was) a visiting member of Gigerenzer's center.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 3:11:29 PM UTC
Unfortunately all tail harm can kill you under accumulation, even if one event doesn't so (my fragility argument).
The Wisdom of Ahiqar the Aramaean.
(Incidentally many of Aesop's fables come from him.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 12:43:03 PM UTC
He also said it
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 12:48:18 PM UTC
India/Persia->Assyria -> Greece ->Persia/Arabia , Greece ->France
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 12:49:21 PM UTC
Ibn al Muqaffa3 was Persian, I think Rozibe bin Dawiye
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 1:31:01 PM UTC
TRANSCRIBING AND TRANSLATING
Bari - my son [Bani in Arabic/Heb]
Bar 3athiro - son of the rich (Heb. 3Ashir)
Akal 7awyo - ate a snake {Akal Hayye in Arabic]
W Amarin -they say (Heb. amar)
Ll saywto akalo - he ate it for his health
W'akalo bar maskino - and the son of the poor when they eat (Levantine: maskin)
W'amarin d'lkafinoh akalo -Thet say it is for his need that he eats it
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 1:58:01 PM UTC
The only difficulty I have is with lkfno for "need" might mean something else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 2:07:17 PM UTC
Solved, Kafino means both hungry and in need!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 2:30:29 PM UTC
saywto might be related to sammo in Ar samm (poison-pharma-medicine) so could be sammto
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 3:16:44 PM UTC
I do not think that Levantine is a dialect, nor that it comes from Arabic. It has many Arabic words. Arabism is just propaganda.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 3:51:26 PM UTC
Mohammed Khalid Alyahya Bullshit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 5:03:08 PM UTC
People who do not know Aramaic and Hebrew-Phoenician should not comment on origin of Levantine words. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 5:05:53 PM UTC
David Deutsch it is like saying that Italian comes from French because they have the same words rather than both come from Latin and there are confounders. Arab propaganda makes people stupid.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 6:04:19 PM UTC
Mohammed Khalid Alyahya Stop the bullshit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 6:05:22 PM UTC
Mohammed Khalid Alyahya Aramaic precedes Arabic by at least 10 centuries, so stop bullshitting here and go away.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2016 6:50:17 PM UTC
For those interested on linguistic distance see my page http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 12, 2016 11:14:03 AM UTC
As people can see the dispute with Mohammed Khalid Alyahya was settled out of court, for some agreement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 12, 2016 3:58:17 PM UTC
not quite...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2016 8:42:34 PM UTC
The more I read it the more I like it. A wonderful piece of work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 10, 2016 11:40:22 AM UTC
It is NP hard.
http://evonomics.com/how-to-legally-own-another-person/
The acknowledgments are not in this version but in the one on my site
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/SITG.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 8, 2016 10:36:35 PM UTC
Aya ligha ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2016 9:07:49 PM UTC
This comes from the Aramaic Ahiqar's ass:
Virtue ethics is about acts of virtue, especially if they come with negative reward.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2016 2:44:57 PM UTC
Psychopaths hide their psychopathy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 3, 2016 12:28:42 PM UTC
By taking debt out of GDP? Great idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 2, 2016 1:21:08 PM UTC
Nobody is talking about Zaha Hadid. The idea came to me as I saw the picture of the Apple campus.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 7, 2016 9:49:41 PM UTC
The idea that the architect(s) know(s) what is good for us lesser mortals is part of the classical treatment of the masses; in the past they were subjected to Lindy effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 8, 2016 12:54:37 AM UTC
Everything built after 1950 lacks in dimensionality. Ostia's buildings (2000 years old) are no different from pre-war Paris.
More details:
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/rationality.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 1, 2016 6:33:33 PM UTC
Systemic ruin is the point not individual ruin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 1, 2016 6:49:25 PM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 1, 2016 6:50:23 PM UTC
For those not getting the point see http://fooledbyrandomness.com/rationality.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 1, 2016 10:19:10 PM UTC
Yes! This was drawn on my Ipad pro.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 2, 2016 1:47:52 AM UTC
Maybe we were crazy but not skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 28, 2016 1:45:07 PM UTC
THis is OK
The point is that the same phenomenon will produce p-values all over the map, A true p-value of .12 will produce p-values <.05 more than half the time, so people may never replicate and get the same result.
One Hundred Years of P-Value Bullshit!
The paper: http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pvalues.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qrfSh07rT0
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 1:50:30 PM UTC
The more people do statistics, the lower the clarity of their ideas. Except for a few. Alas!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 1:53:56 PM UTC
Are you a quant, Daniel Bernoulli?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 2:41:13 PM UTC
In plain English its inverse (pre-image) is also Borel measurable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 2:41:42 PM UTC
Indeed both!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 5:43:41 PM UTC
Working on the distribution of the sum!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 6:53:38 PM UTC
Or Gaussian, I gave both.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 9:47:06 PM UTC
Google is usually 24 hours behind in updating views
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 24, 2016 11:10:33 AM UTC
This is beyond. Even a 1% cutoff doesn't work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 24, 2016 11:11:27 AM UTC
I am working on an explicit distribution for "m" number of tests.
Now some empiricism. Consider that almost all tech companies "in the tails" were not started by "funding". Take companies you are familiar with: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. These companies started with risk-taking. Funding came in small amounts, way later.
Now let us take the idea to its next logical step. The minute something called a "business plan" is created, the idea is corrupt and the BS start dominating. People start thinking in terms of other people's perception of the business, for "raising cash. Like prostitutes.
We can generalize to economic growth. The problem is that these discussions of "growth" are made by people who have never taken risks.
What is needed? 1) determination, 2) sophistication, 3) authenticity, 4) convexity and above all, 5) risk loving.
PS- Someone wanted to start an academic research center; his aim was to have a structure, a business plan, get research grants, etc. Then do research. I bailed out and did more for a total cost of $1.50, with http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2016 11:03:56 PM UTC
So long as you don't TRY to be efficient at it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 18, 2016 11:26:14 AM UTC
What part of *TRY* are so many commentators confused about?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2016 11:01:50 AM UTC
Spezzatura
Me: "Never ask a vague question".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2016 2:06:00 PM UTC
I am not really paid at the U. Less than the secretary that I donate.
The rise of protectionism may have a strong rationale. One fundamental flaw with economic thinking is that humans are assumed to be doing things to make a living and improve their economic condition. This is partially true. But people are also doing things for existential reasons. We may be better off economically (in the aggregate) by exporting jobs. But that's not what people may really want.
I write because that's what I am designed to do --and subcontracting my research and writing to China or Tunisia would (perhaps) increase my productivity but deprive me of my identity.
So people might want to *do* things. Just to do things, because they feel it is part of their identity. It may be cruel to cheat them of that. They too want to play. They want to have their soul in the game.
Bureaucrats don't get it because they don't do things.
----
NOTE I: More technically, it is erroneous to think that one necessarily has to "maximize" income if one seeks it (economists used naive mathematics in their optimization programs and thinking). It is perfectly compatible to "satisfice" their wealth, that is, shoot for a satisfactory income, plus maximize one's fitness to the task, or the emotional pride they may have in seeing the fruits of their labor. Or not maximize anything, just do things because that is what makes us human.
NOTE II: TK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 2:24:33 PM UTC
small is beauteous!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 2:26:06 PM UTC
Utility has problems, TK in SITG
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 3:17:15 PM UTC
Actually, consumers are liking them... on that, later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 3:18:59 PM UTC
You assume that consumers are not workers?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 3:41:41 PM UTC
Najjar (Carpenter -father of Jesus), Haddad (Smith), Gupta, Taleb (scholar), etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 6:08:42 PM UTC
Kenan Simpson Do not cite me for what I did not say. Less income was NEVER part of the problem. Read, think, then comment again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 10:47:57 PM UTC
This is why it was painful for me to write the above. I truly do not know the solution, except possible implosion of a system.
Comments by the previous class found on social media:
http://www.realworldrisk.com/inaugural_program_comments
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 11, 2016 8:27:18 PM UTC
3 instructors know Russian so we would do simultaneous trans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 11, 2016 10:00:17 PM UTC
If I were you, I'd ask for a discount if your employer doesn't cover.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 12:22:32 AM UTC
Aaron Bazzica Please write to Alicia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2016 8:33:34 PM UTC
Nothing for 2d, more for 5 days, but for 5d finance is helpful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 16, 2016 12:53:26 AM UTC
too mych.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:20:01 PM UTC
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21693904-microeconomists-claims-be-doing-real-science-turn-out-be-true-far
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:26:22 PM UTC
Stop the bullshit. Life expectancy AT BIRTH was not improved by EB Medicine but by drop of childhood mortality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:44:52 PM UTC
No. Early modern medicine INCREASED childhood mortality. I will NOT repeat Antifragile for you here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:45:15 PM UTC
Bingo! Overeducation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:54:39 PM UTC
This said people aren't getting that I am not saying science is not good, only that it needs higher standards of rigor before making it into policy ---from iatrogenics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 2:17:45 PM UTC
Yes it is worse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 5:01:07 PM UTC
Marion Feldmann Who is denying education? There is a difference between nutrition and overdose. Stick to argument, please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 10, 2016 12:11:04 PM UTC
Neil Gerace This is strawman. I am not saying that ALL medicine is worse than grandmothers, but that MUCH of it taken unconditionally because it looks like "science" is WORSE than old ancestral advice.
Also note that people get Zapped here for strawmanning. Say whatever you want, DO NOT STRAWMAN.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 10, 2016 12:12:24 PM UTC
Please avoid strawmanning. I am not saying that ALL medicine is worse than grandmothers, but that MUCH of it taken unconditionally because it looks like "science" is WORSE than old ancestral advice. In other words, people are giving up rigor because something cosmetically appears to be "scientific". Kapish?
Actually this is the argument used by the pseudoscientists and charlatans to sell you their wares.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 10, 2016 1:00:22 PM UTC
To avoid sucker problems, substitute the abstract "government" with "bureaucrats/politicians" & "science" with "scientists/journal editors".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 10, 2016 2:37:40 PM UTC
see Silent Risk and Precautionary principle
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 1:32:21 PM UTC
Steve Bussinger Excellent! Thanks Steve.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 1:33:26 PM UTC
Steve Bussinger just posted this:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2408622/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2016 1:34:05 PM UTC
He shows degradation of both diet and life expectancy with early modernity, hence use of bad baseline.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 7, 2016 1:02:50 PM UTC
Please explain clearly and with precision. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 7, 2016 1:10:55 PM UTC
Modi is moving slowly but surely and the bureaucracy in India is too metastatic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 7, 2016 1:15:03 PM UTC
What social media finally did: destroy the press. It is more organic to get information from word-of-mouth, which it accelerated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 7, 2016 1:22:52 PM UTC
So you are conflating the purpose of democracy with the execution in the past; and in your answer contradicting the first sentence "always voted against" with canditates not-"non establishment".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 7, 2016 1:30:03 PM UTC
Bear in mind that "destroy the establishment" simply means some Anglo-Saxon style change, not a European Augean-stables one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 7, 2016 2:37:21 PM UTC
Sumit Saha you dont get my point about big data so read about it. I never said i was against it. Read.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 7, 2016 2:54:04 PM UTC
Mark Baker the end justifies these means.
The file is at:
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/significance.pdf
Background: one economist, Michael Spagat, commented on us vs. Pinker in a journal called significance, making eggregious errors of significance. The mean NEEDS to include the tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 12:50:13 PM UTC
Why not a mafia sub-operation?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 3:46:40 PM UTC
As you see we do not define wars, but casualties.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 4:58:31 PM UTC
Please wait a bit... Fat tails start with the subexponential class.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 8:10:52 PM UTC
My only comment is that both you and Pinker are either incoherent or scam artists trying to say 2 things at the same time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 9:35:09 PM UTC
This is not peer review. They violate stat theory which is why journo Pinker only goes to blogs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 3, 2016 8:18:52 AM UTC
Friends you are wasting time discussing with this idiot who either hasn't read the paper or didn't get that reporting past facts without significance tests is not science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 3, 2016 10:19:41 AM UTC
You can disseminate for now as is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 3, 2016 11:55:09 AM UTC
What do you mean by non-peer-reviewed?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 12:23:37 PM UTC
Looks like we are getting some nonsensical comments of the sort: "true we cannot predict the future, but violence did drop, no?". Not the point. The point is that you cannot say violence --a random variable-- has dropped on such short duration or small number of observations, since fat tails require more observations. Kapish?
1) Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison (a la Tony Blair, used public office for subsequent enrichment; the reverse is far better; agent of the crony clepto-bureaucrato Washington order. Unlike overt corruption, this insidious form (legal not ethical) is the most morally damaging to our fabric).
2) The Wahabi regime of Saudi Barbaria and their friends.
3) Agrochemical and pharma shills.
4) People increasing rather than decreasing ruin problems while claiming to "help", i.e., with enough pseudoknowledge of probability to cause damage (a la Cass Sunstein who find it irrational for people to worry about ruin)...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 29, 2016 7:09:00 PM UTC
A castle near Paris... for Napoleon's estranged first wife.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 29, 2016 10:33:52 PM UTC
Can you take this relativist crap somewhere else? Thank you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 1, 2016 8:13:07 PM UTC
Monsanto means holy mountain so this compensates
We managed to drill the essence of the problems with graphs only, with examples and concepts, no equations. And it worked! For instance, Zari Rachev who was the doctoral student of the great Kolmogorov was simpler than any lecturer I have ever seen on probability, could get points simple enough for school students.
I lectured a bit more than 6/10, but most other instructors were present in debates, with constant commentary from Robert Frey and teasing from Raphael Douady. At many times the discussions were like stand-up comedy.
I focused in my part in showing that almost all of probabilistic decision problems, convexity (antifragility) and all can be linked to a simple logical asymmetry that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and how the point gets lost as people become semi-sophisticated. From that you get almost everything in a tight systematic view.
This is the first time I've worked hard in 15 years. I realized the trick: had no coffee. It works.
The next seminar is June 6.
http://www.realworldrisk.com
[NOTE We are assuming that given that these comments were on public sites (Twitter) we do not need the hassle of the permission/approval process. But if the author objects we would remove immediately.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 27, 2016 9:21:08 PM UTC
We gave 5 full & partial scholarships. But we agreed to limit to students we know.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 27, 2016 9:51:21 PM UTC
I may after all these years be allergic to something in the processing of coffee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 27, 2016 10:04:32 PM UTC
Thanks a million!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 27, 2016 10:05:03 PM UTC
June 6
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 27, 2016 10:05:29 PM UTC
You spare your nervous energy... maybe
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 27, 2016 10:43:17 PM UTC
Do you realize Jaffer that by putting this here you subject yourself to being cited? I thought that you took a class on ... risk!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 28, 2016 10:36:41 AM UTC
Marc Milanini Americans have more caffeine than Italians since expressi are very tight and very small.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 28, 2016 2:17:22 PM UTC
Which simulations?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 28, 2016 3:04:21 PM UTC
Great. I am working for Kelly in reverse
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 28, 2016 6:59:06 PM UTC
Let me repeat the thing about online courses: No. I have my own Moocs and it is not the same as a class.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 29, 2016 12:03:41 AM UTC
Nina Rung The problem is not the pay: we just don't like the medium. I prefer to eat with people in a restaurant not on skype.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 29, 2016 10:17:12 AM UTC
Scalable shmalable. We are NOT scaling.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 29, 2016 10:17:44 AM UTC
We give scholarships.
I just finished your last book.
And I saw this clip and I thoght about your ideas,
What do you think about a visdom of old Jweish Rabby
https://www.facebook.com/ifat.kuchinsky/videos/10153616255374733/?pnref=story
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 26, 2016 9:56:03 AM UTC
Excellent: If lobsters went to a doctor they'd never grow!
Rest in Peace, Umberto Eco.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 20, 2016 2:08:44 PM UTC
Praise
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/seminars/180216.aspx
PDF of slides (temporary)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/BoE2016.pptx-show.pdf
- Your FatToniness, how can I be less unsuccesful?
- Have no personal assistant, no secretary.
- But then I couldn't schedule meetings, answer mail!
-That's the point.
Skin In the Game: The Thrills and Logic of Risk Taking
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SITG.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 15, 2016 1:08:09 AM UTC
It is only 8 PM in NY.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 15, 2016 11:19:44 AM UTC
Done
You don't become a Jesuit priest because it is good on your CV, and because those who leave the orders get great positions in the lay sector. Likewise a political position is not a stepping stone for enrichment.
Interestingly, electors worldwide are getting the point (with the reverse TonyBlairing of UK politics). But not the journos and people who work within the system.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-2016-election/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 14, 2016 3:45:07 PM UTC
Romana Giulia Bertolotti What you just wrote is plain BS.
This is a *via negativa* statement.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 4:32:52 PM UTC
Boko means school.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 11, 2016 10:28:46 AM UTC
Please explain...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 11, 2016 10:29:52 AM UTC
On the scale Banned-Discouraged-Neutreal-Recommended-Mandatory where does Halal fall?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 11, 2016 2:18:13 PM UTC
Kasr is to break, Kshr is to show your teeth. What is the root? http://www.baheth.info/all.jsp?term=كشر
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 11, 2016 6:40:59 PM UTC
Kathr...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 12, 2016 4:10:23 PM UTC
So it could be "Ktir" (many) or Kattir (make many).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 9, 2016 9:14:31 PM UTC
Except in a meta way!
Adding to:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SITG.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 1:48:56 PM UTC
cooking
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 1:49:24 PM UTC
No, read the piece again please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 2:06:26 PM UTC
Non è vero: l'origine non è arabo, ma l'aramaico.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 2:06:55 PM UTC
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/696304516405264384
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 2:07:06 PM UTC
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/696304516405264384
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 3:41:32 PM UTC
Nella giurisprudenza araba l'uso mappe esattamente a "proprietà a rischio".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 3:42:28 PM UTC
See Silent Risk I derive the difference
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 7, 2016 4:01:16 PM UTC
Actually it says that when there is ruin, you will go bust eventually.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 8, 2016 11:14:25 AM UTC
Probability theory is IN mathematics. Financial math is in mathematics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 8, 2016 11:15:27 AM UTC
Imbecile if you draw conclusions WITHOUT reading, don't comment here.
Humphrey Bogard and his friend infiltrated a Nazi cell in New York, impersonating two Nazi engineers. They had to bluff their way by answering questions when they really didn't know anything about the subject matter.
It can also work as a hoax: just give a speech that says nothing but looks technical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSSYkb_dmt8&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 6, 2016 2:01:37 AM UTC
Hilarious! Very effective.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 6, 2016 2:59:31 AM UTC
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercazzola
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 5, 2016 6:28:24 PM UTC
A lot of people are conflating perfectionism (for one's own work) for nitpicking (pseudoperfectionism for other people's productions.) Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 5, 2016 6:57:00 PM UTC
I am perfectionist for my own writing but don't nitpick other people's stuff. Kapish? If you can't see the distinction, try again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 5, 2016 10:35:28 PM UTC
Giovanni Bruno Nitpicker
It is a strange feeling to realize the answer to the question "Is it me or are they blind to something obvious?" is "no, it is not me".
Murray Gell-Mann and colleague found the SAME point (though expressed in a more physical setting).
My literary treatment
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/rational.pdf
Gell-Mann and colleague:
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-exploring-gambles-reveals-foundational-difficulty.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 10:30:42 AM UTC
Here is how time averages do not map to cross-sectional averages.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 10:48:59 AM UTC
THE INVERSE PROBLEM OF MATH IN SOCIAL SCIENCE
The approach I propose is to understand a problem very very well, THEN start using mathematics to check the rigor, glue phenomena together, and delve deeper into it. Also we can thus generate proofs. But it hinges on starting with the problem not some math tools. That was the approach by physicists over the centuries, thanks to the fact that our understanding of the physics grew along with that of the mathematics. The degrees of freedom for the math remain very constrained.
Now the problem in social science is that someone who knows mathematics starts with some mathematical theorem then looks for the problem, and invariably you end up with the wrong math and the wrong problem --since the degrees of freedom are monstrous. This is the "savantism" you end up with, a la Paul Samuelson, Robert Merton et al. Economics was mathematized AFTER math had a huge apparatus, so they picked the wrong math, and math grew out of math with flaws never corrected. You never do that when you know the problem beforehand. The good news is that 1) you can use math to debunk their math BS, 2) we understand economic problems and context very well to know where math is bullshit.
Anyway, NEVER trust a mathematician given a real world problem, never, never, better trust the rigor of a real world person using mathematical proofs.
See the comment here on the melting ice cube;
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 12:09:52 PM UTC
Proofs can be proofs, but beware the sensitivity to parameters, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 12:09:57 PM UTC
Assumptions matter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 1:29:01 PM UTC
Please read my literary version before asking questions about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 5:01:02 PM UTC
"Knightian uncertainty" is econ BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 6:32:42 PM UTC
I am tired of Austrian economics trolls who once they see a familiar word such as "dynamic" think it is immediately an Austrian approach. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 6:48:38 PM UTC
Ironically the only Austrian economist involved was Menger who got the result wrong according to the paper by Gell-Mann.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 6:53:53 PM UTC
In case anyone is wondering what is the connection to skin in the game and why did I put the LOGIC OF RISK TAKING there. Because SITG is an absorbing barrier!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 6:54:37 PM UTC
Giovanni Bruno Not you. Someone else, no longer here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 4, 2016 6:54:56 PM UTC
Giovanni Bruno Kapish is not Italian, but Brooklynese.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 5, 2016 10:38:36 AM UTC
Joe Vander Zanden Not you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 5, 2016 10:39:23 AM UTC
Just hit me that 20 years ago I wrote an entire book on dynamic hedging.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 10:49:55 PM UTC
He cites Shermer on doubts about GMOs being conspiratorial! This is garbage.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:21:30 PM UTC
Actually this is a joke. Doesn't predict anything.
------
In addition, for those who believe in the "wisdom of crowds", looks like the idea is debunked by the minority rule.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 25, 2016 5:50:32 PM UTC
There are other problems with such a crowd. They conflate payoffs and probability, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 25, 2016 5:51:06 PM UTC
Yes because you get Central Limit but I am showing it is not what is going on. Squeezes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 25, 2016 6:23:15 PM UTC
I don't know. Let me think about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 25, 2016 7:40:44 PM UTC
Democracy produces weird dictatorships.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 25, 2016 7:41:42 PM UTC
The price of your car is not determined just by you and the seller, but by the highest bid/lowest offer outside for comparable object.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 1, 2016 7:00:16 PM UTC
Sorry just noticed. Why didn't you say hi?
The great F. Dostoyevsky debunked it in "Notes from an underground" (enclosed).
A common theme of "positivist-rationalists-scientistic" (that is, promoters of scientism) to believe in "end of", new man, new society, new something, etc. Just as the "new atheists" believe that if we remove religion and replaced with something they mislabel as "science", things wouldn't blow up the planet. Now, looking for some quotes from Auguste Comte who, thanks to his magisterial multi-volume project, "Cours de Philosophy Positive" gave respectability to this turkey problem.
-----
Notes:
1) Dostoyevsky, as an author, had skin in the game. He faced his own execution: he was condemned to death penalty, faced the execution squad, and was reprieved last minute. See in The Idiot the discussion of how a man faces what he think is his last hours of life, promising himself to enjoy every minute of like in the same manner if case he miraculously survives... and forgetting it upon the miraculous survival. Much more on him, later.
2) The Nobel Foundation gave me a fellowhip to go study the statistical properties of violence in Oslo. So I will get deeper into this turkey problem and its sucker narrative.
3) Thanking Daniel Obloja.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 3:33:01 PM UTC
My statistical point: changes in violent conflicts over anything less than 100 years is anecdotal/statistical noise --no different from pseudoscience. The irony is that the "scientists" dismiss religious beliefs yet fall into other, cruder and more dangerous forms of superstition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 8:29:11 PM UTC
Manan Rastogi The Variance for Baal's sake, the Variance!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 9:53:36 PM UTC
Luc let me check. Organic bottom up conflicts with Ridley's positions on climate and GMOs. The science behind antifragile is in dose response (small dose and change of stressors) and he doesn't understand it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 24, 2016 1:11:30 PM UTC
The Gustav Larsson guy is violating rules of sophistry. He is unfit for intellectual discussions here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 24, 2016 3:29:46 PM UTC
Jannes Gritter Fucking sophist I am not attacking his person as part evidence or logical argument but excluding him from discussion owing to violation of logical rules. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 24, 2016 6:01:25 PM UTC
I just zapped the fellow who was arguing with David Norton, on grounds of sophistry. Arguing that we have UN or courts of justice or nicer restaurants is not countering a mere statistical argument, namely what the DATA allows us or doesn't allow us to say (i.e. what is and what is not noise).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 24, 2016 7:47:06 PM UTC
Matthew Jensen Criminality has lower variance... .
I've mentioned here the following anecdote. I once had dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant with a fellow who insisted on eating there instead of my selection of a casual Greek place. People in the restaurant were of the very constipated style, that kind of atmosphere. Dinner consisted in a succession of complicated small things. It felt like work. I left the place starving. Now if I had a choice I would have had some time-tested recipe (say a pizza with fresh ingredients, or a juicy hamburger) in a lively place --for a tenth of the price. But because the fellow could afford the expensive restaurant, we ended up the victims of some complicated experiments by a chef judged by some Michelin bureaucrat (one that would fail the Lindy effect, instead of eating some minute local variation around a progress through Sicilian grandmothers).
(Footnote: Hamburgers are tastier than filet mignon, because of the higher fat content, but people have been convinced that the latter is better because it is more expensive to produce).
The same with real estate. Most people, I am convinced, are happier in close quarters, in a real barrio-style neighborhood, where they can feel human warmth, but when they have big bucks they end up pressured to move into a humongous impersonal and silent mansions, far away from the neighbors. Not counting the fact that their house will be professionally managed like a corporation.
I am saying this because, with the passage of time, I am more and more convinced that very few people understand their own choices, and end up being manipulated by those who want to sell them something. Looking at Saudi Arabia which should progressively revert to the pre-oil level of poverty, I wonder if taking away some things from them will make them better off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 2:06:15 PM UTC
This is from the draft of SKIN IN THE GAME
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 2:45:19 PM UTC
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SITG.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 2:57:30 PM UTC
Excellent! Most people are mistaking this post for an advocacy of spartan choices rather than something about the restriction of freedom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 6:55:27 PM UTC
Guilherme Marquezine In Brazil, life outside will kill you if you are very rich.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 6:57:22 PM UTC
BTW Daniele Pace your restaurants in Rome are bang on! I recall you sent me to 2 perfect places, one trattoria (with K.) one pizzeria.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 8:22:55 PM UTC
El ghani biekfe 7alo (Eizeho 3asher Same7 Bi7alko)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 10:40:06 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou Indeed, but that's an added dimension.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 6:03:09 PM UTC
Indeed look at that Moron!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 6:04:52 PM UTC
Daniele Pace The pizzeria was off Via del Corso on the left as you head North you drove me there and introduced me to the manager.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 7:38:39 PM UTC
Let me check my American Express from... then
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 7:40:19 PM UTC
Daniele Pace Indeed Gusto! I went back last year and loved their truffle pizza. For 9 euros it was probably not the real black truffle but 10X better than the real truffle pizza I had in Milan later.
The uncanny resides in the resemblance, not the difference.
So I finally figured out why I am gripped with so much revulsion at BS vendors dressed in the garb of high priest of scientists, intellectuals, or logicians, (say Pinker or Shermer or Harris or some scientist under Monsanto's control), to the point of total maddening anger, and why I do not experience any disgust when I see a fortune teller, a market commentator, or some new age meditation guru such as Deepak Chopra.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 9:29:12 PM UTC
I didn't know, 20 years ago.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 9:29:40 PM UTC
?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 9:34:33 PM UTC
Minotaur
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 10:01:06 PM UTC
Didn't know nothing about this!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 10:28:44 PM UTC
Wittgenstein!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 10:30:29 PM UTC
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 10:58:41 PM UTC
The idea is that I know is wrong to stay wrong, but what is right should correct itself. Incidentally the only errors I've spotted so far is mistaking Pinker and Dawkins for legit scientists as I didn't know much about evolution then.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 11:02:25 PM UTC
Critically, when you do math, you know it can't be internally wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 11:30:32 PM UTC
Helga Vierich Exactly Helga, description is never statistics, hence never science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 12:16:35 AM UTC
He is not a scientist. "some peer reviewed" is resumé work. He has no citations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 11:37:45 AM UTC
This is the kind of sneaky BS (BTW Pinker using deranged bloggers rather than formal statistical channels). Fact:Pinker is making a quantitative claim. When I catch him, he says: "I didn't really mean it". Bullshitter! http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict-peace
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 16, 2016 12:33:43 PM UTC
These are too anecdotal, not really declines. Under fat tails, that is.
"People of high intelligence are ethical. We find fewer intelligent people among criminals."
Spot the nonsense in the sentence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 15, 2016 6:43:45 PM UTC
Note that I am not saying that the first part is true or false, only that the 2nd doesn't support the first.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 4:21:58 PM UTC
Footnote: John Gray said that visits to Isaiah Berlin entailed a five minutes conversation about real things, and five uninterrupted hours of gossip. And Malraux was repelled by literary salons as all Henry de Montherland talked about was royalties.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 4:30:21 PM UTC
Whose?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 4:37:20 PM UTC
I meant whose book?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 4:52:08 PM UTC
See my review... I think I compared it to a book by a plumber.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 8, 2016 1:46:16 PM UTC
Exactly, Tahir Chad. They have upside from it that is not the real one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 4, 2016 11:12:51 PM UTC
Where this gets bad is when journos start judging science, like "String theory is not empirical" etc.
"How do your books differ from those of [X]?".
Me: "I don't know I don't often read contemporary authors, and odds are I will never read "X".
She: "But you are writing books for an audience, no? You are responsible to tell the audience how you compare to others."
Me: "Do you have a boyfriend?"
She: "Yes, he is here."
Me: "Did you ask him how he compares in bed to other men at the party or is it something you found out by yourself?"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 3, 2016 7:18:08 PM UTC
John Smith You are a total imbecile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 3, 2016 9:47:45 PM UTC
Actually the truth is that I had a friendly face and conversation continued as upon a minor joke ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 3, 2016 11:20:23 PM UTC
"Are you working on another book"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 4, 2016 12:43:37 AM UTC
I zap SJW
Anyway wrote only 2 Op-Eds in 2015: NYT and WSJ. The rule is to stay below 3.
http://graphics.wsj.com/image-grid/what-to-expect-in-2016/1672/nassim-nicholas-taleb-on-the-real-financial-risks-of-2016
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 2, 2016 3:13:45 AM UTC
I did not predict nothing. I just pointed out fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 2, 2016 10:45:09 AM UTC
I picked Dubai because it was indierect and not obvious
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 2, 2016 3:50:06 PM UTC
Look at 2009 and you will see the difference.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 2, 2016 3:50:19 PM UTC
Aatif Ahmad Bingo Aatif Ahmad
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 2, 2016 5:56:45 PM UTC
The idea is bimodal; deflation/hyperinflation, almost no inflation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 5, 2016 6:55:28 PM UTC
You are right. We put this as it was totally overwhelmed with finance people.
Science Wins! In the months that it took us to publish this our paper was under the scrutiny of professional probabilists and statisticians who deal with Extreme Events, whose comments we collected and incorporated while Pinker and his goons were active in the press, on blogs and social media spreading stawman-clueless commentary.
Happy Science. Happy 2016!
PS- More generally I have to describe the "Pinker fallacy" under fat tails. His claim is sort of, to put it in statistical or scientific terms: "Violence has dropped by .00001 standard deviations. Let us explain WHY."
PPS- Confirms my idea that, in science, a single comment by a mathematician can outweigh those by a billion BS vendors.
Our paper is here:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04722.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 1, 2016 3:16:29 PM UTC
It was out top choice journal because read by people who work with fat tails. Some schmuck was looking at "impact factor" (Stat journals are a smaller community than biology). It is about the highest. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_venues&vq=statistics
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 1, 2016 4:03:01 PM UTC
The blogger is a banker with random web trolling behavior.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 1, 2016 4:07:28 PM UTC
Hi see the "mathematical formulation of (anti)fragility" link on http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 1, 2016 2:58:05 PM UTC
Can I see the algo? Something I don't understand.
I wish you all a wonderful 2016 full of precaution, thrills, and the honor of taking personal risk for the right cause.
P.S. OK, OK, I add (some) deadlifting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 31, 2015 5:59:20 PM UTC
Not this year...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 31, 2015 5:59:39 PM UTC
OK, OK and I add deadlifting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 31, 2015 6:00:34 PM UTC
OK, OK, I add some deadlifting
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 31, 2015 6:14:29 PM UTC
No no no no no no. Almost never encountered in nature. Messes up rotator cuffs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 1, 2016 8:38:56 PM UTC
I tried to do Kettlebells. I have a heavy one in my office. Don't feel the same bang as I do after heavy lifts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 1, 2016 8:39:19 PM UTC
Or a set of 5 deadlifts / Presses (sandup_
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 3, 2016 4:07:49 PM UTC
Yes but more frequently and with lower weights than deadlifts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 4:10:51 PM UTC
We got rid of trolls. The Ukrainian bot.
I learned while formalizing things in the "Dynamic Hedging" days that once, for the purpose of arbitrage, you write down things formally as a "payoff" with the precision of a legal contract, all the BS goes away.
(I am ignoring the theological flaw in Pascal's wager (worship without skin in the game) for the purpose of analysis. The idea is that it is free to believe in God and should he exist there is a big reward. The point here is not the theology of Pascal's wager (which we know is flawed) but the conflation of upside contigent payoffs with downside ruin.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 2:41:54 PM UTC
The point here is not the theology of Pascal's wager (which we know is flawed) but the conflation of upside calls with downside absorbing barrier.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 2:47:51 PM UTC
"No worship without sacrifice" is another discussion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 8:00:06 PM UTC
A jewel in the folder: the Ukrainian bot caught a GMO troll who apparently manages a Wendy store, calling a mathematician "an idiot" over a mathematical text.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 9:38:24 PM UTC
Let me repeat. Pascal's wager here is NOT a theological argument. It is about making a decision that costs you nothing and has a big upside, in other words a free or cheap option. We call it "Pascal's wager" AFTER the argument; it is just a name. Kapish?
Friends, I promised to deliver in the next few hours a discussion of the most neglected fragilities and the most overestimated risks. We can tell fragility when we see it... but we first need to look at it.
I won't say for now what I came up with but would love for you to contribute suggestions. Don't be shy, don't be afraid to be out there, but please observe salon rules. And, for Baal's sake, let's all be brief.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 1:41:36 AM UTC
Thanks all so far! Sorry I can't "like" to favor any argument this time. This place is great for letting ideas emerge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 3:48:21 PM UTC
Here is mine (sorry for length, but I wrote this independently for a pub):First, worry less about the banking system. Unlike in the past, when systemic fragility would express itself mainly with strain on banks, financial institutions today are less fragile. This isn’t because they got better at understanding risk (they didn’t) but simply because, since 2009, banks have been shedding their exposures to “tail events” (that is, extreme ones). Hedge funds, much more adept at risk taking, have taken the function (as reinsurers of sorts). Furthermore, hedge funds are less prone to the risk-hiding moral hazard we have seen with banks, since their owners have skin in the game, unlike bankers who bear no downside risks.
This is not to say that the financial system has healed: monetary policy made itself ineffective with the low-interest rate policy and the fact that it was relied upon as cure rather than transitory painkiller. Zero interest rates turns monetary policy into a massive weapon that has no ammunition. And there is pressure to reverse some of the rate cuts as there is no evidence that “zero” interest rates are better than, say, 2 or 3 pct., and the Federal Reserve may be realizing it.
I worry about asset values that have swelled in response to easy money, with no more upside for them and plenty of downside. Low interest rates invite speculation in yielding assets such as junk bonds, real estate and emerging market securities. Those are disproportionally fragile: the effect of tightening of 1994 was disproportionally felt with Italian, Mexican and Thai securities. The rule is : whatever has micro-Ponzi attributes (i.e., need to borrow to repay) will be hit.
Second, If “another Lehman Brothers” isn’t likely to happen with banks, it is very likely to happen with commodity firms and countries that depend directly and indirectly on commodity prices. Dubai is more threatened by oil prices than ISIL. Commodity people have been shouting that “we hit bottom”, leading me to believe that the uncle points (liquidations of inventory) have not been reached yet. While prone to short term squeezes in both directions, long term agricultural commodity prices might be further threatened –even more than oil –by the unexpected improvement in the storage of solar energy, which would eventually prompt some governments to come to their wits and cancel the ethanol program as a mandatory use of land for “clean” energy.
Fourth, it is in the physical world that we may need to worry. Terrorism is under control –epidemics such as Ebola are patently not. The most worrisome fact of 2015 was the reaction to the threat of Ebola, by the press playing naive empiricism, confusing a multiplicative disease with a regular one, and shaming people for overreacting to the threat. Cancer rates cannot quadruple from one month to the next; epidemics can. The state department staff, untrained to think in terms of tail risks, unheeded calls to close airports in Africa and stifle the disease at the source, before it multiplies. We are clearly unprepared to deal with such pandemics.
Finally, many are aware that the increased climate volatility will produce some nonlinear effects, which compound in an interconnected world –interconnectedness makes disruptions more acute. But few worry about the specific threat to the electric grid with something vastly more consequential than what we saw with the East Coast blackout of August 2003.
1) It looks like PR promoters/smear campaigners are so dumb that they don't know that we know that they are dumb.
2) Calling GMOs "transgenics" (moving genes from one organism to a different one) better reflects their nature as genetic modification is too vague a designation.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 27, 2015 4:00:59 PM UTC
Have you ever seen an intelligent street prostitute? The intelligent ones work in salons.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 27, 2015 4:17:14 PM UTC
Marc Milanini Indeed and the upside is small: the highest one can get to is the Clintons... Typically the real rich politicians are those who start rich.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 27, 2015 4:17:53 PM UTC
Donno. I wanted to add a picture and found I haven't use the swan pic in years.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 27, 2015 8:41:38 PM UTC
All these are less terminal. Perhaps pandemics but they are not being marketed by Monsanto under the name "Science"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 28, 2015 2:56:58 PM UTC
You know it is a distance metric
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 28, 2015 7:38:36 PM UTC
You don't see that refuse a technology (transgenics) doesn't impies accepting others (nontransgenics). Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 28, 2015 9:08:46 PM UTC
We shd open up a Kashrut discussion, perhaps a symposium.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/rationality.pdf
BTW remamed the book: Skin in the Game: The Logic of Risk Taking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 24, 2015 7:52:31 PM UTC
Sorry to barge in, but the infinities do not cancel out. Unless you make the left tail exponential.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 24, 2015 7:52:44 PM UTC
In other words one-sided compactness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 25, 2015 4:26:25 PM UTC
Hi, I like risk-taking because "risk" is usually associated with dry risk analysis. Risk-taking here is decision making under uncertainty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 26, 2015 7:21:25 PM UTC
Aman in Levantine street slang means I give up (comes from Greek and Turkish music with "aman aman")
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 27, 2015 12:11:03 PM UTC
Altan Turkmenoglu Is it the same in Turkish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 27, 2015 12:41:52 PM UTC
Altan Turkmenoglu Thanks!
---
Note: Without a state of mind, a book never survives. Also note that *almost* no book from 15 years ago has survived.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 23, 2015 5:02:59 PM UTC
Chris Bourne So far FBR is 15 y.o and stable. Any comment?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 23, 2015 10:44:22 PM UTC
I think Kundera is one of the rare living authors who has a state of mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 24, 2015 1:39:55 AM UTC
Greg Ballard Not Eco. He shows off a bit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 24, 2015 1:40:41 AM UTC
In addition to Kundera, Graham Greene, Patrick Modiano and someone believed to be less literary, Simenon, have a state of Mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 24, 2015 4:20:03 PM UTC
Greg Ballard Fughutaboudhim!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 2:29:25 PM UTC
Is it easy to read?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 2:29:50 PM UTC
principal. From root rosh.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 3:19:01 PM UTC
Please explain why you are writing this here with respect to this post.
Start a casino.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 6:30:44 PM UTC
2nd best answer!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 6:35:58 PM UTC
Huge mistake, Daniel Dimitrov.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 7:09:07 PM UTC
Daniel Dimitrov your hedge is LLN.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 7:29:15 PM UTC
they are NOT naked puts, they are bounded and LLN is law of large numbers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 1:26:02 AM UTC
Don't fughet that payoffs for casinos are gaussian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 12:06:23 PM UTC
A+
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 2:31:40 PM UTC
BTW who you? Now we know you are a female. More info?
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/FatTailedpapers2015.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 8:47:42 PM UTC
They spam you.
Ironically these technical matches revealed themselves through arguments during fights in my antiBS crusades (such as the Pinker-BS problem). Social life (physical, that is) is too harmonious, too devoid of fights and arguments for some skills to be made apparent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 3:00:49 PM UTC
That too!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 3:01:55 PM UTC
I am excluding the personal friendships made from social media. This is just for professional collaboration.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 20, 2015 4:25:50 PM UTC
"We're not all famous authors". This is a type of smart ass easy comment only a bitter loser makes. In addition, it has a logical fallacy. Did it hit you that I have only been a "famous author" part of my life? The point made above specifies "only when strictly necessary" (meaning "if you have an inflexible job the point doesn't apply to you") so commenting as if the clause wasn't made is profoundly dishonest intellectually.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 2:01:46 AM UTC
The point that is "unless strictly necessary". So please don't spin about situations where it is strictly necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 21, 2015 3:19:50 PM UTC
Interesting. I almost never take notes.
(Advice to a young adult who wants to become personally free, financially independent, and freely pursue his interests).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 19, 2015 3:39:03 PM UTC
The point is who cares and if you care you wont get the f***you money.
The ancients understood how both courage and prudence were virtues, and how there was no incompatibility between the two --simply they didn't apply to the same domain. (More on that, soon).
The "verbalistic" takes over rather quickly. Many people don't nuance risk properly, especially when educated: they conflate it with variations and think that *exposure to ruin* and *risk taking* belong to the same category. They are not the same animal. Concave is not convex, fragile is not antifragile; fat tails are not thin tails, etc.
What I just wrote seems trivial, but if you take a look at the not yet dismissed "scholarly" but in fact verbalistic and verbose literature (Cass Susstein-style, particularly about "nudging"), it seems largely resting on ill-defined terms and conflated concepts. We keep seeing bigwigs conflating Ebola with falling from ladders, GMOs with agriculture, etc., leading to misdefinition of rationality.
Just a brief stop for some clarity. Have a nice weekend.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 18, 2015 7:15:21 PM UTC
Nudging you into actions that increase tail risk because they think your fears are "irrational".
Indeed, one can generalize and define a community as a space within which many rules of competition and hierarchy are lifted, where the collective prevails over one's interest. Of course there will be tension with the outside, but that's another discussion. This idea of competition lifted within a group or a tribe was the idea of the late Elenor Ostrom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 18, 2015 12:24:16 PM UTC
Nobody is talking about performance. This is SOCIAL life and friendship. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 14, 2015 9:28:05 AM UTC
Yes this is the future!
I swallow my reluctance to TED and TEDx to show this wonderful message on how fake grassroots are built on social media and...how easy it is to spot!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 8:29:27 PM UTC
Anything with skeptic in the title seems to be there to serve some shilling/Astroturfing as they call skepticism "pseudoscience".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 8:29:46 PM UTC
Many.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 8:30:30 PM UTC
EBM has been hijacked by confirmation problems masquerading as "evidence".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 8:32:32 PM UTC
Our paper is not published yet. We are slowing down. I understand wiki. I do not want wiki to post stuff unpublished.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 8:36:10 PM UTC
You can tell the Astroturfers who jumped on this page with comments trying to discredit her, using "antivaxxer" which seems to be a way to discredit someone, and other words about "science" etc. Same people we are used to.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 8:37:03 PM UTC
Also I can tell from the intelligence/independence of the comments the person is an Astroturfer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 9:09:57 PM UTC
We got rid of about 20 people, largely using a canned vocabulary of "antiscience" from "antiwaxxer" etc. Looks like the danger to us is that people spread the view that *science is a closed problem*. It is not just that an individual, by being skeptical of some methods, has to suffer in his reputation, but science itself in the popular minds appears to people to correspond to some consensus which is the opposite: science is not religion, it is doubting the authority of experts, it is never an answer but a method, and the Astrobullshit are removing the point from the popular mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 9:11:20 PM UTC
I prefer that our paper stays unreferenced there until it is final, because it is undergoing a big revision.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 9:20:57 PM UTC
Joshua Miller It looks like the same PR firms handle GMOs and other products s.a. vaccines and innocent activists (too stupid to know what science means) have now merged them in their minds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 9:43:07 PM UTC
Alisha Johns Sorry we have type 2 error. What was your post about?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 9:45:07 PM UTC
Please note all those we block aren't necessarily shills. They could be commenting in a way not compatible with the critical thinking and logical reasoning required to improve thought.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 10:26:53 PM UTC
Alisha Johns May I ask why you are here under 2 names?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 10:39:07 PM UTC
Paul Wehage He meant "fiance" not "finance's" account. Should be OK, Alisha Johns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 10:40:10 PM UTC
Joshua Miller "Rationalists" are even worse than shills and highly irrational, closed-minded idiots.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 10:57:07 PM UTC
Explain the ad verecundiam cliché.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 10:58:57 PM UTC
Paul Wehage scientific papers work well on wiki as people end up reading them and the description has to conform to the contenct. So the rebuttals will be represented, so will be our counter-rebuttals.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 11:02:59 PM UTC
Jim Goldsworthy Sorry, but once I deem a person or a group of like-minded persons produce logical deficiencies, --in other words, what I call "idiots" or "fucking idiots", they are no longer welcome on this page and in my world in general. The world is a democracy, but intellectual life has minimum standards of reasoning and we close academies and groups as requiring a minimum level... Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 11:25:33 PM UTC
Joshua Miller I agree certitude is necessary in some purely inductive framework and some negative empiricism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 14, 2015 12:58:59 PM UTC
You make no sense logically. Skepticism of skepticism does not operate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 14, 2015 1:00:36 PM UTC
In this case it is not a fallacy since she is offering skepticism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 14, 2015 2:00:00 PM UTC
What you wrote is plain bullshit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 14, 2015 2:13:26 PM UTC
She is describing how people like her who oppose powers get persecuted and harrassed and you are trying to play it down as info. Plus they set up sites that find whatever unsavory in someone's background and exaggerate the importance and consequences: the info is actually good since they did not find worse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 14, 2015 2:22:36 PM UTC
Thomas Cole Hamel Great!
When we look at the world from the tails, things are simple and different. How your grandmother and Paul Embrechts (one of the greatest experts on Extreme Deviations) have the same approach to multiplicative tail risks.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/ICBI-short.m4a
Background: I spent a month proving a theorem until I found out that someone else proved it 33 years ago (unnoticed). But my proof went through a lemma that more useful than the Gini result as it applies to ordered sums.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/GINI-1.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 10:32:08 PM UTC
Yes, why?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 10:35:38 PM UTC
Their measures are not measures. In science you don't find inequality then measure...later. Picketty needs to rewrite his book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 12:43:15 AM UTC
Anna, I really don't know. All I know is that the measure they use is not reliable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 13, 2015 1:32:57 PM UTC
If you read the paper you will see it is NOT about Picketty but all measurements of GINI.
Fughedabout the "victim" business. And it is not about enemies building you up, that's not the point. There a *real thrill* feeling that you are risking something for your ideas. The more risk, the more skin-in-the-game, the more thrill.
The more they attack you, the more skin-in-the-game, the more you feel honorable. I cannot describe the sentiment: all I can say is that it is the exact opposite of shame.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 2:45:17 PM UTC
The point is not that the ideas get stronger; it is that YOU feel you are honorable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 3:08:58 PM UTC
Daniele Pace my friend! Good to hear from you. But your statement contains a fallacy, if I may. Fighting for the truth => gives you enemies doesn't mean all what gives you enemies is fighting for the truth. Hope to break bread sometimes in Rome, 11 years later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 3:10:11 PM UTC
Edited in response to edit: I act as asshole with frauds, doesn't mean I act as asshole to "people". Simply most have a tendency to be asshole down nice up, when being tough with the powerful is what matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 3:45:18 PM UTC
By some strange coincidence, Ralph Nader is also Lebanese Greek Orthodox.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 4:22:15 PM UTC
Miłosz Ślepowroński He self published Nedra's proverbs I think. With commentary, unfortunately.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 4:23:40 PM UTC
Daniele Pace is the greatest expert on Italian restaurants that I know. In spite of my obsession with logic, I'd rather commit a logical fallacy than miss a meal with him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 4:47:51 PM UTC
These is a Lebanese expression: "stubborn like a Rum" (Greek Orthodox) or "stubborn like an Amiouni".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 5:14:34 PM UTC
Jaime Marun Not him. It is not a last name, but a first name meaning "rare", probably an ancestor's first name.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 5:15:22 PM UTC
Interesting... It made waves...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 5:39:33 PM UTC
Sorry it means "he who made a Vow" in Aramaic. Same as Hebrew Neder.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 8:32:26 PM UTC
I thank Stan Yurin as the "Ukrainian bot" is sophisticated enough to catch almost all trolls/harassment people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 9:10:15 PM UTC
Georges El Ojaimi wel mwarne lal 5warne.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 9:25:24 PM UTC
David Malcolm Smith I can override the bot if you want to play with him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 10:04:05 PM UTC
Incidentally I was just send this. "Sponsored" meaning someone is paying for it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 10:08:54 PM UTC
No fight. I publish papers, that's it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 10:10:35 PM UTC
Ivo Oo Not even Ivo. These are schoolteachers at best, with a lot of lower level rejects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 12, 2015 10:14:45 PM UTC
Doesn't matter much Jerry Msu. I need no job, no clients, no nothing. They can't remove my academic CV which is all that matters. And eventually I can get big bucks from them if they make a few unavoidable mistakes. You want them to play dirty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 14, 2015 2:38:18 PM UTC
He will keep his promise and may deliver.
People get rigorous arguments; trying to repress truth and logic is like trying to keep a balloon under water, or Fat Tony away from the fridge.
Looks like a combination of persistence and ... f*** you money (which I repeat is is not about money but the moral attitude towards bullying authorities) works.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/supreme-court-of-philippines-confirms-genetically-modified-gm-eggplant-ban/5495025
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 10, 2015 10:55:10 PM UTC
Just to let you know that our Ukrainian bot may have false positives.
PS- Was told I was a target because I wasn't some anti-vaccine luddite, but a statistician.
PPS- This is where f***-you money can be put to use.
http://gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/16581
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 8, 2015 3:54:16 PM UTC
Just to let you know there is a bot that shoots mosquitoes from the Ukraine. It may have false negatives, in which case please let us know.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 8, 2015 5:28:17 PM UTC
PS- Was told I was a target because I wasn't some anti-vaccine luddite, but a statistician.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 8, 2015 10:33:29 PM UTC
I am not talking about the Ukraine but the filter here that detects and removes trolls.
Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 9:45:59 PM UTC
Looks like we are there. Batteries are getting cheaper/denser, panels are getting smarter, more sensitive and smaller. There is a huge appeal for free driving. Possibly we could have separate panels (stationary) or are already there ... The reason I am saying this is because last month in Moscow, the taxi was a... Tesla! He explained that it cost only $1 a day (donno how much electricity in Moscow comes from fossil fuel).
No belt, no straps, no gloves, no BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:33:51 PM UTC
Only lasts a few seconds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:35:03 PM UTC
Added no belts no straps no gloves, no BS. Not even chalk (not allowed in gym). Many are worried about "back". Back is harmed by ABSENCE of such stressor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:37:34 PM UTC
Mat Hieu Never benchpress. Not natural, stresses rotator cuff. I do presses.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:47:59 PM UTC
The "scientific evidence" isn't "evidence". A lot of BS passes for evidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:52:52 PM UTC
Nobody worries that "barefoot" is not scientific. And I know firsthand that I am more stable barefoot.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:53:32 PM UTC
Stefano Giustini Clean and press
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:54:29 PM UTC
Let's put it: it is cheating the least. And I use stones but none at gym.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 1:33:52 PM UTC
Henri Hansen Makes sense: in nature you lift from the ground before putting overhead
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 1:36:19 PM UTC
I punch statues of evil lobbyists...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 1:54:19 PM UTC
Tej Swatch Visibly because you've never seen me... absence of evidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 3:17:51 PM UTC
Hi Daniel I fondly remember these days... Are you in contact with Mozitis?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 9:09:56 PM UTC
I am tired of people telling me "protect your back", "watch your form", etc. Visibly my form developed through injuries that have guided me through this, over time (my body remembered the injuries) not some "balance". And a slight imbalance makes the workout less symmetric, more natural. Where is Ido Portal when you need him?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 10:24:01 PM UTC
I had a sciatica injury 5 years ago. Cured by weightlifting.
Two young (motivated) friends have started a project to Uberize medicine and medical information, removing noise from medical search. I am running with them a (sort of) symposium here on the idea.
Please comment. Be tough, unrelentlessly inquisitive.
The project is very important *if* it allows the right transparency without interference from the big corporations. As you recall from the New York Times files, we have evidence that Monsanto discussed with a shill (Folta) the manipulation of entries on WebMD. Will access to multiple sources protect us?
So please ask them such questions as 1) how this system ensures independence, 2) whether they have the right filters, 3) what you like or don't like about it, etc.
Anything that bypasses the middleman is good for us, if done properly.
MedNexus
http://www.mednexus.io
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 5, 2015 1:24:19 PM UTC
Spyros Makridakis debunked the problem of high blood pressure. He is a Firrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrst rate statistician.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 6, 2015 6:34:42 AM UTC
Kevin Folta (who collaborated with Monsanto to manipulate WebMD) has tried to post here. The Bot might be throwing him out so here are his comments and the NYT report on his activities (correspondence with Monsanto on the attempt to manipulate WebMD).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 6, 2015 6:37:00 AM UTC
The Bot tends to throw out people connected to GMO propaganda /and trolls from Ketchum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 6, 2015 6:37:49 AM UTC
We can't let the Bot have exceptions as they have tried to post close to 2000 comments here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 6, 2015 6:39:29 AM UTC
So, Folta, all I can say is go to twitter which is public or send message and we will post here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 6, 2015 3:31:37 PM UTC
We got a more polite letter (less impolite) from Mr Folta saying he is not a shill. However he fails to provide convincing arguments --all we know is that 1) He collaborates with Monsanto to manipulate public opinion on GMOs and advises them in their anti-labeling and other strategies (that is helping lobbying groups, an insult to democracy), 2) He and his university receive funds from Monsanto, 3) He has denied the association including the funds (that is commonly known as "lying"), 4) He has reviled scientists opposed to GMOs (very harshly), 5) He may not have made any WebMD entries but has discussed the point with Monsanto and did not reject the idea, 6) He gave the argument that he only cites peer-review (which is necessary and highly insufficient which is the problem: I can dig out peer-reviews of anything). So as a professional statistician, all I can say is that the joint probability of Folta being a shill is so high it is not even funny. And he (or someone else) using a group to smear-campaign me will not change my opinion. Further, at an intellectual level, I truly despise the man. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/06/us/document-folta.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 6, 2015 3:44:38 PM UTC
LEtter says: Nassim,
I never posted any information on WebMD. If I did, it would have been evidence-based from the peer reviewed literature and completely appropriate. However, I did not.
My note to Lisa Drake clearly states that it is not a priority, and I never did it.
Your claims of "manipulation" are not true. Your "shill" claims have no merit, as no company has ever influenced my messaging. Comments are based on a 28 year public science career and understanding of the peer-reviewed literature.
I would appreciate an immediate correction please. Thank you.
Kevin
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 6, 2015 4:07:43 PM UTC
Stephen Coda Can't tell you why and how but it works. Thinks in conditional probability, use of language, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 12:51:39 PM UTC
Cj Karoly Who are you bullshitting? Why did he hide the relationship with Monsanto? Why did he lie? And Monsanto has indirect support to his university. And can't trust what he says since he lied or misrepresented in many instances.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 7, 2015 9:30:18 PM UTC
Some trolls here are posting the sophistry that NYU (where I am part time) has another prof getting funds from Monsanto. But I am Not defending Monsanto nor does he seem to engage in promoting and manipulating the public in favor of Monsato.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 8, 2015 8:55:11 AM UTC
Someone trying to DENY a relationship between Folta and Monsanto? Go troll elsewhere.
Let us examine the implications. The unpopular one is that 1) integration of heterogeneous populations is never a good idea (unless neither majority nor minority are not of the stubborn kind); 2) If you are going to start a movement, make it intolerant of nonsense, etc.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 10:47:55 AM UTC
You want your ideas to be intolerant of BS to survive, those of others to not be stubborn.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 11:01:51 AM UTC
where?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 11:02:44 AM UTC
No. Foolish people can do smart things, the reverse isn't true.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 11:49:20 AM UTC
BTW this explains the Wahhabi/Salafi gains thanks to their intolerance ...and the spread of ISIS/Daesh. WITHIN a religion, there can be such a drift.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 1:56:32 PM UTC
Steven Dragicevic Explain
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 1:57:52 PM UTC
Guido Gothenburg Popper!
RE: Ethics
Science cannot survive if PR firms smear scientists on behalf of Big Corps.
Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 30, 2015 9:57:46 PM UTC
no, Ketchum PR
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 1:22:15 AM UTC
The problem is that PR firms are insecure about their reputation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 10:56:46 AM UTC
Among their reputation among corps... If you don't have a good reputation, how can you build one for others?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 12:50:05 PM UTC
Consider smoking. A long uphill battle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 1:27:56 PM UTC
Actually, scientists are fragile, science is not.
Recall from Antifragile and earlier discussions here that a doctor's answer would be different if you put (emotionally speaking) his skin in the game by asking him "what would you do?" instead of "what should I do?"
The opposite works equally well. A trick I did use as a trader: under pressure, to remove the emotional burden and the loss of mental clarity, you imagine that you are someone else in the situation. That someone else should be some precise person, in flesh and blood, say X. What should X do now? buy more? liquidate, etc. It applies to any decision, say "should X buy this house?"
You can use the strategy in a lot of dilemmas. Replace yourself with X, and ask: "should X resign because of ethics?"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 1:01:40 PM UTC
Creates mental clarity. But needs training and effort.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 1:10:22 PM UTC
Michal Kolano in trading a stop-loss in addition to preservation allows you to remove your skin from the game to think about the situation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 1:17:43 PM UTC
Why Talleyrand?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 2:58:40 PM UTC
Michal Kolano You NEED to set up the mechanism BEFORE. Like a plan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 4:16:30 PM UTC
He was shifty. "un tas de merde dans un bas de soie".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 10:15:08 PM UTC
Bingo. Universal rules means removing skin in the game when you have too much of it and putting it where it is missing.
Note that PR is somewhere between benign industrialized hypocrisy and malignant deformation of science and the body of knowledge in society.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 6:36:50 PM UTC
The entire fucking business is unethical and these people are TRAINED to approach you through flattery.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 6:42:14 PM UTC
Any moron who argues that the fellow is polite got to realize that he is PAID and TRAINED to approach people via flattery. PR is industrialized hypocrisy. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 6:49:22 PM UTC
Nathan C. Perry You are hopeless. Try to talk to someone in the mafia to "convince him".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 7:16:58 PM UTC
How do you know Arabic?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 7:44:46 PM UTC
Almost all occupations are honest
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 7:54:01 PM UTC
Si vis pacem parabellum
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 8:30:06 PM UTC
Wrecking not recking
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 8:32:07 PM UTC
The name of the fellow was redacted. And youmare not getting that it is not HIM I am answering but as it is a PR firm messing with smears it is OTHERS I ak showing how to respond.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 8:59:10 PM UTC
I would not do it for a TRILLION dollars, believe me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 8:59:51 PM UTC
Some professions, such as PR and lobbying, are unethical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 9:38:09 PM UTC
Yes, indeed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 9:39:07 PM UTC
There is an ethical form of PR: sending communiqu´s etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 9:39:28 PM UTC
wayno?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 9:40:37 PM UTC
Most people who refuse prostitute themselves for a large amount, say 100K will do so for much larger one and derive a huge satisfaction from it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 9:41:25 PM UTC
I use it in NY all the time from my days with FX traders from Brooklyn
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 10:02:21 PM UTC
No, I meant my answer would still be "fuckoff"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 10:29:21 PM UTC
I got less annoyed by the fellow as I am by those who ask you to be "classy": a loss of scale that reminds me of those who complain that a suicide note has a grammatical mistake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 10:43:54 PM UTC
Sorry for my misspelling
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 11:04:24 PM UTC
try again the system is unstable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 11:06:22 PM UTC
George Filippakis I agree. Let me check the spam folder.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 1:03:11 AM UTC
Saulo Dos Santos Soares If you can't see the link between legal and ethical, you can't post here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 1:04:30 AM UTC
These sites don't exist as all info is there to promote Monsanto.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 2:10:34 AM UTC
In America you can choose your profession. If you elect an unethical one you pay the price. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 29, 2015 12:08:01 PM UTC
Susan, ignore, PR firm in question is sending people here... We detected the same "subtle" arguments by low-intelligence copywriters.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/rational.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 3:29:11 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 3:52:36 PM UTC
This is coming, following chapter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 4:35:56 PM UTC
I agree but Part II corrects the simplification. Money is not as bad as ecocide. I am simplifying the transfer from one to the other.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 4:37:47 PM UTC
I am focusing on simple transfer of Prob measures. BTW Pinelis contacted me to change reference to published one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 4:57:42 PM UTC
Tim Schittekatte Thanks I am trying to avoid watering down this book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 7:50:31 PM UTC
Right but the idea is to take something trivial (and triggers such reactions as "this is trivial" and prove something less so in Part 2 about rationality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 8:41:38 PM UTC
Look up gigerenzer
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 1:21:37 PM UTC
I added a section to the effect that there is worse than losing money, proving the necessity to worry about ecocide.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 6:07:58 PM UTC
Look at new section
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 28, 2015 7:54:54 PM UTC
Typo wrecking not recking...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 30, 2015 2:32:16 PM UTC
Yes but utility theory is less intuitive than the natural conclusion that you can build on its own. And Utility theory is only interesting as it maps to the other coming from different parts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 30, 2015 2:33:09 PM UTC
I will add that the 2 are independent approaches to the same conclusion.
Now our examination of GMO problem is taking us in an interesting territory. The initial work was essentially probabilistic -- since few people understand both probability and fat tails, it was counterintuitive to many "scientists" (most scientists can't even get P-values correctly to understand fat tails).
Luckily there is a huge crowd of computer scientists and mathematicians involved or familiar with the so-called P/NP problem and algorithmic complexity in general. They immediately get that:
1) selective breeding is different from insertion of remote genes from a combinatorial standpoint and how nature has to tinker in close, not remote space (genes from vicinity without going very far) to ensure stability
2) understanding the impact on a high dimensional environment of trangenics/GMOs is not possible
also not covered here, that genetics are neat to impress people with science but we will have a hard time understanding how things interact, and so long as P !=NP we will NEVER get things through genetics that we can check via experience and long term testing.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/PPAlgo2.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 9:18:22 PM UTC
Yes sex guarantees a slow growth which lowers risks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 10:25:35 PM UTC
This answers the mutagenics question. Why is mutagenics less bad than transgenics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 26, 2015 3:21:50 PM UTC
Typo in text
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 26, 2015 3:26:22 PM UTC
Wrote transgenics in place of mutagenics
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 11:58:49 AM UTC
Hahaha I can't believe people are arguing about polls... here!
interpretations; it ends in splintering schools and uncontrollable infighting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 10:10:57 AM UTC
Simply, the more literal, the more contradictions and the more subsequent patching and infighting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 10:29:44 AM UTC
OK, off the hook.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 10:43:34 AM UTC
Limit interdicts to narrow areas. Barbell.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 10:45:31 AM UTC
Anurup Kedia Smart ass they don't say the same. Mine says it will splinter and self-destruct
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 12:58:49 PM UTC
That's the barbell. Risk lowering rigidity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 12:59:19 PM UTC
BTW here is a technical version of barbell http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.7647.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 1:22:09 PM UTC
ONLY, Only if you bound the left tail.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 27, 2015 11:08:04 AM UTC
It was as in the Levant ethnic differences transformed into religious minute points: Catholic-Protestant (Irish vs English), Orthodox-Maronite (Greek vs Syriac), Shiite-Sunni (Persan-Levantine vs Desert Arab), etc.
or
HOW TO NOT BE A CHARLATAN
(revision of earlier discussion)
You can attack what a person *said* or what the person *meant*. The former is more sensational. The mark of a charlatan is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on *some* of his/her specific statement ("look at what he said") rather than attacking his position ("look at what he means" or, more broadly, "look at what he stands for"), the latter of which requires a broader knowledge of the proposed idea. Note that the same applies to the interpretation of religious texts.
Given that it is impossible for anyone to write a perfectly rationally argued document without a segment that, out of context, can be transformed by some dishonest copywriter to appear totally absurd and lend itself to sensationalization, politicians and charlatans hunt for these segments. "Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung" goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand, a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror, and others.
I take any violation by an intellectual as a disqualification, some type of disbarment --same as stealing is a disbarment in commercial life. It is actually a violation of journalistic ethics, but not enforced outside of main fact-checking newspapers.[Note 1]
Take for instance the great Karl Popper: he always started with an unerring representation of the opponents positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceededing to systematically destroy them. Or take Hayek's diatribes "contra" Keynes and Cambridge: at no point there is a single line misrepresenting Keynes or an overt attempt at sensationalizing*. [**I have to say that it helped that people were too intimidated by Keynes' intellect to trigger his ire.]
Read Aquinas, written 8 centuries ago, and you always see sections with QUESTIO->PRAETERIA, OBJECTIONES, SED CONTRA, etc. describing with a legalistic precision the positions being challenged and looking for a flaw in them and a compromise. That was the practice by intellectuals.
Twitter lends itself to these sensationalized framing: someone can extract the most likely to appear absurd and violating the principle of charity. So we get a progressive debasing of intellectual life with the rise of the media, needing some sort of policing.
Note the associated reliance of *straw man* arguments by which one not only extracts a comment but *also* provides an interpretation, promoting misinterpretation. I consider *straw man* no different from theft.
COMMENTS
I just subjected the *principle of charity* as presented in philosopy to the Lindy test: it is only about 60 years old. Why? Does it meant that it is transitory? Well, we did not need it explicitly before before discussions were never about slogans and snapshots but synthesis of a given position.
An answer came as follows. Bradford Tuckfield (earlier post) wrote: " I think this principle is much older than 60 years. Consider in the book of Isaiah, chapter 29, verse 21: he denounces the wicked who "make a man an offender for a word," implying that people were focusing on specific words rather than positions, and that this is a bad practice."
So it seems that the Lindy effect wins. In fact as with other things, if the principle of charity had to become a principle, it is because an old practice had to have been abandoned.
Thanks Predag Brajovic for the Richelieu story.
[Note 1: Journos seem to make the mistake but freak out when caught --they have fragile reputations and tenuous careers. I was misinterpreted in my positions on climate change in a discussion with David Cameron in 2009 (presenting them backwards) and when I complained, the editors were defensive and very apologetic, the journos went crazy when I called them "unethical", some begged me to retract my accusation.]
[Note 2: In my experience, the "neuroscientist" Sam Harris who fits the characterization of a perfect charlatan, has recourse to spreading what people say.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 12:26:09 PM UTC
I discovered that Roman jurisprudence was built along these lines, tinkering with ideas like engineering, which influenced Talmudic methods.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 1:20:05 PM UTC
Ad Hominem is not a fallacy if it disqualifies discutants; it is a fallacy when discussing some class of texts. This pyramid is not rigorous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 2:56:03 PM UTC
Yes ignore this MBA simplification as it makes the idiot produce more errors. These pyramids are destructive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 4:38:08 PM UTC
Actually I find this pyramid bullshit. Only one thing count: refuting the central point. Everything else becomes nitpicking distraction from central point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 4:52:25 PM UTC
Let me cite it and credit you!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 5:12:52 PM UTC
In the Bulletin du bibliophile, Volume 6 (1843), page 12, the phrase is attributed to Voltaire, not Richelieu.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 5:18:59 PM UTC
Actually a cop during the revolution https://books.google.com/books?id=p3vNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=%22lignes+de+la+main+du+premier+venu%22&source=bl&ots=VTpl3PSunl&sig=TyAueeuMSirSrtME0iLCjdoz9OY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilsObQxKTJAhWCJx4KHVHcBkEQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22lignes%20de%20la%20main%20du%20premier%20venu%22&f=false
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 5:24:44 PM UTC
This too... all over the map.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 22, 2015 5:26:04 PM UTC
Here it is attributed to Talleyrand https://books.google.com/books?id=OZKWUG0tdJ4C&pg=PA374&dq=%22donnez+moi%22+%22lignes+de+la+main%22+%22le+ferai%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCzf-jxqTJAhWIOj4KHYbiDZUQ6AEIKjAC#v=onepage&q=%22donnez%20moi%22%20%22lignes%20de%20la%20main%22%20%22le%20ferai%22&f=false
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 23, 2015 2:38:04 PM UTC
Jordi you don't seem to read comments preceding yours
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 21, 2015 8:49:34 PM UTC
I need to chip in
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 6:34:08 PM UTC
Loooooooooooove it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 6:38:23 PM UTC
Put it on twitter need to H/T you
http://www.politico.eu/article/the-saudi-wahhabis-are-the-real-foe-islamic-terrorists-salafi-violence/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 16, 2015 9:12:23 PM UTC
Uberized Op-Ed
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 17, 2015 1:05:01 PM UTC
Now 1.6 million. And was written in 6 minutes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 8:23:32 AM UTC
Bullshit.
---
Even worse, the Wahabis have accelerated their brainwashing of East and West Asians with their madrassas, thanks to high oil revenues.
---
So instead of invading Iraq, blowing up Jihadi John and individual terrorists, thus causing a multiplication of these agents, it would have been be easier to focus on the source of all problems: the Wahabi/Salafi education and the promotion of intolerance by which a Shiite or a Yazidi or a Christian are deviant people.
---
If we absolutely need to put people in Guantanamo, it would be far more effective to ship over there the Salafi preachers, Wahabi clerics, not just the people swayed by their teaching. And if we need to correct the profound Saudi problem, we need to start by sending to them OUR preachers, educating them into tolerance, explaining the very concept of the separation of church and state,. Or, better even, encourage Muslim preachers who promote religious tolerance ("laka dinak wa li dini") -- instead of seeing them ostracized.
----
And if you find violence unavoidable, it should be directed at the Saudi and Qatari funders of violence, as well as the Salafi theorists, rather than the young performers.
---
PS Beware the usual ISIS crypto-sympathizer who sort of "explains" (that is, justifies) what happened (intentionally targeting civilians) with some other Western event that can hark all the way to the crusades... Otherwise it is presented as "biased". You can spot such person from a mile away. For them, you cannot condemn ISIS without at the same time trying to be "balanced"? Who are they fooling? This is the technique of bundling problems that can be treated independently and you need to learn to deal with such people by forcing them to discuss the problem of ISIS on its own.
https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/saudi-arabias-curriculum-intolerance#.VWGehE-8PGc
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 6:45:34 PM UTC
Shiites are vastly, vastly more tolerant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 6:58:58 PM UTC
Who are you trying to fool? Unless you define Islam as NON-Salafi.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 7:00:27 PM UTC
People like you can explain everything in terms of conspiracy theory. You deserve to spend time in Guantanamo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 7:04:55 PM UTC
Sanel Minela Karajić I do listen to him (I thought he was in Austria). He is the type of person who could save the situation: laka dinak wa li dini.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 7:06:52 PM UTC
added muslim preachers of tolerance we need to support.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 7:21:37 PM UTC
I am blocking the usual ISIS crypto-sympathizer who explains what happened (intentionally killing civilians) with some other Western event that can go all the way to the crusades... Otherwise it is "biased". You cannot condemn ISIS without at the same time trying to be "balanced"? Who are they fooling? This is the technique of bundling problems that can be treated independently.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 16, 2015 5:28:10 PM UTC
After ~800K readers, thi post was picked up by http://www.politico.eu/article/the-saudi-wahhabis-are-the-real-foe-islamic-terrorists-salafi-violence/
Delenda est Salafi-stan.
(Background: Cato the ancient, for years, kept starting or ending his speeches at the Roman Senate with variations around "Delenda est Cartago", *Carthage must be destroyed*. Until the Roman fleet went and destroyed Carthage, ending its threat.)
---
Comment 1: Since Sep 11 no focus to cut the SOURCE of terrorism: Salafi funding of terror & intolerance in schools (Qatari & Saudi money); ISIS oil.
---
Comment 2: Someone who went to school on Sept 11 in Saudi Arabia, now age 18 is brainwashed by the system to believe that all Shiites, Christians, and other minorities are deviant beings whose death doesn't count.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 1:11:10 PM UTC
(Added a background info with last edit)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 1:47:50 PM UTC
You cut the source. Funding by these people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 2:06:09 PM UTC
Since Sep 11 no focus to cut the SOURCE of terrorism: Salafi funding of terror & intolerance in schools (Qatari & Saudi money); ISIS oil.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 2:32:53 PM UTC
Comment 2: Someone who went to school on Sept 11 in Saudi Arabia, now age 18 is brainwashed by the system to believe that all Shiites, Christians, and other minorities are deviant beings whose death doesn't count.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 2:37:41 PM UTC
Yes, exporting Wahabism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 3:11:25 PM UTC
Umair Itrat Madrassah, preachers, financing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 4:59:37 PM UTC
Here is what you get in KSA https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/saudi-arabias-curriculum-intolerance#.VWGehE-8PGc
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 5:07:09 PM UTC
Stop your BS and look at Wahabi school curriculum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 14, 2015 6:33:53 PM UTC
Ideas here are summarized in new post above.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 17, 2015 10:16:10 AM UTC
No. Cato died in 149 the year they started the siege of Carthage.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/equality.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 13, 2015 2:18:12 PM UTC
Yes he took risks but as in everything if he knows others are coming why take that risk?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 13, 2015 2:32:31 PM UTC
Isn't it in the text?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 13, 2015 2:38:40 PM UTC
من الغرر ما يقع في الشيئ محل العقد ( السلعة التي يتضمنها العقد ، أو ثمن تلك السلعة ) ، فمن الغرر في محل العقد :
الجهل بجنس المحل ، كأن يقول : بعتك سلعة بعشرة ، أو بعتك ما في كمّي بعشرة ، هكذا دون تحديد جنس السلعة المباعة .
الجهل بنوع المحل ، فلو قال شخص لآخر : بعتك حيواناً بكذا ، دون أن يبين نوع هذا الحيوان أهو من الجمال أم الشّاء ، فالبيع فاسد لجهالة النوع .
الجهل بصفة المحل ، منها بيع ما تلده البهيمة ، فالبيع معلّق على ولادة البهيمة ، فإن ولدت لزم المشتري الثمن على أي صفة جاء بها المولود ، وإن لم تلد ، فلا يكون هناك بيع ، لهذا اعتبر هذا البيع ممنوعاً للجهل بصفة المبيع .
الجهل بمقدار المحل ، فلا يصح بيع سلعة مجهولة القدر ، أو بيع سلعة بثمن مجهول القدر .
الجهل بذات المحل ، كبيع ثوب من ثياب مختلفة ، أو بيع شاة من قطيع ، دون تحديد ذات السلعة المباعة .
الجهل بالأجل ، كالبيع بثمن مؤجل إلى أجل غير محدد ، كبيع سلعة بثمن مؤجل إلى أن تلد الناقة ، وفي ذلك غرر ناشئ من تأجيل الثمن إلى أجل مجهول .
عدم القدرة على التسليم ، فلا يصح بيع ما لا يقدر على تسليمه ، كالبعير الشارد الذي لا يعلم مكانه ، أو بيع الدين بالدين ، أو بيع الإنسان ما اشتراه قبل قبضه .
التعاقد على المعدوم ، وفيه قاعدة " أن كل معدوم في الحال ، مجهول الوجود في المستقبل ، لا يجوز بيعه ؛ وأن كل معدوم محقق الوجود في المستقبل ، بحسب العادة ، يجوز بيعه " .
عدم رؤية المحل ، وهو ما يعرف ببيع " العين الغائبة " ، واختلف الفقهاء في جواز بيع العين الغائبة ، فقال بعضهم : لا يجوز مطلقاً ، ولابد من مشاهدة العين المبيعة وقت العقد ؛ وقال الجمهور بجوازها على الصفة ، وأثبتوا حيار الرؤية ، فإن رأى المبيع على غير ما وُصف له ، فله الخيار في إمضاء البيع أو فسخه .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 13, 2015 5:02:30 PM UTC
Some fellow was wondering why I was "selling" my book. Selling is not the problem, asymmetry is. The point is that I am not HIDING something about the book, selling you apples while claiming to be selling a book. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 13, 2015 5:13:29 PM UTC
I don't see it clearly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 13, 2015 7:06:05 PM UTC
I meant the asymmetry rule.
Completed the short chapter
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/skinofothers.pdf
Imagine working for a corporation that produces secret harm to the collective, in hiding cancer-causing risk which kills the thousands but is not (yet) fully visible. You can alert the public, but would automatically lose your job and there is a gamble that the company's evil scientists would disprove you, causing additional humiliation. You know the history of whisteblowers and realize that, even if you end up vindicated, it may take time for the truth to emerge over the noise created by corporate shills. You have nine children, a sick parent, and as a result of the stand, the children's future is compromised. College hopes are gone. You feel severely conflicted between the harm to the collective and guilt from harm to your progeny. Thousands are dying from the hidden poisoining by the corporation. You would like to be a hero but it comes at a huge cost.
Society likes saints and moral heroes to be celibate so they do not have family pressures and be forced into dilemmas of needing to compromise their sense of ethics to feed their children. Some martyrs like Socrates had young children (although he was in his seventies), and overcame the dilemma at their expense. Many can't.
The fact that people with families are vulnerable has been remarkably exploited in history. The Samurai had to leave their families in Edo as hostages, thus guaranteeing to the authorities that they would not take positions against the rulers. The Romans and Huns partook of the practice of trading permanent "visitors", the children of rulers on both sides who grew up at the courts of the foreign nation in a form of gilded captivity. The Ottomans relied on janissaries who were extracted as babies from Christian families and, having no family (or no contact with their family), were entirely devoted to the Sultan.
Etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 2:28:25 PM UTC
Indeed!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 2:45:11 PM UTC
Makes them feel they have more to lose.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 7:40:59 PM UTC
Min inta ya VN?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 9:03:04 PM UTC
Completed chapter https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/skinofothers.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 9:24:22 PM UTC
What is Jauhar?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 9:33:55 PM UTC
Paul Schwartzmeyer, this is the type of compliment I gladly accept.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 11:01:05 PM UTC
"I, Sir, have a family, you know, and was not born "from oak or from rock"—this is again an expression of Homer*—but from human beings, so that I have a family too, and indeed sons, men of Athens, three of them, one already a teenager and two who are children. But nonetheless I will not beg you to acquit me by bringing any of them here."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 11:02:23 PM UTC
Few religions allow celibacy. I don't mean tolerate, but allow. Celibacy was illegal in Rome.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 13, 2015 12:59:41 AM UTC
Guru for me equals fraud. You want to aim be "wise" or a "sage" providing a service, not to be a "guru".
In the more rural past, wealthy people were not as exposed to other persons of their class. They didn't have the pressure to keep up with other wealthy persons and compete with them. The wealthy stayed within their region, surrounded with people who depended on them, say a Lord on his property. Except for the occasional season in the cities, their social life was quite vertical.
It is in mercantile urban environments that socializing within social class took place. And, over time, with industrialization the rich started moving to cities or suburbs surrounded with other people of similar --but not very similar --condition. Hence they needed to keep up with each other, racing on a treadmill.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 10, 2015 5:04:58 PM UTC
No bullshit here please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 10, 2015 5:05:47 PM UTC
Bingo! Status anxiety comes from meeting your peers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 10, 2015 5:26:06 PM UTC
The fellow is rehashing some low-grade libertarian ideas that people are "free to choose" hence relocate, as if it had anything to do with anything in an 18th C. rural setting for a lord. This is the type of imbecilic parrot response you often get from economists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 10, 2015 6:58:59 PM UTC
For school itself. It is a modern concept; people before used to just have tutors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 10, 2015 9:52:44 PM UTC
You need to lie about your net worth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 9:19:53 AM UTC
We just hit on the benefits of decentralization. By vertical socializing, people are more committed downstream.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 12:54:21 PM UTC
Indeed, working on it on a plane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 1:12:36 PM UTC
For a rich person isolated from vertical socializing with the poor, the poor become something entirely theoretical, a textbook reference.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 12, 2015 8:31:53 AM UTC
John Faithful Hamer Especially limousine liberals.
How often matters much more than how much.
Populations in history have tended to eat meat irregularly ( the Greek ate meat only on sacrifice days) but like lions and other hunters/carnivores they gorge on it during these episodes. Orthodox Christians are vegan around 200 days a year, but they feast on fatty meat during feast days.
Having taken a look at the paper I can safely say that the authors missed the point. The report is based on statistical confounders.
Incidentally Monsanto missed the point with the crops that are genetically engineered to produce their own pesticides. As these crops release the pesticides continously, rather than by bursts, they are effective enough to represent a risk to your health, but not enough to harm the pests.
Jensen's inequality, once again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 6, 2015 3:25:01 PM UTC
The "confirm strength of the association" is meaningless. You need to establish convexity of the response BEFORE any establishment of strength as we face many statistical confounders. The report is amateurish, statistically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 6, 2015 3:26:12 PM UTC
Since fasting is never incorporated they miss the larger point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 6, 2015 3:41:38 PM UTC
This comment from the Antifragile days explains it. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/medconvex.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 6, 2015 3:48:46 PM UTC
Not part of the meta-analysis I think
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 7, 2015 7:15:33 AM UTC
No.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 7, 2015 7:17:26 AM UTC
James, they have a web group that detects "GMO", "Monsanto" and goes wild.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 8, 2015 8:01:50 AM UTC
It means splurge on bacon on the occasion.
Life expectancy doesn't tell you how LONG people live.
It mostly tells you how many children fail to survive. So reducing childhood mortality when it is high extends life expectancy much more than efforts aiming at making people live longer. For instance bringing childhood mortality down from 30% to what we have today, close to 0, extends life expectancy by about 25 years --which is the bulk of the gains since the middle ages.
If you want to really measure how long people live, use the expectancy at 40.
For those into these things, this is the perfect illustration of the beautiful concept of ergodicity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 4, 2015 1:46:59 PM UTC
Indeed many people think we live *longer* by 40 years.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 4, 2015 1:47:26 PM UTC
that adds 11 years, not the 50 people boast.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 4, 2015 1:48:54 PM UTC
I mean very learned people have argued with me about LE thinking we've added 45 years!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 4, 2015 5:38:38 PM UTC
In fact if you look at successful people even conditioning by theirr success you would see something similar to what we have today.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 6, 2015 12:16:08 PM UTC
Jay A Lewis The retard/GMO troll didn't get that this is exactly the point I am making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 8, 2015 9:47:54 AM UTC
Many of the problems we are good at curing come from modern life... so, maybe.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 2, 2015 6:18:04 PM UTC
Alex Major The exit story in pol science is... a bit anecdotal.
www.realworldrisk.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 30, 2015 1:36:32 PM UTC
Are you applying to NYU because of my course?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 30, 2015 2:24:51 PM UTC
Friends, let me repeat it. There will be no online version, no online anything. You can't have a worshop online. It is not even fun to do. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 30, 2015 8:55:17 PM UTC
We mostly boast of... attitude problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 31, 2015 5:47:35 AM UTC
Amer Khan in case you've notice we don't market, we just announce.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 2:29:44 PM UTC
Saw no trash so far
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 9:52:41 PM UTC
I am in the very North. Unspoiled.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 30, 2015 11:23:35 AM UTC
Photo stolen from Pierre madani
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 27, 2015 10:57:41 AM UTC
It is not a fucking free option. I am taking a 6 AM flight and there is an ETH dinner.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 10:03:32 PM UTC
What time?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 31, 2015 5:55:27 AM UTC
Then that was moi.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 27, 2015 10:49:33 AM UTC
Inte bi bayrut? ana honik yonm 5amis 3al ma3rad el kiteb
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/employee.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 26, 2015 1:06:32 AM UTC
Here is Coase's seminal paper. He missed employee = risk control via SITG http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x/full
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 26, 2015 9:17:08 AM UTC
It's a matter of DNA. People who have been employees are signaling domestication.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 26, 2015 9:18:18 AM UTC
Which Veyne? I was going to look into it for slavery but I am on the road for 20 days. Is it the History of Private Life, Vol 1?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 26, 2015 10:11:35 AM UTC
Thanks! I just ordered her book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 26, 2015 10:20:34 AM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 26, 2015 10:21:23 AM UTC
In it I recall the origin of an aphorism, how people cared more for those of their class and rescued those from ruined families by making them "stewards" or dame de compagnie later.
There is nothing more random than getting published for the first time. I once reviewed the numerous rejection letters I got for Fooled by Randomness (and, ironically The Black Swan when FbR had done well), and noticed the following. The editors rejecting the book did not claim "strong filtering". Not a single one did say "well, I am not sure; it doesn't look like it is a compelling bet". This is the kind of response a trader/risk taker would expect.
No, they invariably went out of the way to be *predictive*, explaining that "this book *will not* sell", "the topic *will not* interest anyone", "this has *flaws*", etc.
It could be that my manuscript irritated some editors (some complained about the arrogance). But this is an experience that is shared by all authors: perusing rejection letters of subsequently "successful" books, you can observe the same constant: the editor builds some narrative behind the rejection, almost always *vicious* and aiming to discourage, even demolish the confidence of the author.
If you are an author, only pay attention to "Yes/No", ignore any other information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 23, 2015 12:02:53 PM UTC
Do subsequent bestsellers elicit more elaborate rejections?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 23, 2015 12:04:17 PM UTC
10 in UK and 5 in US.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 23, 2015 5:49:00 PM UTC
What about The Beatles?
This page is not about finance except when the idea generalizes. Here it helps us connect flaneuring to successes such as those of Buffet.
The best thing is to not have to do anything *as a default*. So one commits in those cases that are way too obvious.
+ No schedule except when you can't do without
+ Have no personal assistant.
+ Have no office, or only use one when strictly necessary.
+ Only write things that you find compelling.
+ Take only those offers that you can't refuse.
---
So I figured out something about the success of Munger-Buffett. It is not in the strategies they run, but in their very, very, very strong filtering.
Simply it is generalized flaneuring. Charlie Munger: "We have no system for estimating the correct value of all businesses. We put almost all in the "too hard" pile and sift through a few easy ones". "Warren (Buffett) talks about these discounted cash flows. I've never seen him do one". (in Tren Griffin's book)
The implication is that the nuances of the "genre" as strategy matter less than filtering. Because of such nonlinearity, Buffett's performance is no longer correlated with that of the strategy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:03:08 PM UTC
Sorry October not March, edited.
---
Friends, I've completed the chapter on Stubborn Minority Rules thanks to the comments here: Why GMOs are history; how Islam became prominent; discusses the spread of languages, the functioning of markets,etc.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/minority.pdf
I am crediting Arnie Schwarzvogel and Boof TheRabbit whose citable name I would love to get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 4, 2015 3:06:39 PM UTC
Lindy requires the asymmetry going your way.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 4, 2015 3:18:23 PM UTC
Slaughter is TINY price in cost of meat. It is mostly regulation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 4, 2015 3:18:38 PM UTC
Bartek Kachniarz ? This would seem strange.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 4, 2015 4:09:27 PM UTC
Let's do some flaneuring in London. Are you there in December?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 5, 2015 12:07:40 AM UTC
Depends on sects, but that is the rule.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 5, 2015 9:02:46 AM UTC
good approximation anyway, 1/2000 precision.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 5, 2015 12:56:01 PM UTC
"Markets from London to Mumbai collapse on fears of recession" was the NYT headline
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 6, 2015 12:17:31 PM UTC
Added comments about bilingualism by Jean-Louis Rheault to text.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/minority.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 1, 2015 1:26:59 PM UTC
You live in Venice?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 1, 2015 3:08:56 PM UTC
There are none!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 1, 2015 11:18:16 PM UTC
Indeed! Waiting for him to request to put name
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 2, 2015 9:36:43 AM UTC
ok I will modify slightly to reflect and add names.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 2, 2015 9:37:13 AM UTC
Wow! This is EXACTLY how languages dominate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 2, 2015 9:37:47 AM UTC
The more the better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 3, 2015 2:16:07 PM UTC
That is EXACTLY how Islam spread in the Levant and Egypt.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 4, 2015 8:03:10 AM UTC
NonKapish. What is the connection between autism, Tourette, etc?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 28, 2015 2:58:15 PM UTC
Needless to say that it is not easy to predict bad text but one can use filters. For instance, business books.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 28, 2015 5:59:06 PM UTC
Michal Kolano Yes which is why there is word of mouth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 26, 2015 12:52:24 AM UTC
I downloaded it. Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 25, 2015 4:31:01 PM UTC
There is, simply, no such book... yet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 25, 2015 5:37:57 PM UTC
Big data works beautifully for some low-dimensional applications such as terrorism, surveillance, etc. but never for fat tails EXCEPT as negative empiricism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 25, 2015 7:30:19 PM UTC
András Salamon Professional probabilists spend their time masturbating on properties and HAVE NOT seen implications such as these https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/GINI-1.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 25, 2015 7:35:37 PM UTC
Looked at it... this book is about modeling financial data.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 25, 2015 8:46:18 PM UTC
No some bug
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 25, 2015 10:19:53 PM UTC
This is Fooled by Randomness in general, not fat tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 26, 2015 1:12:22 AM UTC
Very good. And Coles is good.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 26, 2015 1:13:07 AM UTC
Marc Reinhardt But it is not about fat tails per se, just extremes, including Gaussian and other
-----
Some chief executive was discussing the certainty of a future event. He said "the probability of [the event] happening is 100% now. But it could change in the future".
The error is obvious. Visibly, if a probability is 100% it cannot possibly change; to be consistent, such probability needs to be treated as lower than 100% (what I have called metaprobability in *Silent Risk*, chapter 2). In other words, no probability that is 0 or 1 should ever change. Hence any uncertainty about probability raises the odds above 0 (and lowers below 1), an argument that proves that uncertainty about probability translates *necessarily* in higher odds of tail events.
The error by the executive is obvious as I expressed it here, but let us see how people do not detect it in a different domain (especially if academics), some form of probabilistic autism. We make, justifiably, a virtue of one's ability to change one's mind, as per J.M. Keynes’s apocryphal saying “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” (in response to “If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three,” a remark attributed to Winston Churchill, cf. Wapshott).
But then *if you know* that you may change your mind on a given subject [First Order], then you should always act as if you would change your mind in the future [Second Order] when evidence shows up, that is, treat knowledge in a Popperian manner. Futher, you know which side of the evidence is more likely to change your mind (the negative). This is the very idea of incompleteness, which seems obvious phrased in such a way, yet many people fail to see the logical conclusion that you should never have a certain class of *irreversible* actions in areas where you know that your knowledge is incomplete. This error trivial but rampant, often among psychologists dealing with ... probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 24, 2015 10:59:48 AM UTC
By definition then it is something that you know you will *never* change your opinion about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 24, 2015 11:06:26 AM UTC
No, because "inevitable" is 100% proba. "Highly likely" is probably what he meant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 24, 2015 11:07:38 AM UTC
You can actually have a 0% or 100% but under the condition that you know you cannot change your mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 24, 2015 12:22:45 PM UTC
In fact there is a gap between common parlance and logic as common parlance has some fuzziness, etc. Mapping one to one is a mistake. "Never" often means "not today", etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 24, 2015 12:47:05 PM UTC
Long discussions of metaprobability in SILENT RISK.
Delenda House of Saud.
PS- How to boycott. You can ethically drive a car if you are an individual (but preferably avoid nonelectric cars), but you can't buy oil from KSA if you are a business, nor do direct business with any Saudi entity, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 23, 2015 9:07:06 PM UTC
You can drive a car if you are an individual, but you can't do direct business with any Saudi entity, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 23, 2015 8:35:33 PM UTC
Nature is a better computer because it is higher dimensional.
"I ain't over till it's over."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 20, 2015 2:59:14 PM UTC
No ergodic systems die when absorbed. Simply they keep going without absorbing states.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 20, 2015 3:13:23 PM UTC
Yes they never freeze except when dead. So nonergodicity is in death.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 20, 2015 3:51:52 PM UTC
Note that recurrence is not guaranteed in highly dimensional systems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 20, 2015 4:36:26 PM UTC
I use ergodic in the applied-probabilistic sense: a Markov chain with transitional probabilities strictly higher than 0 and strictly lower than 1. The rest (scale, state parameters) can change all you want.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 21, 2015 11:26:57 AM UTC
Brent Halonen : "A drunk man will eventually find his way home; a drunk bird may be lost forever."
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/GINI-1.pdf
2) For those of you who are in Boston, Yaneer Bar-Yam discusses Complexity Theory, Decentralization and Syria at Fletcher (Tufts) Monday at 5:30 PM. I will be there for a 5 min intro.
http://fletcher.tufts.edu/Calendar/2015/09/21/Peace-for-Syria-A-Federal-Governance-Strategy-with-Dr-Yaneer-BarYam-moderated-by-Dr-Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb-Sponsored-by-The-Fares-Center.aspx
3) This lady independently says everything on our cheat-sheet about GMOs. She says that to express doubts about GMOs requires for a scholar to have "f*** you money".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRKNkn2nva8
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 20, 2015 11:42:14 AM UTC
Wait until the desire to study economics goes away.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 20, 2015 4:38:45 PM UTC
Good. There is a mention forthcoming on bias / alpha
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 21, 2015 11:27:43 AM UTC
Gini isn't nonsense if you measure it right.
Could you please solve an argument that I have with one of my Facebook friends Vitaly Shevelev?
We couldn't meet an agreement on the presence and level of presence of the Black Swan effect in the plot of "The Day of the Triffids" book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids).
My friend insists on the following: there is an effect of the Black Swan in the book. And it is because we can see series of small random events that cause some catastrophic results (almost everybody dies, the humanity is almost vanished from the Earth).
But my position is a little bit different. I insist that there is the Black Swan effect but it is not in the mentioned above series. I said that the problem of the Black Swan in the following: we the humanity couldn't predict such catastrophic results of usage of the Triffids. Noting similar happened in the world before so people were careless and couldn't predict the dramatic out come.
So who is right and who is wrong? Thank you in advance for your opinion.
PS. I read your book "Antifragile" this year and it is astonishing. I even wrote a short review of it placed here http://blog.kvv213.com/2015/07/antihrupkost-kak-izvlech-vy-godu-iz-haosa-antifragile-things-that-gain-from-disorder-2012/ (language is Russian).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 20, 2015 11:19:35 AM UTC
Let me check the book. It seems interesting to see how a cumulation of small variations leads to explosive outcomes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 19, 2015 9:52:34 PM UTC
Ron Kenett Hi Ron! of course. But undercontrol is never present in government... except for serious problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 19, 2015 9:52:48 PM UTC
Ron Kenett good to hear from you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 18, 2015 6:10:11 PM UTC
The point is that with Trump we see the shit; with others the crap is hidden.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 18, 2015 6:58:31 PM UTC
Excellent. We fake as if we were following their opinions.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/FictionAndFacts.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 14, 2015 6:57:16 PM UTC
It is not even good for shareholders. MON is down 25% over the past year while organic sales are booming... Never a good idea to focus on promotion rather than science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 14, 2015 6:59:51 PM UTC
Hahaha! I need to be careful about 2016.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 14, 2015 7:01:38 PM UTC
Here are the resolutions! http://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-taleb-tweeted-resolutions-2015-2014-12
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 14, 2015 10:59:11 PM UTC
Ania Lian this remark is ... not good. The point simply means that you are not calling them because you NEED them, to use them for something, but calling them just to call them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 14, 2015 11:44:30 PM UTC
Excellent, Marc Milanini. The whole thing is that science is an upper bound, not an average, just like markets.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 9:31:07 AM UTC
We have very, very strong evidence that Scientific American is very vulnerable to Monsanto propaganda; it should not be an arbiter of science. It just recites what a PR firm wants to recite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 10:06:12 AM UTC
Because clearly you Ahmad Hachem are an imbecile. Such a "consensus" would have stopped science in the middle ages. What a dangerous imbecile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 10:18:45 AM UTC
Marc Milanini the other thing in that stupid list is that NOT ONE of these "organizations" has done a risk analysis. NOT ONE.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 10:27:08 AM UTC
Explain why I need PR Kings to eat what my ancestors did. You are making a false balance. The "organic lobby" has a tiny, about 1% of the presence of the GMO lobby.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 10:44:04 AM UTC
Conversation ended. Please now go elsewhere as there is a minimum of reasoning required here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 2:53:53 PM UTC
He is a fraud. Not a scientist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 8:08:18 PM UTC
By "in the box", David Boxenhorn we mean not part of agri, grown in labs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 8:08:31 PM UTC
But I agree with the principle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 16, 2015 11:33:39 AM UTC
Alessandro Ruocco the GMO people claim there are gene transfers in nature. Which is completely bogus an argument. The problem of course is that the ones done artificially will NECESSARILY be outside the statistical range (otherwise the transfers would have taken place before and there would be no need for GMOs).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 17, 2015 7:31:39 PM UTC
Here you go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRKNkn2nva8#t=226
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 17, 2015 8:41:06 PM UTC
He is good.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 18, 2015 10:07:12 AM UTC
Once you zap a troll, other comments go away.
This already works well for executive "education". I give short workshops in my specialty of applied probability (I have given a few with PW, YBY and RD, though only lasting 1-2 days), limited to professionals. An Uberization would consist in making longer workshops, say of 2-3 week duration, after which the attendees would be getting a piece of paper of sorts.
From my experience, both students and lecturers are more sincere when they bypass institutions. And, as with other Uberizations, it would be much, much efficient economically.
A full education would be a collection of such micro-diplomas, which can be done on top of a conventional one.
Finally I would personally like to attend such workshops in disciplines outside my specialty. After my experience with Aramaic/Syriac last summer, I have a list of subjects I would be hungry to learn *outside* university systems...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 7, 2015 12:14:23 PM UTC
Indeed. It would make education a continuous process.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 7, 2015 12:44:14 PM UTC
And as with Uber you will get comments on the web.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 7, 2015 4:27:01 PM UTC
The university comes from Arabic Jami3a first university was by Arabs
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 7, 2015 11:04:15 PM UTC
MOOCs are not my thing. They complement but cannot provide an education. Here is my min-MOOC page https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uY6yLP9BS4BUc9BSc0Jww
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 8, 2015 1:49:21 AM UTC
Bingo!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 5, 2015 12:18:42 PM UTC
Something like 5 PM café near ETH?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 5, 2015 2:13:41 PM UTC
There are 2 Zuriches. The Zurich of the bankers and the Zurich of ETH.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 5, 2015 4:31:47 PM UTC
But... hotel? Is there a regular real café?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 5, 2015 5:21:33 PM UTC
THanks Marci Pan See you a 5 at Felix Café am Bellevue
Bellevueplatz 5
8001 Zürich
Telefon 044 251 80 60
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 5, 2015 5:21:42 PM UTC
Unless my flight is delayed
Someone has done me favors in the past, when I needed them, say got me out of trouble. I naturally feel indebted to *that* person. But the ethical reaction should not be to pay the same person back since his generosity, if genuine, should be unconditional. My debt should be to the system (something called "society"), or, less abstract, someone else, preferably a stranger...
This is similar to the mechanism of bedouin hospitality. And it becomes multiplicative.
Likewise, like anyone who isn't a saint, I have done things in my past for which I have remorse. But, to clear my conscience, I do not have to rectify the *exact* situation. I just need a large action that does not benefit me but helps the largest number of people, say, take risks by going after evil such as Monsanto, debunk BS vendors, prevent Hilary Clinton from getting close to the White House, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 3, 2015 11:45:06 AM UTC
Explain, please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 31, 2015 2:58:11 PM UTC
Same for corporate vulnerability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 31, 2015 3:08:46 PM UTC
My weightlifting
#skininthegame
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 30, 2015 12:52:04 PM UTC
To repeat this is not "MY" fund. There are other people. It is just that I am more know than the others. Bad journalism. Pure sensationalism.
There is an asymmetry as follows. A tiny proportion of "stubborn" eaters could determine the consumption habits of the entire country. It is a key that Kosher people (representing <.3% of the US population) do not eat nonKosher, but nonKosher people eat Kosher. Many goods are Kosher but nonKosher people can't tell because they do not recognize the small cryptic (U) or (K) sign on the can.
Which is why it suffices that a tiny portion of the population becomes "stubborn" NonGMO for the entire food to be NonGMO.
Now I discovered that the difference in price at the supermarket level between organic and nonorganic comes from distribution, not production. Production costs play a tiny role. Costco and Walmart are now into organic (they represent about 4% of US GDP) and growth of organic would not depend on demand, but on distribution efficiency.
---
Where does this nonlinear effect come from? If the price differential is small, it is easier at a wedding to accomodate NonGMO people by having everybody eat so, rather than introduce a new category. Same thing at the level of a restaurant or a supermarket. This "scaling" is called renormalization group. I did a bit of work to show the asymmetry in attached exercise. Ignore the exact numerical details; what matters is the nonlinearity, how things tip one way. The moral: the GMO industry spends time "converting" journos and others, but all this is a waste of time when it radicalizes a segment of the population.
-----
INSPIRED BY A CONVERSATION WITH SERGE GALAM.
---
PS: Got the GMO renormalization result in closed form: Renorm(n):=1-(1-p)^{4^n}... was too obvious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 29, 2015 2:33:35 PM UTC
Kosher people less than .3% and kosher labels covers pretty much 100% of liquids in East Coast.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 29, 2015 3:02:47 PM UTC
It is categorization. "nonGLuten" isn't Kosher or NonGMO
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 29, 2015 3:29:17 PM UTC
Which is why Organic sales are booming.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 29, 2015 3:30:42 PM UTC
Kosher people are limited to pockets in the East Coast, for a total <.3% with a small rise for Passover. So renormalization group doesn't work well. GMOphobia is more distributed (and of course much higher in percentage).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 29, 2015 4:04:55 PM UTC
Got the GMO renormalization result in closed form: Renorm(n):=1-(1-p)^{4^n}... was too obvious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 29, 2015 6:23:03 PM UTC
Who sold you this nonsense?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 29, 2015 9:39:06 PM UTC
This is Monsanto bullshit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 30, 2015 2:09:08 AM UTC
Which story from the Midrash?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 30, 2015 12:43:12 PM UTC
The EU has dealt with the problem and puts an upper bound at .9% .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 30, 2015 12:53:57 PM UTC
No, there are serious emotional considerations... People like me because of the biotech lobbying would never eat GMOs. The more they lobby the more stubborn I get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 30, 2015 1:16:30 PM UTC
In the US "Organic" meat => Fed ONLY organic feed. Which is why I use organic as a proxy for NonGMO.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 1, 2015 8:52:57 PM UTC
This is valuable. Companies take minimum risk. No upside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 2, 2015 8:07:02 PM UTC
Bingo. But you need absence of kashrut against it in the target economic class.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 2, 2015 8:33:51 PM UTC
BTW what's the ratio of halal meat in the UK?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 3, 2015 10:58:11 AM UTC
Bingo!
"To Benoit Mandelbrot, a Greek among Romans" [The Black Swan, 2007]
to
"To Benoit Mandelbrot, a Roman among Greeks"
As I came to realize that the Romans were noBS FatTonies; they resented grand theories and favored prudent and progressive tinkering. Much of what they built, from constitution, to Roman law, to bridges, to low income housing, to their literature, to their imperial administration (still around in the structure of the Catholic church), have survived 2000 years.
Nothing else of substance was changed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 21, 2015 2:51:44 PM UTC
That's wrong and a misconception. See Antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 21, 2015 4:02:41 PM UTC
Romans were open minded and tolerant except for intolerant sects like...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 21, 2015 4:30:18 PM UTC
Let us close this conversation. I didn't spend 5 years writing on the topic to have to reexplain everything here. Thank you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 23, 2015 12:28:58 PM UTC
Everyone loved slavery so realize that should not play the anachronistic analysis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:42:33 PM UTC
Probability is 100% science and 100% philosophy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 20, 2015 2:28:15 AM UTC
Excellent news. NEJM is truly independent.
For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. For early Jews it was also tribal; for early Muslims it was universal. For the Romans religion was social events and festivals (law was separate ). For Jews today religion became ethnocultural, without the law --and for some, a nation. Same for Syriacs, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians religion is aesthetics, pomp and rituals. For Protestants religion is belief with no aesthetics, pomp or law. For Buddists/Shintoists/Hindus religion is philosophy. So when Hindu talk about the Hindu "religion" they don't mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian.
People keep talking past each other. When the nation-state idea came about, things got more complicated. When an Arab now says "Jew" he largely means belief; a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. But for a Jew it means a nation.
In Serbia/Croatia, or Lebanon, religion means something at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 14, 2015 7:43:01 PM UTC
Kahneman confirms all my intuitions. But not the policy paternalism of Thaler. So I would be a libertarian believer in Kahneman.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 14, 2015 9:58:56 PM UTC
Exactly my problem. Officials ALSO have overconfidence. Actually they are ...more overconfident than their subjects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 6:44:39 PM UTC
Lions don't bark
It did not hit them that I AM a cancer survivor, and changed "despise those who boast" to despise cancer survivors". Also look at the fake student evaluations...
https://www.facebook.com/sciencebabe?fref=ts
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 3:14:18 PM UTC
I usually don't get upset except exploitation and ....cancer. Cancer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 4:28:47 PM UTC
Can someone answer this idiot? He is a member of NH house of representatives.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 4:59:14 PM UTC
Here is the offensive propaganda they removed it. As a cancer survivor all I can see this is.... bothersome.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 6:33:37 PM UTC
I am not following details... Did he explain what he meant about my degrees in a matchbox? This fellow is a legislator. He should be able to explain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 5:33:53 PM UTC
Thanks Paul.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 3:18:34 AM UTC
It is Western Syriac, but Syriac is Eastern Aramaic. I learned Ktaybutho which is the formal, closer to the middle. But it is close enough to Maaloula
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 3:18:47 AM UTC
It is in Arabic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 10:06:47 AM UTC
Syriac script
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 1:48:58 PM UTC
Yes see this note http://fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 2:38:06 PM UTC
It is easier, much fewer characters. Syriac has beginning/middle/end
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 2:54:22 PM UTC
But I find it easier to read the Hebrew (actually Aramaic) script.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 8:09:50 AM UTC
The instructor was in Jerusalem with his family. Arabs thought they were speaking Hebrew, Jews thought they were speaking Arabic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 4:55:12 PM UTC
La7n?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 12, 2015 12:27:23 AM UTC
A lot of Greek texts such as Galen, even Aristotle, might be there, simply because nobody can decipher.
This is a picture of a church altar in Maaloula (St Sergius/Mar Sarkis) I saw a few decades ago, with a striking feature: it has a drain for blood. This altar came from a reconverted pagan temple used by early Christians. Pre Nicea (4th C) Christians recycled altars. Altar in Arabic/Aramaic is still Mazba7 from "DB7=ritual slaying by cutting the guttural vein". And Korban is still used for sacrament (the Semitic word for sacrifice).
Well, in the Mediterranean pagan world, no worship without sacrifice. The gods did not accept cheap talk. This also applied to the Temple of Jerusalem.
Somehow Christianity removed the idea of such sacrifice under the notion that the Christ sacrificed himself for others; but there is still a simulacrum with wine representing blood, at the close of the ceremony flushed in the piscina (the drain).
So in a Judeo-Christian place of worship, the focal point, where the priest stands, symbolizes Skin in the Game. The notion of belief without tangible proof is not existent in history.
Hebrews 9:22 " And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission." (et omnia paene in sanguine mundantur secundum legem et sine sanguinis fusione non fit remissio)
(Credit Elisabeth Thoburn)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 7:04:56 PM UTC
Sebastian Michał I zapped him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 7:09:35 PM UTC
Sebastian Michał I zapped the fellow. If someone cannot discuss religion without disrespect, he will be zapped from here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 7:51:00 PM UTC
So long as it was risky to be Jewish, it's all OK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 12:08:39 AM UTC
Thanks a million! I ordered it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 12:10:09 AM UTC
And let us not talk about Isaac.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 3:59:04 PM UTC
Would love to see it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 1:24:01 AM UTC
Strangely, studying Aramaic made Arabic much, much more attractive to me, as if it were the next step. The refinement of Arabic and its precision are astonishing. So, I know what to do next summer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 13, 2015 11:52:51 AM UTC
In the context of SITG I find the recurring scapegoat extremely strange, as if there is someone on whom to dump one's problems and make him take sacrifice for you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 14, 2015 2:46:18 AM UTC
Qutaiba Hawamdeh Aramaic is more Levantine, Arabic more like Arabia/Yeman
In the end Truth and Reason prevail and those who take the most risk for the sake of Truth will be the heroes.
PS- Only comments that address specifically in a nonscripted way points not answered in PP paper are accepted. Thanks.
PPS- Funnily close to 99% of the remarks by trolls were scripted for attacks on proponents of organic foods or vaccines or something of the sort.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 1:16:00 PM UTC
Only a small percentage of the SP500 corporations survive 30 years in it . I put Monsanto expected life in SP at <10 y.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 1:45:05 PM UTC
Count that Monsanto is down 28% from the high while other SP500 much much less.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 1:55:19 PM UTC
Big Pharma is benign ... Nothing generalizes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:02:59 PM UTC
Multiplicative effects and irreversibility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:10:42 PM UTC
Not part of PP, as we said in our paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:29:53 PM UTC
Yes but the mistakes do not carry systemic effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:38:59 PM UTC
Antifragile, if you read it properly, requires the multiplication of small and local mistakes. Fragile is when a single mistake can blow up the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:50:46 PM UTC
As in which area?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:51:54 PM UTC
You are very very confused.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:53:29 PM UTC
If you do not make the effort to read PP you should NOT be here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:59:00 PM UTC
I am doing so in "skin in the game", the arguments people use to "help" you when it is mostly good for them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:59:57 PM UTC
Usually if the name goes away, a larger entity swallowed the unit. Largely companies drop out for financial reasons.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 1:39:22 PM UTC
We had an organized bunch coming here. We automatically zapped them and so if someone was banned by mistake, please write to me. And this is the type of answers they give.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 1:41:13 PM UTC
Aneesh are you a data scientist?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 3:08:25 PM UTC
Note that it costs only a few dollars a day for someone to zap systematically suspicious posters who have not participated on this page before.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 3:31:04 PM UTC
Incidentally, there are more and more scientific articles questioning the "consensus" http://www.enveurope.com/content/27/1/4/abstract
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 3:31:29 PM UTC
and this http://sth.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/05/0162243915598381.abstract
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 5:08:32 PM UTC
Past history is not relevant as SP500 are not Lindy but have memoryless decay. Perhaps the size effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 10, 2015 9:43:17 PM UTC
Hi can you give more details?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 2:09:42 AM UTC
Exactly. The method is to treat people like you as if they were nonthinking animals. What can you do about it?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 8:23:49 AM UTC
Example of how to respond to a GMO Shill trying to harass you: Play with him. Make him feel deeply, insulted. Get him angry. Have fun.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 8:30:37 AM UTC
You lose the argument the minute you try to win the argument.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 10:19:08 AM UTC
You appear to be deeply insulted. Very deeply insulted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 10:57:28 AM UTC
We explain why you cannot ignore the Seralini study as negative empiricism uses a smaller n than confirmatory empiricism. Elementary but one needs to go beyond canned stat 101 to understand it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 11:50:00 AM UTC
Pietro Bonavita the problem is that they only get on the list when we ban them. But we can play with a mouse or two first.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 12:38:57 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita here is your mouse Tom Morgan to play with.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 11, 2015 1:30:30 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita OK, can we block them now?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 12, 2015 9:28:00 PM UTC
See fooledbyrandomness.com comments on PP. It is a common fallacy outside the moral domain.
A lot of the discussions we've had here can be framed with the difference between "satisficing" (an old Northumbrian word meaning "good enough") and "optimizing" (meaning always try to do better). Clearly, as with everything we think both modern and relevant, this was present in the classics in the various discussions of the difference between moderation and greed, particularly in virtue ethics. The great polymath Herbert Simon posited that systems cannot really optimize; I have held that optimization leads to nonlinear increase in hidden risks (the fragility arguments) which invariably blows up the apparatus. Simon was hated by economists (he got their "Nobel") because all their methods consist in optimizing (the easy mathematical route).
In human relationships we can't optimize without becoming greedy selfish unethical crooks. And in commerce we prefer relations to transactions, ready to support the local butcher because we feel we are part of a community and we are not alone --we are paid back with a smile and someone who says hello in the street. Indeed the central flaw in optimization is thinking that "everything else" ceases to exist and makes people think the individual, not the collective, is the true unit --when such thinking blows up the system (or fake local rationality as opposed to more organic, collective, survival of the system broader type of "rationality").
---
But the true discussion is the Procrustean Bed standpoint: from an existential reason, we humans are punished when we try to optimize, as if we suddenly ceased to be humans.
---
Friends, comments are welcome (provided they conform to the rules, i.e., add to the discussion).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 8, 2015 1:25:50 PM UTC
no.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 8, 2015 5:20:29 PM UTC
The exact opposite. They set bounds and force temperance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 8, 2015 5:36:55 PM UTC
TTB Heuristic: "take the best" after n trials.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 9, 2015 11:47:32 AM UTC
That is what I meant TTB is serial
"If rationality were valuable in evolutionary terms, accountants would be really sexy."
1) Is it that professions that are attractive to others and provide social rank satisfy a certain selection criterion, with hidden benefits to society that we can detect? I think so: courage is extremely attractive and heroes are worshipped for a reason, as they take risks for the collective. But is it universal?
2) The accountant definition of rationality is too narrow and not altruistic enough to qualify as useful for the collective. They are scribes, not high priests.
3) We can extend the discussion to other professions: mathematicians (I am told) aren't interesting to others (except to math students); same with economists. If these professions don't seem "sexy" is it because they aren't that "fit"?
Got this idea this morning, and the search immediately returned this:
Turns out now they are calling it "obesity paradox".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 5, 2015 9:20:23 AM UTC
I looked at the problem a few years ago. They found that overweight people (but those below the point of obesity) lived longer. But studies did not look at muscle mass/composition.
----
(Skin in the game)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/INCERTO%20Map.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 3, 2015 3:32:34 PM UTC
Can you summarize? Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 3, 2015 3:33:10 PM UTC
Dan Mantini you can afford legal bills!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 3, 2015 3:33:19 PM UTC
Great to hear from you!
Let us list what comes to mind as an auxiliary function, such the “spandrels of San Marco,” where the necessary space between arches in the Venetian cathedral of San Marco has led to the placement of significant art.
+ A dishwasher allows you to hide dirty dishes. A swimming pool allows adults to be shirtless and feel the summer breeze without looking ridiculous. (Rory Sutherland).
+ Formal dress codes allow overweight men to hide their shape.
+ Dietary laws have the side effect of keeping minorities tight together --and preventing the majority from feeling threatened. In Ottoman Mediterranean cities, interdicts against alcohol allowed tolerance; they prevented non-business socializing with the Christians. It allowed multi-religious cities to flourish.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 2, 2015 1:24:42 AM UTC
I agree with the great teacher Jean-Louis. The internet is making people interract.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 2, 2015 11:09:47 AM UTC
School gets the kids out of the house.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/response.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 31, 2015 3:20:40 PM UTC
Yes before the recent commoditization of science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 31, 2015 8:58:53 PM UTC
Note the irony that what I call "Popperian" isn't quite Popperian but an evolved version largely by his detractors. Recall that I doubted naive Popperianism (how can we really tell if we "rejected" something? Things are more complicated). But the point is asymmetry..
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 1, 2015 1:43:08 AM UTC
read the document
---
PS-As to Walter Palmer (the dentist from Minnessota), in this case given the gravity of the violation, he should be fed to lions, as in the days of the Circus Maximus.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 29, 2015 4:11:16 PM UTC
We do not EAT lions. Kapish? We do not kill cows FOR PLEASURE.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:35:05 PM UTC
Kyle Mamounis if you can't see the difference between gratuitous killing and killing FOR EATING you are hopeless and need to leave this forum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 30, 2015 9:57:00 AM UTC
J-L it is a deterrent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 30, 2015 3:18:45 PM UTC
J-L in this case there is no legal recourse: the ethical is not the legal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 8:10:45 PM UTC
Leave Luciana Nery alone. She knows her stuff.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 9:23:00 PM UTC
We actually had a fellow here saying it is sexist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:56:46 PM UTC
I did not delete his comments. I zapped him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 29, 2015 2:07:50 AM UTC
Cindy Yu these do not seem as common in the opposite direction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 29, 2015 11:03:24 AM UTC
Yes this is an "estimator" which is not a measure...
A well functioning society isn't one in which people are equal but one in which people have equal *probability*. So measuring static inequality is severely flawed.
Take the United States. Less than 10% of the people in the 1982 list of richest 500 were there in 2012. Compare to France where 60% on the rich list today have inherited their wealth. And there are other more robust metrics: 56% of Americans will spent at least a year in the top 10% (in income not wealth). Not in Europe.
So a good society is one in which people at the top have *skin in the game* hence can lose their money. Wealth generation should not lead to protected position at the top. Social mobility isn't in elevating people, it requires the top to open a position.
So in Europe a civil servant from the "mandarin class" is safe for life as they extract rent from the system, while a good entrepreneur will run a chance of getting poor, leaving room for others.
PS- Let me explain to those who don't get it. SITG means the rich needs to remain exposed to losing back his money rather than shielded.
PPS- 39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 % of the income distribution, 56 % will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% percent will spend a year in the top 20 %. Ref http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-to-riches-to-rags.html?_r=0
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 10:56:44 AM UTC
Piketty doesn't know how to measure inequality. See my paper with douady in PHYSICA A
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 10:56:52 AM UTC
Even better
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 11:01:09 AM UTC
Updated with links.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 1:34:14 PM UTC
Pedro stop doing BS here. Data is not empiricism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 1:44:01 PM UTC
Pedro Barahona when you say on someone's page "he is hit and miss" and "just math" do not expect to invited to stay as we don't tolerate bullshitters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 1:44:47 PM UTC
Yes which is why negative tax is imperative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 2:24:02 PM UTC
Let me explain to those who don't get it. SITG means the rich needs to remain exposed to losing back his money rather than shielded.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 3:34:03 PM UTC
This post is about switching to probabilistic inequality from just naive static outcome inequality. It is the same approach as Rawl's veil.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 8:55:58 PM UTC
Even better. The SP500 represents the bulk of the capitalization, perhaps 90%, but the Forbes 500 represent a much smaller portion of total wealth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 11:48:48 PM UTC
Rory Sutherland education lowers variance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 1:30:47 AM UTC
People aren't looking at the problem right. It is 2-way. If 56% of Americans spent a year in the top 10%, it means that those in the top 10% are likely to spend some time below their bracket even if *on average* they stay in the top 10%. That is sufficent to cause such an effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 3:27:55 PM UTC
SOCIAL MOBILITY AND INEQUALITY (cont)
In Central Asian and Asia Minor regicide traditions, he who actually kills the king becomes the new king.
This enforces bilateral skin-in-the-game.
The anti-GMO crowd got very excited that a pro-GMO activist who just graduated with a math PhD "attacked" our paper. It is the first comment by a "mathematician" which seems to be a big deal. Let us discuss here. Please ignore the technical in my answer.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/response.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 26, 2015 1:32:25 PM UTC
The point is that a paper *in draft* is only vulnerable *if* there is a central flaw, not a missing footnote, a typo, a poorly phrased sentence, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 26, 2015 1:38:31 PM UTC
Yes that's the idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 26, 2015 1:39:50 PM UTC
Please ignore the technical in my answer. Just look at his paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 26, 2015 2:46:21 PM UTC
David Norton you are an honest person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 26, 2015 4:06:03 PM UTC
My coauthors have voted in favor of a point by point general public discussion of Merberg's post. I voted against.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 1:15:57 AM UTC
It did not hit you that people here are likeminded and that Merberg is attacking and engaging via posts?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 27, 2015 1:23:09 AM UTC
Let me explain why there is no dialog. Merberg said "this is bullshit and here is why" and the "why" turned out to be his mistakes. Had he said "here are two mistakes" we would have engaged him.
We can look at supersitions as x% useless and 1-x % with survival benefits, except that it is hard to know beforehand what is useless and what is not, what is "irrational" and what has a hidden implicit rationality that helps navigate opaque systems. But it suffices that a tiny proportions, say only .01%, of superstitions protect collective or individual survival for these superstitions to be necessary. And for the very notion of superstition to be rational.
Beware of the probability-fool scientist a la Pinker judging superstitions with primitive tools; in fact we can show that some of these superstitions are most sophisticated in complex systems.
Clearly superstitions might have calming effects in helping us make sense of uncertainty (I never fight harmless superstitions), allowing us to be rational elsewhere; but let us ignore these functions, just focus on survival. Recall that rationality is survival.
To prove the point that superstitions are risk management tools, extremely "rational", all we need is 1) show that superstitions do not increase risk of ruin , 2) show only a few seemingly "anecdotal" examples (they are not) of risk-mitigating superstitions that we only understood ex post, such as the belief that ghosts haunt coastal areas ending yp protecting people against tsunamis by pushing indigenous populations to settle in elevated areas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 23, 2015 1:57:17 PM UTC
Mice as correlated with the plague(s)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 23, 2015 4:31:02 PM UTC
The point is that superstitious people have skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 23, 2015 6:06:22 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita in Lebanon we the "rum" do so when we see an orthodox priest to stave off bad luck.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 25, 2015 10:29:16 AM UTC
In other words superstitions are convex heuristics or removers of concavity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 23, 2015 11:12:08 AM UTC
This is not NYT. He know about him; he works for CEI paid by Monsanto.
Some of you may have noticed that search service for this forum was frozen a year ago due to the changes of facebook APIs.
Since I badly needed this functionality for myself again (native FB search is still near to nonexistent), the phoenix is reborn with several new features.
1) The address is now http://nassim.link
I hope I was not too impudent on choosing the name, at least now nobody should recall hardly spelled mine in that old 26-char URL.
2) Search engine was completely recreated from the scratch, and should work better overall. For advanced usage please read some hints on the home page.
3) Now also searches pasted URL snippets as well as shows them in the search result.
4) Small feedback experiment added: the service now has an official Twitter feed (also displayed on the home page), which will happily retweet your findings if anything of interest. See https://twitter.com/nassim_link
Please report any issues/errors/claims/protests to me.
Thank you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 23, 2015 12:24:34 PM UTC
Thanks! Using it now for the next book.
"Love what you do, avoid high ranking positions, and do not get too close to the powerful".
---
Also: "Torah learning is best combined with a worldly occupation, because the effort of both will keep one from sin. Study alone without work will in the end be nullified and lead to sin." (2:2)
---
Elsewhere (Avot 1.3): "Do not seek rewards".
----
.שמעיה ואבטליון קבלו מהם .שמעיה אומר, אהוב את המלאכה, ושנא את הרבנות, ואל תתודע לרשות
PS- Also, the Talmud was put together as a corpus, inspired by the methods of and to have an alternative to the Roman School of Law of Beirut (Berytus). All the Beirut texts vanished during the earthquake. The Jews, having a diaspora, never had such problem because versions of the corpus were spread across the diaspora.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:32:20 PM UTC
Thanks. Now strangely I am at a Syriac summer school and this seems more Hebrew than Aramaic. Is it translated into Hebrew?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:39:51 PM UTC
Also I learned that the Talmud was put together inspired by the methods and to have an alternative to the Roman School of Law of Beirut (Berytus). All the Beirut texts vanished during the earthquake. The Jews having a diaspora never had such problem because the texts were spread across the diaspora.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:44:09 PM UTC
Ori Pomerantz why is there no Gemara for this? Or is there?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 23, 2015 12:40:59 PM UTC
This is rather... wrong. There are very, very few contradictions; these are salient because someone like you seems to dig them. Further, the entire point of the Talmud is a "discussion". Finally you seem to misunderstand the word "proof".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 23, 2015 1:22:20 PM UTC
Further there are no nomological contradictions; these (minor) "divergences" are in the Gemara which is a series of interpretations.
+ Have you ever wondered why people are upset by CEO compensation, sometimes >200x that of the average employee, but not if an entrepreneur makes the same amount of money; nor are they upset with singers, authors, or performers?
+ The economist Thomas Sowell found this an aberration. His argument is that a CEO is not harming you; he is not sponsored by the taxpayer (or let us grant him that for this argument). But Sowell and the others apologists of CEO pay are missing the fact that our naturalistic fraud detector may be picking up something quite severe. A CEO has inverse skin in the game; his losses are transferred to the shareholder (as he keeps the upside with stock options and stick others with the downside). As I said in Antifragile, he is no entrepreneur (or artist where thousands are sacrificing their lives, so entering the profession cannot be done rationally on economic grounds).
+ We also detect that a CEO is largely an actor. Just look at one on TV for a split second.
+ So our ecological instinct is effective there in smelling something unfair; it is more powerful than that of regular economists who need a more sophisticated understanding of contract theory/asymmetry to get the point.
+ Note that in some countries where wealth has a bad name, it is often because it is associated with rent seeking. In the US, perception is different because wealth is traditionally associated with risk taking.
+ Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that societies give respect to people who have skin in the game (but not exclusively), and have a moral repulsion towards those who have inverse skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 1:46:16 AM UTC
Ignorance is the reason. Shareholders don't understand optionality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 1:53:53 AM UTC
Another scam. The board is owned by CEOs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:42:58 AM UTC
Entrepreneurs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 6:07:41 PM UTC
It is OUR business, we the public, if it is a public company in which we can invest or are indirectly invested, if shareholders are hoodwinked with a false narrative and if there are economic externalities. That's the point of a public corporation, unlike a private one. If a company is public, it becomes largely a public problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 7:46:23 PM UTC
Yes, just as we are concerned with fraud when a company offers shares to the public. The (legal) fraud is in the misrepresentation of the asymmetry.
In S. Italy it is taboo to have butter with fish. In the Levant it is taboo to have yoghurt and fish within 4 hours of each other. This seems to hold in many other countries, such as India and Pakistan. Where does this come from? The explanation usually offered is not religious but supposedly has something to do with health effects (hence the root is pre-Christianity and possibly pre-monotheism). I recall someone warning me of sudden death.
PS- Now, strangely, the Kashrut bans dairy with meat not fish, while customs ban the reverse. Only some Sephardic Jews have adopted the habit.
PPS-Found a piece of research thanks to Arthur B. Note that the researcher mistranslates yoghurt (laban in Arabic is yoghurt, not milk, except in colloquial Egyptian).
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cea_0008-0055_1996_num_36_144_1859
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 19, 2015 8:46:00 PM UTC
From the comments, it looks like there is a very strong hidden reason, this is NONRANDOM across so many cultures. May not apply to all fish (salmon w/cream cheese), all dairy (certainly yoghurt but maybe not cheese). But something very nonrandom.
The great Enrico Fermi proposed the following paradox. Given the size of the universe and evidence of intelligent life on Earth making it non-zero probability for intelligent life elsewhere, how come have we not been visited by alliens? "Where is everybody?", he asked. No matter how minute the probability of such life, the size should bring the probability to 1. (In fact we should have been visited a high number of times: see the Kolmogorov and Borel zero-one laws.)
Plenty of reasons have been offered; a hypothesis is that:
+ With intelligence comes hubris in risk-taking hence intelligent life leads to extinction.
+ As technology increases, misunderstanding of ruin by a small segment of the population is sufficient to guarantee ruin.
Think how close humanity was to extinction in the 1960s with several near-misses of nuclear holocausts. Think of humans as intelligent enough to do genetic modifications of the environment with GMOs but not intelligent enough to realize that we do not understand complex causal links. Many like Steven Pinker are intelligent enough to write a grammatical sentence but not intelligent enough to distinguish between absence of evidence and evidence of absence. We are intelligent enough to conceive of political and legal systems but let lobbyists run them. Humans are like children intelligent enough to unscrew a computer but not enough to avoid damaging it. And we are intelligent enough to produce information but unable to use it and get chronically fooled by randomness in some domain (even when aware of it in other domains). +
Acknowledgments: I thank Alessandro Riolo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 18, 2015 1:45:24 PM UTC
Don't ruin my weekend/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 18, 2015 2:04:45 PM UTC
+ As technology increases, misunderstanding of ruin by a small segment of the population is sufficient to guarantee ruin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 18, 2015 2:14:19 PM UTC
One of the proposed explanations.
The great Ronald Coase, in 1937, came up with the theory of the firm which "offered an economic explanation of why individuals choose to form partnerships, companies and other business entities rather than trading bilaterally through contracts on a market." His idea is that there are costs to having firms but that transaction costs are lower within a firm, by which he meant cost of searching, bargaining time, secrets, etc. These are supposed to outweigh some the benefits of competition. So competition works, but it is optimal to have firms competing than just smaller units.
+ A simple extension related to SITM: firms exist because employees have more skin in the game as they have more to lose in some situations. For instance, a contractor has many clients, an employee is the equivalent of a person with a single client. You can have a complicated chain where one supplier can put you in trouble because another supplier is now frozen. The supplier cares about you but he has other clients and doesn't need ALL of them to be satisfied, just MOST of them (not even).
+ In fact employees are rather insecure and although they may have slack and inefficiencies, they are more dependent precisely because they are inefficient and after years of employment are no longer able to work independent of a protector of job security. So it is this insecurity that makes them loyal, and escape the ubercompetitive system of contracts.
+Great literature beyond Coase: Alchian, Dempsetz, Williamson, etc. This idea came to me listening to a podcast by Russel Roberts.
+ Relational vs Transactional capitalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:46:39 PM UTC
The one ON Coase not BY Coase
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:47:30 PM UTC
Excellent point. Bilateral commitment, ingroups. That's actually what Elinor Ostrom worked on.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:47:44 PM UTC
Relational vs Transactional Capitalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:30:40 PM UTC
Indeed. Lowers failure hence necessarily makes them sticky.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:30:54 PM UTC
Not possible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:31:19 PM UTC
Middle managers get sacked if there is disruption in the flow.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:44:54 PM UTC
God bless you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 9:11:19 PM UTC
That's Ostrom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 11:42:21 PM UTC
This is NOT the Coase theorem. Different paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 17, 2015 1:19:34 AM UTC
The Coase theorem is about how externalities are dealt with by the market in the "near" absence of transaction costs or presence of "low" t.c. The only thing in common the The Nature of the Firm and The Problem of Social Costs is transaction costs, low in one case, high in another.
It does not address the worse effect of disrupting interdependence in natural systems; this is just a simple comparison of concentration effects.
Note that there is NO tail risk study for GMOs. Not a single one.
This is temporarily here as it will be refined later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 5:44:21 PM UTC
which email?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 16, 2015 8:48:09 PM UTC
We encountered the author on twitter. Joe Norman scratched the surface, the guy is CLUEEEEEEEELESS.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/business/dealbook/another-too-big-to-fail-system-in-gmos.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 13, 2015 8:39:07 PM UTC
I put the PP paper here. No trolling "geneticists" committing fallacies we outline in paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 14, 2015 12:42:38 AM UTC
Same way driving at 15 mph is not as dangerous as driving at 6000 miles per hour. Kapish?
In the earlier discussion on Greece and that thing called "Europe", the analysis *olive oil/butter* was grounded in the method of the *annales*, a school of history that is based in more prosaic daily life, away from the sensational events of history such as who ruled, which coup, which war, which geopolitical BS, etc. --things that appear learned but are in fact journalistic. It is vastly more sound statistically as it explores robust series of facts rather than the personalities and biographies or accounts of wars (a modern approach would be to focus on diabetes and traffic jams than the sensational shark attacks or plane crashes).
+ So instead of studying Roman History in terms of Caesar and Pompey, you study the daily life and body of laws and customs.
+ I accidentally discovered the book "A History of Daily Life" (4 vol. in English) 30 years ago and Vol 1 (Ancient Romans) has been near my bed since. Another representative book for the approach is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's "Montaillou Village Occitan". And, for our beloved Mediterranean, take Braudel's magnificient opus.
+ It is in a way more pleasant to read as an account of Venice based on trade rather than abstract geopolitical BS makes you smell the spices.
+ Since the discovery of the works of Duby, Braudel, Bloch, Aries, et al. I have been unable to read conventional history books of, say, one on the Ottoman Empire that focuses on the Sultans, without irritation. It feels like historians across the board are playing the repulsive "narrative nonfiction" style of the New Yorker.
+ This was pointed out by Jack McNally in the discussion on oil vs butter, whom I thank.
+ PS. Other Books: *Courtesans and Fishcakes* intead of some BS about the Peloponesian wars, where you see how the Greeks ate bread with the left hand. Or *The Identity of France* which tells you the French spoke no French in 1914, etc.
PPS. This is why historians claiming Italy was dangerous before the unification didn't realize the death toll from these conflicts was very small (discussion in *Silent Risk*).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 12, 2015 5:50:16 PM UTC
Other Books: *Courtesans and Fishcakes* intead of some BS about the Peloponesian wars, where you see how the Greeks ate bread with the left hand. Or *The Identity of France*.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 12, 2015 5:56:10 PM UTC
Bingo! This is why historians claiming Italy was dangerous before the unification didn't realize the death toll from these conflicts was very small.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 12, 2015 5:58:04 PM UTC
Yes. A wonderfuuuuuuuuuuuuuul series by the great Georges Duby.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 12, 2015 7:24:33 PM UTC
"cette poussière d'actes de vies individuelles attachées les unes aux autres" THanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 12, 2015 7:25:50 PM UTC
Indeed! Excellent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 13, 2015 12:35:37 AM UTC
Will Durant was a BS operator.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 12, 2015 4:06:35 PM UTC
Please read page on how to comment on aphorism.
+ There are two natural cultural (eventually leading by mixing to ethnic) demarcations: butter vs olive oil (and eventually a third, the palm tree). The demarcation is robust: if people have the same food, they are the same (or eventually through mixing) become the same. Now if a nonblind but deaf Martian visited Turkey and Greece, he would think they are the same people (same with Lebanon and Western Syria). If words are different, body language in the Levant, Greece, Turkey and Southern Italy is similar. "Una faccia, una razza". But a bureaucrat blinded by constructions would put the Greek in the same unit as the German, and bundle the Turk with the Huns in the Altai mountains near China.
+ But Mediterraneans are integrated as a socio-cultural unit. This is not just recent; the integration is 5000 years old in the East and 3000 in the West. The trend to "Europeanize" came with German scholarship which starting in 1820s (one Müller) tried to kill any Levantine/Babylonian connection to Greece, trying to give Germany some nobility in its historical roots, while French scholarship was until then considering Greece as deeply rooted in the Levant and Asia Minor, as a continuum from Babylon to the Phoenicians to classical Greece (mythology says that Europa herself was Phoenician). The rise of antisemitism played a part: the Teutonic cultural separation from the Levantine Canaanite race (the Jews and Phoenicians had near-identical language and ethnicity).
+ The Levant and what is now Greece spent at least 1000 years in the same political unit Rome-Byzantium and another few hunded in the Ottoman Empire; the Greeks and the Germans have now about 40 years together.
+ The nation-state started integrating the Mediterranean people. During the 19th Century only a few coastal cities such as Marseille and Toulon in Southern France spoke French, the rest spoke Provencal or Catalan.
+ The idea of a Mediterranean unit is not popular. Partly because it has been linked to Mussolini.
+ The Mycenians did not use a Semitic language (linear B). But the word Knossos (the capital) means "settlement" in Phoenician.
+ If a French person looks like a Mediterranean and speaks French, it is by colonization. The same applies to the "Aryanization" of Greece, to the "Turkification" of Asia Minor, and the "Arabization" of Syria or the "Aryanization" of India. Arian/Semitic/Hun is not a distinction beyond the language spoken.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 12:31:24 PM UTC
No derrida BS, please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 12:34:24 PM UTC
I said "loose" because I do not believe that leagues are natural. But a Mediterranean one is LESS unnatural than a "Europe".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 12:34:47 PM UTC
Explain in rational arguments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 12:39:07 PM UTC
"Couple of thousand years?" 200 years ago Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, and less than 100 years ago a large share of Greeks were concentrated in Turkish cities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 12:48:16 PM UTC
Remove the Levant. A Mediterranean unit Malta-Greece- Sicily-Calabria-Naples-Spain-Portugal makes more sense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 12:54:01 PM UTC
I agree: the Greek threw themselves more into "Europe" because of the Turks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:02:10 PM UTC
You can fool yourself all you want by calling yourself "European", but you cannot fool me. Nor can you eventually fool the system with the "integration". This delusion explains why you don't realize that there is effectively a problem with the Greek presence in "Europe".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:09:55 PM UTC
Yes, "gathering". Or knisia, mikness, miknesse (broom), etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:11:56 PM UTC
Nobody is discussing Croatia. And the last thing I need is for someone to lecture me about what is "my level".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:12:13 PM UTC
Go elsewhere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:17:03 PM UTC
Thanks George Dimos. Will look. That was when the Greek centers of gravity were Alexandria and Constantinople.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:19:14 PM UTC
Ioannis Yan. America is not build from an ethnocultural orientation, but as a political system. Europe is not so much so, as it is dominated by Germany. But I agree that joining Europe had its benefits in terms of governance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:21:40 PM UTC
From what I've read the Greeks were never excited by the importation of a German ruling family; what precipitated the distancing from the East was Turkish nationalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:27:59 PM UTC
Interestingly, the Greeks fared sort of well under Ottoman rule (though not under Turkish rule). The tradition was that the minister of foreign affairs of the Grande Porte was Greek (f.i. the father of the mathematician Caratheodory). Senior Ottoman civil servants were traditionally Greek or Armenians as Ottomans feared a Turk would try to plot against the Sultan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:43:11 PM UTC
That is the stable solution. Bring Turkey back to the Mediterranean, away from Saudi Arabia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:44:56 PM UTC
I do not believe the common currency is a problem. When I traded Drachmas I saw that everything of significance was linked to the Swiss Franc of the US $. Only chickenshit was in purely Drachma.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 2:08:01 PM UTC
Some BS in the replies. Some arguments were of the sort I rephrase as: "Well. Europe isn't just about common history and culture but common goals and values". Then why is the discourse about "us vs them" when people invole the "we" for Europe? And if some kind of cultural unity wasn't a criterion, why is it invoked? The EU failed on economic grounds; but I am addressing its failures on *cultural* ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 2:10:09 PM UTC
Bruce Godfrey then why not add Canada to the mix?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 2:10:56 PM UTC
And why the BS then with the "common history" discourse?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 2:18:50 PM UTC
Mattia Picchi Excellent analysis. Everything organized from the top goes wrong as it leads to overinterventionism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 2:44:13 PM UTC
Indeed. I remember luch with "Fat Tony". How are you both doing?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 2:47:37 PM UTC
The point is that NOBODY would have lent them in Drachmas in such a size. Borrowing in such size would have to have been done in EUR.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 3:22:22 PM UTC
These "Turks" are largely Greek or local Asia Minor population. Most of alteration is in the language.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 6:03:07 PM UTC
Indeed; it is the fact that Europe is not that simple, not as defined, and not as exclusive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 6:09:11 PM UTC
As much as the Greeks (and other Levantines) hate the Turks, they are quite a bit the same people. It doesn't mean one should not have grudges; simply separate grudges from your long term interests.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 6:17:12 PM UTC
The point: Mycenians used linear B (nonsemitic), but I suspect earlier Minoans were somehow partly Semitic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 6:25:28 PM UTC
In other words I believe that linear A was largely Semitic https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Kx0VAAAAIAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=%22linear+A%22+phoenician+by+Jan+Best&ots=wBd-tW-oLy&sig=ph7AzAwTX1LvcxliBL_jynWXSAk#v=onepage&q=%22linear%20A%22%20phoenician%20by%20Jan%20Best&f=false
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 7:12:23 PM UTC
I thought it was clear that I did not see Europe as a Platonic entity, that's the whole point. Is it so unclear?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 7:17:27 PM UTC
No, but he has more in common with a Spaniard or a Sardinian than with a Northern Frenchman. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 7:20:42 PM UTC
Exactly. You got the transportation argument. The center of Greece, twice in history, happened to be in Alexandria (once major once minor). Alexandria had less to do with Egypt than with the Mediterranean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 7:21:23 PM UTC
Finally someone saw Braudel! La petite histoire is more robust than theories about "Europe".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 8:58:19 PM UTC
Guido Gothenburg be careful with your reaction and language, we are using cultural arguments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 10:53:45 PM UTC
Shengen/CEE are irrelevant under free movement of goods and labor; granted these can be restricted to a broader set of states more economically similar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 11:03:39 PM UTC
Carlo Lavezzari why not the reverse?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 11:06:31 PM UTC
What is now Germany ALSO is a mix of tribes...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 11:25:58 PM UTC
Added: if you want to use history/culture, use them properly ("annales" style).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1Dm2ZYeA6U
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 10, 2015 9:33:28 PM UTC
Yes it i discussed in the Q & A.
Even thin-tailed variables are unpredictable.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/Propagation.pdf
PS: Actually we show how we lose predictability by adding dimensions, with a trade-off, so it can lead to precise policies and decisions
.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 10, 2015 12:27:28 PM UTC
Amateurs have fun.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 10, 2015 12:44:43 PM UTC
In the aftermath of the Tim Hunt affair, I emphasise my main affiliation as "flaneur", the rest is partial and unnecessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 10, 2015 1:33:48 PM UTC
Adding: Actually we show how we lose predictability by adding dimensions, with a trade-off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 10, 2015 2:00:20 PM UTC
No it is not present in statistics, to the contrary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 10, 2015 3:39:07 PM UTC
Ridley conflates left and right tail and the fact that the left tail has an absorbing barrier.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 10, 2015 5:55:28 PM UTC
I have a derivation showing why left tail isn't affected by mean in Silent Risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 11, 2015 11:11:59 AM UTC
No standard mathematical statistics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 6, 2015 12:55:34 PM UTC
Excellent
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 6, 2015 12:57:01 PM UTC
And, unfortunately, his enemies
- When one discusses events related to a casino roulette wheel, one can easily make a distinction between realizations and the property of the roulette wheel. Anyone can see that it is highly irrational to make comments and build theories on past history, except *in their relation to* the properties of the roulette table --otherwise, one is fooled by randomness, or committing the gambler's fallacy.
- When discussing a given history of gambles and making claims, we know *exactly* whether we are referring to the *outcomes* from the roulette wheel or to the roulette wheel.
- Now in real life, when we talk about *crime*, or incidence of *ebola*, or such things, alas, we use the same word "crime" or "victims" to refer to both the realizations (i.e., the history of the process) and the *generator* or what here is equivalent to the roulette wheel. Verbalistic effects cause us to conflate the two.
- But when we write down things mathematically, we clearly see that one is called "random variable", the other is called "realization" so mathematically the two are separate. When we discuss series of random variables we talk about "stochastic process". Analytical claims are always made about the random variable or the process, not the realization.
- What I have just illustrated seems simple. But, alas, many people make fallacies and we have to fight journalistic imbeciles and social scientists conflating past history of, say Ebola with its properties. (More technically, the history of Ebola is NOT an empirical claim about its properties, except that they correspond if and only if the process has thin tails.)
PS- Which brings me to the value of mathematics: its value lies less in the computation, the numbers, than in the use of clear-cut definitions that avoid sloppiness of language. I see mathematics, particularly in probability, close to legal theory, where everything is as explicitly defined as possible. When things are well defined, their relations (or lack of) become immediable visible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 6, 2015 1:39:23 AM UTC
I take calculus any time before stats...
(More lessons from the UCL episode aside from mob terror.)
One reason to avoid titles, prizes, etc. things not organic: I surmise that it makes people more, not less reputationally fragile and vastly more conscious of it. From my own experience with fights, winners of the Nobel (or rather pseudoNobel) in economics are easy to terrorize, much easier than ordinary academics. I had direct fights with 4 of them and observed/discussed with another 3: total insecurity, loss aversion.
This is not good for the person, and not good for research as people are scared to take risky positions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 4, 2015 6:59:40 PM UTC
Sir Hunt is OK. It is about others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 4, 2015 9:26:36 PM UTC
Should we zap this idiot?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 3, 2015 1:00:12 PM UTC
Yes posted it and have been communicating with Louise M.
A society of administrators and insecure, reputation-vulnerable laborers creates a dystopian society managed by the lowest common denominator, in which all the gains in legal sophistication vanish, turning people into pure slaves, no longer independent, fearful of opening their mouths, terrorized byf the slightest smear and *no due process* in the undoing of reputations.
For a perfect illustration of the process, this is the investigation by Louise Mensch who appears to be one of the very few people in the UK to have both balls and a sense of justice.
http://unfashionista.com/2015/07/02/the-royal-societys-diversity-committee-pre-judged-timhunt-now-ucl-should-give-him-due-process/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 3, 2015 11:32:43 AM UTC
This is an exception that confirms the rule.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 3, 2015 12:32:22 PM UTC
You are right... another reason to be antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 3, 2015 2:31:11 PM UTC
It rhymes well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 3, 2015 2:41:12 PM UTC
retweeted...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 3, 2015 4:46:05 PM UTC
Exactly. Skin in the game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 3, 2015 8:24:30 PM UTC
Stanislav Mudrets You are not getting Jackson Howard Wagner's point, stop using straw man.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 4, 2015 3:31:53 PM UTC
As I said let's focus on solving this very visible case then use it as precedent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 4, 2015 4:11:44 PM UTC
Gary Bradski I disagree. I was told that a writer should never be called with any "right-wing" label as it destroys his reputation (anti-intellectual), but the reverse is not true.
Boycotting UCL, twice and invite anyone who has respect for freedom of expression, disdain for hypocrisy, and feels that intellectual life should not fall prey to Soviet-style arbitrary bureaucrats, to do so.
Please note that UCL, aside from having a campus in Qatar, is penalizing a defenseless old white male while letting hate preachers operate with impunity. And without even any attempt at due process, fact checking, blinded by twiter mobs and loud policing operators. Despicable hypocrites.
---
UPDATE: Looks like academics in UK are afraid of speaking too loud as they are afraid of administrators and the thought police giving them a label. I was told that there is no tenure in UK and "performance reviews" can be arbitrary. Spineless slaves; they don't deserve to do research.
---
(Had to delete old post because of problem with cropping phone numbers and we inadvertently lost comments..)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 6:10:46 PM UTC
Sorry we lost the comments, hope to retrieve them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 6:35:52 PM UTC
Fucking idiot this is the nonsense I have been fighting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 7:44:37 PM UTC
Exactly they are afraid of mobs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 7:58:41 PM UTC
You shoud talk to the states boycotting North Korea. Come back when you are done, meanwhile comments on this are closed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 7:59:17 PM UTC
Scary, this trend is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 8:33:46 PM UTC
Fucking idiot I want freedom of speech in society. Go publish elsewhere. A journal can control who can publish articles. You are diverting the problem from UCL to a general one of boycott and boycott victims, which is not the topic. Go use your freedom of speech away from here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 8:34:19 PM UTC
I am tired of idiots and no longer want sloppy reasoning here!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 10:24:53 PM UTC
It has to do with double standards. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 2, 2015 10:26:59 PM UTC
The point here is: where are the students? When I was a student I never missed an opportunity to spent a night in jail.
Is is a faux or some valid results?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 30, 2015 3:39:14 PM UTC
Likely faux. Unconditional prob of faux ~= 90%
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 9:15:09 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris we are 2 year behind on a NY Greek lunch with tarama, octopus and fresh feta cheese.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 9:31:28 PM UTC
OK, tender feta
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 9:34:22 PM UTC
Paul Wehage you need to outgrow 1970s style psychoanalyzing people. Modernize.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 9:41:52 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita, zapped him: salon rules means also not insulting the host. But the main rule is that don't go for a spot for aphorisms if you don't like aphorisms and if you do don't complain about aphorisms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 9:43:54 PM UTC
Joe Norman this seems to be a new specialty for us.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 9:45:51 PM UTC
Andreas Kulukulu OK OK I can't describe good feta but I accept what you mean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 9:46:16 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris last lunch we figured out we were plagiarized by Dobelli.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 27, 2015 10:39:39 AM UTC
That was how it started.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 27, 2015 10:40:43 AM UTC
Yes but lies are eventually fragile. Not truth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 28, 2015 1:40:23 AM UTC
OK OK Joe Norman I entered the fray
Two things. First, one really needs to be independent to open one's mouth and avoid falling prey to a bunch of mob misinterpreting what you are saying. Misinterpretation is iniquitous and independence is the only shield --financial independence is not necessary, working a minimum wage job provides protection. As we saw on this page from the people I zapped there is a high density of militants with some localized brain damage who are oblivious to any reasoning, attacking people on things about which they actually agree.
Second, the Tim Hunt episode effectively would not have happened in the U.S. where we take the first amendment and free speech very, very seriously. There have been only few cases of academics losing jobs and these took place for technicalities (as in the Salaita case).
To explain how one can be misinterpreted by the press, I once presented our precautionary principle in the UK, with 5-7 newspapers and many bloggers calling me "climate denier", which was the exact opposite of my position. I struck back but the only solution is to not depend on the press. Again, the UK press is vastly more unprofessional as these things do not happen easily here. I thank God every day I live in the U.S.
----
Guardian link (my letter):
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/aug/27/climate-change-taleb-tax-conservatives
----
Tim Hunt link
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-demands-apology-from-sir-tim-hunts-critics-and-claims-leaked-transcript-shows-sexist-comments-were-lighthearted-banter-10341160.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 4:25:47 PM UTC
Not true. Maybe in a community college things are not easy for adjuncts, but the procedure is such that inquiries take place after complaints and free speech prevails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 4:26:31 PM UTC
Businesses are not universities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 4:31:42 PM UTC
Larry Summers is a professor a Harvard. Free speech. When he was an executive he upset the females who did not give him confidence, plus other things he did to allienate faculty. A manager is NOT free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 4:32:10 PM UTC
Excellent!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 26, 2015 4:56:43 PM UTC
Rachida Sommerfeldt there was a law suit, a due process. In the US people are innocent unless proven guilty. Stay in Europe or whatever...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 27, 2015 3:42:18 PM UTC
Please stop the continuation of the trial here. Go ask for retrial and offer your theories.
In the paper, Longo and associates saw health benefits from fasting that was NOT associated with reduction of calories, but solely from the variability (5 day fast compensated by subsequent boost in calories). So it is NOT the caloric deprivation but the convexity of the human body to change (over a specified range) that is the subject under concern. Luckily you can detect that without too many experiments given its mathematical necessity (the link between convexity and benefits of volatility).
This report missed the point. And look at the silly weight loss connotation.
http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/2015/06/24/reverse-signs-aging-safely-5-day-fast-month/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 25, 2015 3:51:17 PM UTC
I zapped someone who posted religious hate. Ban was answering him not Timothy. But Timothy is plain wrong.
+ a single decision vs. a RULE generating a sequence of decisions. One decision can be rational while the rule is not. It would be rational for me to eat tuna today but under repetition it would harm the planet so it is OK to keep switching preferences. We saw that intransitive preferences or random preferences can be very rational.
+ it may seem irrational to not take the direct route between 2 points, but under convexity of payoffs/nonlinear transformation it becomes so. You may discover a new direction.
+ local vs. global rationality. Mental accounting: say husband would not buy a tie by himself but his wife --with a joint checking account --gives it to him as a gift and he is excited. It could be irrational for a given instance but as a method it prevents people from splurging.
+ ludic vs. ecological environments. Some actions show biases in a casino and are irrational but real life is not a casino and these can be really rational. Life is ambiguous, laboratory settings are not.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 6:41:28 PM UTC
No. Forcing people to invest in the stock market is idiotic paternalism...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 6:41:41 PM UTC
and under fat tails is very very risky.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 6:42:26 PM UTC
NUDGE people are clueless see Chap 6 in Silent Risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 7:19:49 PM UTC
Same as intransitivity, let the environment decide and bring variations in decisions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 7:20:36 PM UTC
Excellent book. His Nobel lecture is clearer than the book that it expands, so read it first, then the book.
Excited to see Nietzche got the point!
" The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) ..."
In Beyond Good and Evil, I, 4.
Why was this burried? Because scholars do believe in such sentence, given the zeitgeist of "rationalization".
I need to thank an anonymous person on twitter.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 11:34:01 AM UTC
I am working on bias-variance where we see that it is OK to miss the truth if it lowers the error rate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 11:45:45 AM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 12:43:17 PM UTC
This is rationality of decision making; epistemology needs to remain nonpragmatist.
This also illustrates how to do rigorous statistics in the absence of a textbook recipe for a fat-tailed process, by means of Monte Carlo analyses.
I will be teaching a course called "Extreme Risk Analytics" at NYU-Engineering this fall and will have to produce an 80-p lecture notes booklet, which I will write progressively from interaction with the class. SILENT RISK is too advanced, so I need a more introductory book.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/comment.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 11:44:20 AM UTC
It is too deep for students without advanced knowledge of mathematical statistics, but I have been using segments from it. The baby book will be a good bridge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 11:52:48 AM UTC
How the Monte Carlo simulations converge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 12:27:39 PM UTC
Bruno Jahn The Roodman fellow did not understand that the autocorrelation test for events was sufficient for the purpose and any additional squeezing of info from data was a no no; he wanted to data mine subsegments. The problem is that by the Slutzky-Yule effect (something I described in Fooled by Randomness without naming it) it is IMPOSSIBLE to not find a frequency of drop in violence. That is the FBR effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 12:28:22 PM UTC
Very encouraging.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 1:00:22 PM UTC
The syllabus of EXTREME RISK ANALYTICS https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/Lecture%20Syllabus.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 1:51:55 PM UTC
It is a question of methodology. Nobody should be called a scientist if he packages anecdotes for evidence and plays on sensationalism. So the rest of his "work" would be suspicious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 5:16:23 PM UTC
A drop is not natural ex ante, but ex post if you pick a spike it is natural that what follows is lower.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 6:49:19 PM UTC
Casella and Berger for introduction. But all Gaussian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 22, 2015 9:31:05 PM UTC
Before posting your BS did you consider that it refers to a longer paper?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 23, 2015 2:35:26 PM UTC
jazi zilber just showed this. But it is for murders not wars. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 9:28:31 AM UTC
In probability there is no "short term" for homogeneous arrival times, i.e. when the probabilities don't change.
It is now safe to say that about anyone who ever said anything remotely favorable (or nonnegative) about the Wahabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was getting paid for it. Prostitutes.
This post isn't about Saudi Arabia; rather about the purchase and sale of public "opinion".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 9:43:13 PM UTC
Which bank? Last time I worked for a bank was 17 years ago.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 9:56:33 PM UTC
It was a joke.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 9:56:49 PM UTC
April fools.
or
THERE CAN BE NO INTELLECTUAL LIFE WITHOUT THIS ELEMENTARY RULE OF HONESTY IN REPRESENTATION
You can attack what a person *said* or what the person *meant*. The former is more sensational. The mark of a charlatan is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on *some* of his/her specific statement ("look at what he said") rather than attacking his position ("look at what he means" or "look at what he stands for"), the latter of which requires a broader knowledge of the proposed idea. The same applies to the interpretation of religious texts.
Given that it is impossible for anyone to write a perfectly rationally argued document without a segment that, out of context, can be transformed by some dishonest copywriter to appear totally absurd and lend itself to sensationalization, politicians and charlatans hunt for these segments. So do some, but not all journalists, which can lead to the degradation of public debates.
The strength of the great Karl Popper is that he always started with an unerring representation of the opponents positions, often exhaustive, before he systematically proceeded to destroy them.
Twitter lends itself (via appeal to mobs, with "retweets" ) to these sensationalized statements: extracting the most likely to appear absurd and violating the principle of charity. With the growth of the internet get ready for more. So we get a progressive debasing of intellectual life with the rise of the media.
And you can easily tell if someone is a charlatan at their absence of use of the principle of charity, or worse, the reliance straw man arguments by which one not only extracts a comment but *also* provides an interpretation.
COMMENTS
I just subjected the *principle of charity* as presented in philosopy to the Lindy test: it is only about 60 years old. Why? Does it meant that it is bogus? Well, we did not need it before before discussions were never about slogans and snapshots but synthesis of a given position. Read Aquinas, 8 centuries ago, and you always see sections with QUESTIO->PRAETERIA, OBJECTIONES, SED CONTRA, etc. describing with a legalistic precision the positions being attacked and looking for a flaw in it and a compromise. That was the practice.
UPDATE- Bradford Tuckfield wrote: " I think this principle is much older than 60 years. Consider in the book of Isaiah, chapter 29, verse 21: he denounces the wicked who "make a man an offender for a word," implying that people were focusing on specific words rather than positions, and that this is a bad practice."
So it seems that the Lindy effect wins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 11:30:46 AM UTC
Schulbz van Koleka Incidentally I do not believe ad hominem is necessarily a fallacy. We exclude nonqualified people from technical discussions, say a nutritionist from mathematical conversations and I tend to exclude journos from risk discussions because they take the conversation in sensational territory.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 11:42:04 AM UTC
Fuck them. An author with a large body of work is not under obligation to pander to people like you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 11:43:40 AM UTC
I am talking about Sam Harris presentation of MY work and statements.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 11:52:44 AM UTC
Another bullshit: should every word I write be a legal contract with exhibits?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 12:00:31 PM UTC
PS- If you are misunderstood AND your position is made explicit elsewhere, then you satisfied your side of the contract with the audience.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 12:01:15 PM UTC
I didn't write 3000 pages for bullshitters like you to lecture me on my obligations to explain my points.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 12:13:06 PM UTC
Declan Mansfield I have no problem with "criticism", I have problems with bullshitters like you calling their bullshit "criticism".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 12:30:15 PM UTC
Dawkins has done the same with EO Wilson and Novak's work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 12:33:43 PM UTC
Precisely, NO.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 1:21:29 PM UTC
Ciceronian ethics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 1:24:40 PM UTC
Bradford Tuckfield I posted an update with your statement. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 1:39:42 PM UTC
You are violating elementary logic.The fact that some statements may have deeper meaning than words doesn't mean that ALL statements cannot be taken at face value.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 1:40:19 PM UTC
Please do not post before thinking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 1:41:32 PM UTC
The position not the words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 5:08:02 PM UTC
How about now?
It is easy to be politically correct under no skin-in-the game, when it represents no personal risk, or doesn't harm one's profits. U.K. universities' largest donor is Saudi Arabia (where women can't drive and bloggers are whipped and jailed). They gladly take the money --unconditionally. But the administration of UCL takes it out on a defenseless 72 year old scientist who made a stupid locker room joke, and doesn't represent any danger or potential profit. This is a combination of hypocrisy, cowardice and prostitution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:26:26 PM UTC
What this Maria Spirova and other imbecile responders don't realize is that it is highly *unethical* to react only selectively, where the least harm to oneself is done. It is as if you only arrested a certain category of criminals, using their crimes as justification.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:31:07 PM UTC
Fucking idiot who is in favor of locker room jokes?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:33:23 PM UTC
Some of the hypocrites here are turning my remark as being in favor of Tim Hunt rather than against two-sided justice and complacency with Saudi Arabia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:33:53 PM UTC
Some of the hypocrites here are turning my remark as being in favor of Tim Hunt rather than against two-sided justice and complacency with Saudi Arabia. Who are you fooling?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:49:40 PM UTC
This fucking idiot is switching the debate... who is he fooling?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 2:59:46 PM UTC
Note the maneuvering by these hypocrites. The post is about hypocrisy and skin in the game, to feel better they turn it into anti-feminism. Hypocrites, disgusting hypocrites, but doesn't fool us here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 3:30:16 PM UTC
This Maria Spirova is playing a game by diverting the discussion from hypocrisy to something most agree on, gender equality. This is called spin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 4:04:18 PM UTC
And gave his son a doctorate...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 4:05:32 PM UTC
Explain what your remark has to do with the post other than yo divert.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 18, 2015 4:13:18 PM UTC
The post is not about Tim H but about DUPLICITY.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 19, 2015 1:48:11 AM UTC
I've noticed from the people who were zapped the following trait: they feel so strongly about their idea that it allows them to play straw man with an argument: substituting an argument for another, and not backing away as any reminder that it is not the right discussion is treated as if one was saying that "women should be repressed in the workplace."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 19, 2015 1:52:05 AM UTC
Maria Spirova you are a fraud. But we keep some here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 19, 2015 6:09:43 PM UTC
Why are you nitpicking here?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 19, 2015 10:21:24 PM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 20, 2015 2:22:41 AM UTC
I think there is a petition ... I signed one.
Hypocrites and cowards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:57:44 AM UTC
More understanding with those who behead people than those who make locker room remarks? Fucking dweeb!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 17, 2015 9:11:50 AM UTC
Guru this is how people bullshit you away from moral clarity. This Alexandru imbecile is doing the verbose spin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 17, 2015 11:15:46 AM UTC
Who are you bullshitting? Get out of here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 17, 2015 1:02:51 PM UTC
I systematically zapped those who spin here.
---
PS A world of hypocrites: they buy oil from Saudi Arabia yet mob-lynch a poor defenseless idiot (wirh Nobel) for chauvinist remarks. Hypocrites and cowards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 4:42:14 PM UTC
You cannot argue for freedom of expression if you condition it on taste.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:05:30 PM UTC
The point is that if the man was a butcher people would be still buying meat from him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:15:51 PM UTC
The critics here are either stupid or don't get my point that an opinion offensive or not is an opinion. Very stupid.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:16:47 PM UTC
And that some jobs prevent one frim being able to express an opinion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:18:10 PM UTC
It means he is not free to offend you if working for others.
Are you thick or what?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:21:40 PM UTC
Fucking idiot i am not defending bigotry. Read my post
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:22:36 PM UTC
Nobody is defending him read the fucking point it is about freedom and employment. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 5:47:05 PM UTC
Fucking hypocrites who buy oil from Saudi Arabia and savage this poor guy because he is defenseless.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:23:46 PM UTC
Hypocrite. Stop buying oil from Saudi Arabia. Enroll in fighting them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:24:40 PM UTC
Hypocrites hypocrites. Take some risks and go after Saudi Arabia not some idiotic professor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 7:52:43 PM UTC
I am a moral obligation to not offend not an institutional one
---
Under ubiquitous surveillance, it is not just the state watching people, but also people watching the state, and, worse: people watching people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 12:29:21 PM UTC
How many times have you encountered a trolley problem in real life?
Many, such as Winston Churchill, were ashamed to be shielded from harm when soldiers were not, and took a large amount of personal risks, for instance by crossing the Atlantic while chased by the Luftwaffe. It is the same conscience that dictates that the captain of the ship is last to leave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 7, 2015 7:32:45 PM UTC
Sadek is not quite truthful, rather "rightful"
Intellectual mediocrity & evil don't mix: The FIFA blokes appear to be unaware of the existence of diamonds, which Baal created so one would not need to wire funds via the SWIFT system or walk into a branch with a suitcase full of banknotes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 3, 2015 12:37:54 PM UTC
Bitcoins leave imprints.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 5, 2015 7:08:41 PM UTC
You don't purchase the diamonds. You use them as currency.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 6, 2015 10:31:28 AM UTC
You're not getting it. It is used as currency from the beginning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 6, 2015 7:36:50 PM UTC
First, explain how you start with shady money. You get them on trees?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 7, 2015 5:58:28 PM UTC
Bitcoin is the mother of all traceable items.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDY_fh2TVlI&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 29, 2015 7:56:00 PM UTC
who is CLS?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 29, 2015 8:52:46 PM UTC
The world has not been the same since Benoit Mandelbrot died.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 30, 2015 11:25:18 AM UTC
I view Zizek as an entertainer with insights and no pretense, unlike, say, Pinker, who tries to play science.
----
PS- Sepp Blatter is far easier to get than Gotti. Why? First, no omerta. These people are amateurs with nothing bonding them. Second, the internet. Times have changed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 27, 2015 7:49:54 PM UTC
From what I know from the mafia and the Feds, expect 100s of arrests especially if the Europeans get on the bus.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 28, 2015 4:04:35 PM UTC
The mafia acted like that initially. Till FBI surprised them by going seriously after them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 2, 2015 7:36:48 PM UTC
Hehehe
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 20, 2015 12:54:03 AM UTC
On right track. Cheap is an easy way to increase payoff.
https://medium.com/bull-market/violent-warfare-is-on-the-wane-right-99223faa45e6
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 18, 2015 11:37:34 AM UTC
No and no.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 18, 2015 11:45:50 AM UTC
Here is a Lognormal ... doesn't fit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 18, 2015 3:39:59 PM UTC
Please do not discuss stuff outside the data and subject and make us say things we did not explicitly say in the paper. Kapish? Thank you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 19, 2015 12:25:12 AM UTC
Hacking wars.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 19, 2015 3:41:16 PM UTC
Someone was giving us theories. We are explaining what claims CANNOT be made from the data.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 17, 2015 5:39:45 PM UTC
You can see junk science here: https://www.facebook.com/TheBetterAngelsofOurNature?fref=ts
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 17, 2015 6:36:29 PM UTC
Only after year 0 (no punic, etc.). We used bounds incorporating estimates and did ALL permutations knowing some dick was going to bicker about data. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 17, 2015 8:24:40 PM UTC
Used 350K as upper bound for Jewish wars including famine...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 17, 2015 8:43:19 PM UTC
Iceni revolt, one side reported 70K. Encyclopedia of Wars.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 17, 2015 9:20:28 PM UTC
Tacitus is not a reference. You turned out to be wrong on all the "exceptions" you found.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 17, 2015 9:21:17 PM UTC
And we have a METHODOLOGY to deal with absent info and unreliable data. Did you read the paper?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 18, 2015 11:23:29 AM UTC
Nicholas Teague this is professional research not popular science. Nothing outside the intro/abstract should be addressed to nonspecialist or researchers. That is the case for about every paper in physics, stats, math, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 18, 2015 1:28:20 PM UTC
The point "we also assume
that their occurrence is random across the data" is for the purpose of clustering. You can miss data in the past not in the present without much effect on total, especially if small.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 18, 2015 2:04:52 PM UTC
James Honzik reload the file. Let me know your name we can thank you if you wish in the Appendix.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 15, 2015 1:50:53 PM UTC
Not at all! Pascal's wager is in the benefit domain, not the ruin domain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 15, 2015 2:04:31 PM UTC
John Roesink has a severely flawed reasoning. The fact that the planet DID survive known shocks does not imply it WILL survive all unknown shocks, mere survivorship bias argument.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 15, 2015 10:38:21 PM UTC
Strange, we got a wave of standard "climate deniers" hitting the page with BS and insults. And anyone making an analogy to "Pascal's wager" (which doesn't apply to the ruin domain) has been zapped.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 16, 2015 12:11:04 AM UTC
which one?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 16, 2015 1:10:52 AM UTC
How about Paul?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 16, 2015 12:55:48 PM UTC
Reminder: any reference to Pascal wager (which does not apply to the ruin domain) will be zapped.
------
(As usual some people are getting the aphorism wrong. It does not mean one should offend people, it means that if people will eventually end up being offended it is much better early than late. Kapish?)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 13, 2015 1:51:35 PM UTC
As usual some people are getting the aphorism wrong. It does not mean to upset people, it means it should happen early not late.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 11, 2015 12:49:44 PM UTC
Not something desirable.
---
Business (as a barbell with plenty free time on the side) has been the purest way to engage in intellectual life.
P.S. Just discoved Oscar Wilde has said the same thing (partially, about business and arts.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 10, 2015 2:27:42 PM UTC
Business is the purest of human activities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 10, 2015 2:29:51 PM UTC
Added; Business (as a barbell with plenty free time on the side) has been the purest way to engage in intellectual life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 10, 2015 11:28:11 PM UTC
wow! Will cite.
Take diabetes. We are discovering that diabetes is not (as we thought) the result of being overweight, rather the effect of absence of variation, not losing weight, not having periods of starvation (that among other things, clean up the fat deposit in the pancreas that is LIFO). So someone overweight who loses weight can be much better-off than the same person a bit thinner at stable weight.
---
There is plenty of research in diabetes hinting at this from many sides but nobody tried to put a systematic mathematical apparatus on it. Though the math is not trivial (because of path dependence), I was able to play with it with Monte Carlo analyses.
---
Note that the Russians have known that for over a century.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal.htm
See also (easier read)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2385179/I-reversed-diabetes-just-11-days--going-starvation-diet.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 9, 2015 12:32:31 PM UTC
Nonscientific BS... We are made for occasional famine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 9, 2015 12:33:05 PM UTC
They used to cure people by putting them in Sanatoria... fasting for 40 days... no more diabetes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 13, 2015 1:54:49 PM UTC
You don't understand what confirmation bias means. Sorry.
He would be seen pacing outside his house at dinner time, trying to resist going inside. When questioned by his neighbors, his answer was: "I am seasoning my dinner".
----
Note: there are other sources on Socrates than Plato's, portraying a very pragmatic fellow.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 9, 2015 12:28:14 AM UTC
Socrates of Xenophon.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/isthepopeatheist.pdf
--
(Please do not divert the conversation away from the topic at hand, namely revelation of preferences. Thank you.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 7, 2015 9:30:11 AM UTC
The Pope is NOT contradicting the Christian faith. That is my point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 8, 2015 10:57:56 AM UTC
Looks like people aren't getting the gist.The difference between Christian and atheist in the 21st century lies in things that do not lead to dramatic action.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 9, 2015 10:01:46 AM UTC
Mel Kulbicki explain how believers at moment of death TAKE RISKS that athesits don't take. Please explain, or, as I suggest, reread, think, then post.
[Please note the difference between NEED TO and WANT TO before commenting. Some commentators here have made mistakes.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 4, 2015 4:48:50 PM UTC
Many nitpickers didn't get the NEED to prepare for a lecture. NEED, not should not prepare. Fools.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 4, 2015 5:02:28 PM UTC
I zapped a few nasty commentators... People have a hard time distinguishing between NEED and WANT.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 4, 2015 6:03:24 PM UTC
VIsibly you completely missssssssed the idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 5, 2015 1:16:05 PM UTC
fucking idiot I did not become "famous" by marketing.
(Real world vs theory.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 1, 2015 7:47:00 PM UTC
Fat Tony thought so and Fat Tony would not be teaching Socrates, if you see what I mean. A hypocrit would go with the flow.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 2, 2015 8:08:34 PM UTC
Not at all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 2, 2015 8:18:53 PM UTC
I would not teach Socrates today, if you see what I mean; in fact the opposite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 3, 2015 10:54:22 AM UTC
Got rid of some nitpickers... Intellectual life is not enhanced by nitpickers, but degraded by them as they derail from substance. Visibly the aphorism doesn't mean ALL people who voted same way, and the gist is on people who would have voted one way then and differently today. Subtance, only substance.
(Rephrased aphorism)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 27, 2015 8:57:44 PM UTC
The point is symmetry. You can accept it to be gracious, but not use it to prop yourself up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 27, 2015 5:24:57 PM UTC
Yeah yeah yeah... You are telling me as if I cared.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 26, 2015 10:38:22 AM UTC
These idiots are pathologizing the antigmo... they will make it fashionable.
(Note that we are only concerned with wars with > 5000 casualties).
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/WeisenbornDataProject.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 23, 2015 11:05:47 PM UTC
For the tails, only conflicts >50K seem to matter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 23, 2015 11:06:05 PM UTC
Statistics are not affected by the small wars.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 24, 2015 2:08:45 AM UTC
Individual data points don't matter... A million random uniform between low and high estimates. We got the result: faaaaaaaaat tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 24, 2015 12:20:19 PM UTC
PDF is OK... Reloaded just in case
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:29:06 AM UTC
Why are you doing this to me?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 22, 2015 9:21:42 PM UTC
lotteries
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 19, 2015 6:32:42 PM UTC
Masroor Bangesh A sense of entitlement is common in places with a strong class barrier.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:35:11 AM UTC
I wait indefinitely the first 2 times. That's it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 11, 2015 3:35:53 PM UTC
4 miles
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 11, 2015 3:36:27 PM UTC
Steven Deschain They are doing both.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/smear.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 11, 2015 4:00:08 PM UTC
Sebastião Durão If you think this is publicity ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 11, 2015 5:34:03 PM UTC
Their activities were public, just not in your sphere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 12, 2015 1:56:28 AM UTC
He's done... he knows there is more stuff.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 8, 2015 6:12:55 PM UTC
It is working on f(x) [exposure from x] rather than x.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/infinite.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 8, 2015 11:50:11 AM UTC
Yes see my Max Ent paper on ArXiv
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 11, 2015 12:15:51 AM UTC
Hi Bob did the functions backward.. corrected. Analytic in the sense that it has a Fourier transform?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 11, 2015 11:29:43 AM UTC
I transformed from x' to x instead of from x to x' ... now I get better looking closed forms. Would love to see examples about cutoffs...
(Skin in the game).
We've discussed the notion of revelation of preferences.
If your answer is yes, see if you can replace "preferable" with "more rational".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 5, 2015 11:11:05 AM UTC
I added that survival implies survival of the species not just you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 5, 2015 11:26:00 AM UTC
So you do not think that rationality needs to incorporate survival?
It tells you the person gives respect to the nonhotshots, doesn't blame the driver for traffic jams and delays, and treats hired help like human beings.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 4, 2015 10:09:41 PM UTC
These cancel out across riders and rides.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 5, 2015 1:03:22 AM UTC
Its main value is an asshole detector
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/superwealth.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 6:06:34 PM UTC
skin in the game for the supperrich.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 6:15:12 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita next walk we should talk about rules for that...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 6:25:01 PM UTC
wrong guy to read this.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 8:41:38 PM UTC
No, I started a new job at Goldman Sachs. It is very very promising.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 9:56:24 PM UTC
Actually transparency is the ONLY heuristic.
---
Consider religious dietary laws. They may seem irrational to an observer who sees purpose in things and defines rationality in terms of what he can explain. Actually they will most certainly seem so. The Jewish Kashrut prescibes keeping four sets of dishes, two sinks, the avoidance of mixing meat with dairy products or merely letting the two be in contact with each other, in addition to interdicts on some animals: shrimp, pork, etc.
These laws might have had an \textit{ex ante} purpose. One can blame insalubrious behavior of pigs, exacerbated by the heat in the Levant (though heat in the Levant was not markedly different from that in pig-eating areas further West). But it remains that whatever the purpose, the Kashrut survived $\approx$ three millennia not because of its \textit{rationality} but because the populations that followed it survived. It brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. Simply it aided those that survived because it is a convex heuristic (see our definition of convex heuristic in \ref{convheu}). Such group cohesion might be also responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community. Simply, people who eat together hang together and dietary laws help in enforcing a group cohesion.
This adumbrates our central idea: that rationality is not what has conscious verbalistic explanatory factors; it only be what aids survival, avoids ruin. Rationality is risk management, period.
The consequence is that beliefs should not be judged on whether they are epistemologically true or false, but primarily in whether they allow survival [IN THE COLLECTIVE, and IN THE LINDY SENSE]. Belief in Santa Claus is therefore rational if it prevents people from dying and not rational if they cause extinction.
Take the idea to its logical conclusion. Superstitious-like resistance to matters like GMOs might be the instrument of enforcing such survival.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/rationality.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 5:59:37 PM UTC
I will add Lindy effect. By ergodicity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 6:21:30 PM UTC
Note that I hold that Islamic ban against alcohol is modern and had the effect to reduce the amount of socialization with Christians.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 6:44:02 PM UTC
At the level of the collective, Nidal. not individual.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 6:44:49 PM UTC
Rather bullshit because denying statistical validity of large n.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 6:45:40 PM UTC
This is an incoherent remark because I've excluded ALL other possible definitions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 7:26:29 PM UTC
Let me rephrase. This is the Lindy effect. Lindy is the opposite of ex post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 7:28:05 PM UTC
No proportional to surviva to black swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 8:33:14 PM UTC
Nassim, not Nasser.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 8:35:16 PM UTC
Missing the idea. No causation, just convexity of action that exists in populations that survived. We do not know causes there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 8:36:58 PM UTC
Before you continue to waste people's time on this page, please read up on fragility and Lindy effect. And read the rules of the page. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 8:38:34 PM UTC
No, we can't. But we can assess the notion of fragility= breaks under volatility/error/time/disorder and time breaks the fragile... From there there rules may sense as optionality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 8:39:24 PM UTC
In other words rationality is not at the level of the individual but some collective.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 9:19:42 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita the rule is that only Lindy can tell you if something is not irrational.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 9:56:20 PM UTC
When we see an animal with a trait, we can easily surmise that it survived because of something related to such trait, say, a long neck. But when we see populations, we never assume that they have survived thanks so some religious beliefs. That's the problem with rationalistic fundamental atheists-imbeciles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 2, 2015 10:01:39 PM UTC
Aphorism: We surmise a species survived thanks to side effects of some trait. We rarely assume humans survived thanks to some religious beliefs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 3:38:04 PM UTC
Curt Doolittle excellent responses. But his friend is victim of "scientism" i.e., fails to realize that true science is fallibilist and does not make claims outside what can be solidly proved. It does not cover more than 1-2% of our daily decisions...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 3:58:42 PM UTC
Chris Gorrie The fellow is clueless.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 5:54:28 PM UTC
and how do you know how to "update"? You fail to understand opacity/Lindy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 6:01:29 PM UTC
You miss the ENTIRE point that we don't know why pork was banned and will NEVER know.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 7:20:08 PM UTC
Pietro the difference is that no mathematician or physicist would utter that crap...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 8:42:18 PM UTC
Chris Gorrie give him chapter 1 of SILENT RISK
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 8:42:54 PM UTC
Indeed you increase the population you eat (predator-prey)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 4, 2015 12:01:45 PM UTC
I read the book... but the notion of Golden rule was starting to enter the ancient world.
No more FB I was told.
I also went and bought suits. Mostly dark-blue.
More than 100 biologists signed a petition asking for retraction. And the math was not remotely addressed. Yet if the paper is wrong, math should be 1) wrong (which can be shown incontrovertibly) or 2) inadequate for the task, which is trivial to show by expansion of functional/parameter space, as I've been doing with economics. (But here the math was addressing flaws in the math that was behind the theories supported by Dawkins and others). Neither of these 2 were done. Having seen the bitter attacks on Edge.org & elsewhere, including comments by biologists that Wilson was "senile", I spent some time scrutinizing the math: it is impeccable, though unsophisticated by mathematical finance standards. The beauty of mathematics is that it is *impossible* to be misunderstood.
They were attacked in a verbalistic manner. In other words, with BS. I view the crowd Steven Pinker-Richard Dawkins with intellectual revulsion as the perfect bullshit artist on the planet.
---
The lesson is obvious. Fughedabout supplemental material and backup. Put the math in the front, words in the back, particularly when the words are only there to explain the mathematical reasoning. Alas, it is necessary. Math is distortion-free, which repels the distorters...
(Note the earlier idea came from Yaneer Bar Yam and his idea can be related to the one in antifragile that averages miss Jensen's inequality. A function of a mean is different from the mean of a function).
---
PS- When I wrote Antifragile, which is defined as a locally convex reaction to a nondegenerate stressor, the technical material was in another paper. It turned out to be a mistake as BS artists (another journalist, Michael Shermer) were arguing about "resilience" (which is nonconvex), etc. The math is first, even if it repels bad and unrigorous readers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 1, 2015 1:17:53 PM UTC
Gintis did not get Jensen's inequality. He is no mathematician.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 1, 2015 1:26:47 PM UTC
No, IF you use math, then the math is all that counts. Don't use math is you want to reason say like a jurist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 1, 2015 1:27:12 PM UTC
your 3 is subsumed in 2.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 3, 2015 4:51:42 PM UTC
The article above is not about biology but about BS artistry in ignoring math and fighting math with words.
----
For ease of access these get recycled in Montaigne (who was a popularizer of people who wrote 1500 y earlier), better, the vastly more erudite Erasmus, plus the corpus Paroemiographorum of Greek proverbs, a compilation of Arabic proverbs, etc.
This is Lindy at work. I announced it to John Gray who immediately wondered if that covered such a thing as "cognitive dissonance", an idea that seems eminently modern. Well, it is found it in Montaigne "Effect renard", referring to Aesop (sour grapes, the grapes you can't reach are declaed ex post to be not good.) We've known about it for at least 2600 years (and Aeasop was reflecting collective, perhaps more ancient, wisdom).
One exception perhaps concerns things that correspond to modernity, things to which the ancients were not exposed.
----
The argument is made that the weighted squat, although perhaps not as "everyday" for our ancestors as the deadlift, works the muscles over a larger ROM and is thus more useful for gaining strength. "not because we are conditioned to squat from our evolution, but because evolution left us with a body that benefits so tremendously from squatting"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 31, 2015 11:57:23 PM UTC
Guru the idea is to squat with medium weights > 240 and deadlift the rest with a higher limit but no more than,say, 500
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/public-lecture-markers-of-country-fragility-with-dr-nassim-nicholas-taleb-tickets-16134816671?utm_term=attend&invite=NzY2NDM5MC9rcmlzdGluLndhZ25lckB0dWZ0cy5lZHUvMA%3D%3D&utm_campaign=inviteformalv2&utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&ref=enivtefor001
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 24, 2015 6:35:34 PM UTC
When are you in NY next?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 1, 2015 1:29:20 AM UTC
Thanks! where can I reach you to thank you?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 1, 2015 12:48:25 PM UTC
just sent you my email address.
I am posting because it generalizes to all sucker risk taking in complex domains, including GMOs, etc. And also because people kept using a fraud periodically rediscovering it is a fraud yet kept using it.
--
John KAY: "As the global financial crisis began to break in 2007, David Viniar, then chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, reported in astonishment that his firm had experienced "25 standard deviation events, several days in a row". Mr Viniar’s successor, Harvey Schwartz, has been similarly surprised. When the Swiss franc was unpegged last month, he described Goldman Sachs’ experience as a "20-plus standard deviation" occurrence."
--
This triggered a smear campaign, an 18 year smear campaign by very vactive people.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/jorion.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 24, 2015 3:23:29 PM UTC
Sign of weakeness........finally!!!!!
If we wanted planes to be safe "with statistical significance" that is 99% confidence level we'd have between 400 and 2500 crashes a day.
The point is that risk management uses a much much higher degree of rigor than statistics, something GMO-idiots are not getting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 20, 2015 8:41:58 PM UTC
No, articles come and go, technical documents stay.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 21, 2015 7:22:05 PM UTC
It should work in Gaussian domains.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 17, 2015 10:03:59 AM UTC
Friends, Nidal Abed was the first to nitpick a heuristic here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 17, 2015 7:55:45 AM UTC
Voila! Random choices to span broader spaces.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 13, 2015 10:25:29 AM UTC
Easier to fast when you barbell it with this. Make you more patient.
1) are written for reviewers
2) last only 6m.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 11, 2015 4:02:06 PM UTC
No journos here please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 11, 2015 11:12:40 PM UTC
"if"
"Suppose you want to buy a pair of shoes and you live in a house that has a shoe store. There are two different strategies: one is that you go to the store in your house every day to check out the shoes and eventually you find the best pair; another is to take your car and to spend a whole day searching for footwear all over town to find a place where they have the best shoes and you buy them immediately. The system is ergodic if the result of these two strategies is the same"
http://www.ams.org/notices/201502/rnoti-p152.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 9, 2015 12:55:03 AM UTC
We've had a lot of discussions of ergodicity here in the context of Fooled by Randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 9, 2015 10:58:34 AM UTC
No, no, no. What I mean is that in an ergodic process luck good or bad washes out.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 11, 2015 11:27:22 PM UTC
In other words, Joe Norman and Daniel Hogendoorn the process in the story is not ergodic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 11, 2015 11:35:08 PM UTC
Yes the measure needs to be invariant. In calculus terms the same probability distribution when Xit and Xti where t is time and i is the unit i= 1, 2, ... N.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 11, 2015 11:35:42 PM UTC
So you can calculate life expectancy by sampling deaths in a single day.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 11, 2015 11:36:55 PM UTC
We can prove that a process is ergodic if and only if there is skin in the game.
This is a big deal because it would make U.S. social media a refuge of free-speech (it would be the London of Voltaire's day).
Now, by extension, how protected is someone in London expressing on U.S. social media something potentially libelous towards another London based person.
Please do not stray off-topic here with generalizations and keep security/surveillance matters outside this discussion. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 8, 2015 2:38:58 PM UTC
You need to subpoena a US server.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 8, 2015 2:49:06 PM UTC
Yes but how can a UK court subpoena something in California?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 8, 2015 3:15:18 PM UTC
This article misses the SPEECH Act of 2010... and missed the point that if a book published in the US but read in London falls under UK law, than it can be arbitraged by my taking to London a book defaming me, reading it there, and suing --it leads to complete legal tourism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 8, 2015 5:53:53 PM UTC
The reason I am saying this is that there are plenty of charlatans in the UK who have sued scientists like Goldacre or Simon Singh for criticizing their methods... But in the US it is impossible and these people have not been sued in the US. Also I am concerned that Monsanto-backed scientists might sue in the UK for similar reasons...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 1, 2015 12:56:08 PM UTC
huuuuuuuuuge BS. Montaigne was citing people 15 centuries before him. Anti-blogger.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 26, 2015 12:47:12 AM UTC
Related to the course.
---
I initially thought that the intermittent protein deprivation followed by overcompensation was meant to draw benefits from Jensen's inequality/antifragility (whether the process is kidney-rest, anti-inflammatory or authophagy for cancer control/hormonal as held by Valter Longo, it doesn't matter because we know the statistical structure of natural life gave hunters intermittent meat and steady vegetables and we are not supposed to have steady red meat).
---
But it can't be just that. It just hit me that I missed a central point. This relief was also to help ... THE ANIMALS, the ecology. Animals too need a break from milk/egg production, etc. And because of nonlinearity their population may need some kind of natural surge (hint: look at Lotka-Volterra predator-prey models).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 10:23:15 PM UTC
"Canival" comes from J-L Rheault.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 10:44:09 PM UTC
You are right, Carne vale is before a period of no meat.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 10:44:55 PM UTC
Implication? Worry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 10:46:14 PM UTC
Here is the calendar... scary http://www.goarch.org/chapel/calendar/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 23, 2015 10:27:59 AM UTC
Any link/keyword?
---
Recall that the antifragile is what likes a bit of randomness.
---
It may be very efficient, in the long run, to inject some randomness in one's choices in order to span a broader set of objects, and intransitivity is one way to do so. Break the routine of choices. This is similar to gift giving: a gift is something that you would not buy otherwise; it too breaks your routine of choices -- like a book you would have never thought of buying.
---
Mother nature may have a way to force you to make "mistakes" of small consequence may reveal deeper preferences or more interesting attributes of the world. This is optionality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 6:49:00 PM UTC
no
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 7:05:51 PM UTC
I said explicity that I leave aside the asynchronous decision and consider the static. Reread.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 7:07:38 PM UTC
Did you understand my point? it is about STATIC inconsistency.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 7:08:51 PM UTC
Why is it that economists can't read ideas?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 8:10:16 PM UTC
If you don't get my point on randomness why do you bloviate on what I am trying to say?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 8:33:04 PM UTC
Not at all. But "mistakes" of small consequence may reveal deeper preferences or more interesting attributes of the world. Optionality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 9:19:05 PM UTC
Yes revised the entry to put *static*.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 22, 2015 9:22:29 PM UTC
Federico Epimeteo it is largely considered that *static* violations of transitivity are indeed irrational, with some exception that it may indicate violation of completeness... see Davidson 1976. But under bounded rationality or dynamic decision-making violations are not violations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 23, 2015 11:14:14 AM UTC
Or low probability large payoff.
---
(This came 8 years after the f*** you money idea was formulated in The Black Swan, except that it missed the critical later develoment as Fat Tony explained that " f*** you" is not financial, but a state of mind, people on minimum wage are more likely to have it.)
---
(Thanks G. Panterov)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 14, 2015 5:37:24 PM UTC
People get angrier when you say Fuck You and personalize it.
It takes time for things to break, but they eventually break, & there should be no rush although our impulse is to think that they will collapse immediately after we become aware of the problem. Give things time... 3 to 8 years in today's complex system. By definition the fragile cannot be selfsustaining as the probability of a collapse increases with time.
--
We had to wait 4 years for Fannie Mae to go bust (after detection of their fragility), but it did go bust; 5 years for Syria to blow up, but it did; bankers are losing power 5 years after the crisis. We thought in 2009 that the econ establishment would be discredited and... it is starting to happen about 5 years later. We thought in 2010 that the Greeks would be in the streets and here they are...
--
So what's on the list (of the unsustainably fragile)? For me, Saudi Arabia, Elsevier/Wiley (academic publishing will be Uberized), the Fed's monopoly, Monsanto, bureaucrats in Europe w/lifetime employment, Oligarchs, etc.
Please be specific, avoid the vague and the general.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 13, 2015 3:03:03 PM UTC
It is the opposite of via positiva forecasting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 13, 2015 3:12:40 PM UTC
bingo!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 14, 2015 1:16:47 PM UTC
Religion is robust. Lindy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 12, 2015 4:08:11 PM UTC
Silent risk section 3.2 "INVERSE PROBLEMS" here www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 12, 2015 4:08:29 PM UTC
silent risk see link below.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 6, 2015 1:15:45 PM UTC
Eleni I checked out of that business... only technical/academic
I once had to choose for a post-conference dinner between a lively Greek Taverna and a high-high class restaurant with Michelin Star etc. I was voted down in favor of the high class restaurant, where I had to suffer through the "experience" of eating complicated tiny stuff (very very complicated) with paired wine, etc., while listening to some bullshit by the sommelier and faking that I was not bored. Other customers in the room seemed, as we say in Lebanese, to have a cork stuck in their behind (all men wore ties). The meal cost the organizers ~$200 per person.
After the meal (I was still starving), I drove to my favorite pizza place and got 2 slices of Nick's Pizza for $6.95. I was furious, feeling hoodwinked by some constructed story that everyone was buying.
Now let us discuss constructed preferences vs natural ones: if I had a choice: between paying $200 for a pizza or $6.95 for the French complicated experience, I would pay $200 for the pizza, plus $9.95 for a bottle of Malbec wine. Actually I would pay to not have the Michelin experience.
There exists a sophistication that has negative utility. This tells us something about wealth & GDP growth in society: the presence an "S" curve beyond which you get incremental harm. It is detectable only if you get rid of constructed preferences.
Now societies have been getting wealthier and wealthier, many beyond the positive part of the "S" curve. And I am certain that if pizza were priced at $200, the people with a cork in their behind would be lining up for it. But it is too easy to produce so they opt for the costly, and pizza will be always cheaper than the complicated crap.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 6, 2015 8:43:42 PM UTC
Interestingly similar to foot-binding.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 12, 2015 3:19:06 AM UTC
Names also get longer
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 3, 2015 1:18:25 PM UTC
I notice that at literary festivals when rich "patrons" are furious to be low low in the pecking order.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 3, 2015 9:29:20 PM UTC
not true. Not zero sum unless rent seeking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 3, 2015 1:08:27 PM UTC
Will check.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 3, 2015 6:29:31 PM UTC
Commandé!
http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=20&threadid=97884
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 4, 2015 12:37:44 PM UTC
?
(Backward vs forward)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 2, 2015 11:40:07 AM UTC
Many are not getting it right. It is the difference between history seen forward or backward.
Still incomplete, but useful.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIRGRNUzN6RXRaZk0/view
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 30, 2015 7:04:00 PM UTC
Overseas!
So, clearly the world today is better, fairer, with equal opportunity to survive and be survived. But we cannot compare evolutionary processes to those of the past.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 3:06:42 PM UTC
The point is that variance is reduced. We are selecting for traits and some people have more children... But the overall variance is greatly reduced.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 3:41:39 PM UTC
Variance in number of children per person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 3:42:23 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn Also recall that Jews were polygamous until the middle ages, so the variance among men was even higher since many did not have children.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 3:42:51 PM UTC
Variance in number of children per person around the mean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 5:20:31 PM UTC
No, David, it is not variance that needs to be uncorrelated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:44:50 AM UTC
I thought the problem was Napoleon who got 500,000 soldiers killed.
--
The lesson came from Fooled by Randomness, now entering its 15 years. But it was finished in 1998 and I could not find a publisher (not even an agent) and the unknown pub house who took it accepted my literary terms against reduced financial ones (the publisher went bust and I republished with RH). Most sent me a form: 1) "What is the book about?", 2) "Who is it for?", 3) List "other "similar" books". In fact the form works very well for newspaper articles or short scientific monographs (at best), never what deserves to be called books.
--
Their rejections mentioned: 1) lacks in focus (not enough finance, too much philosophy and "stories"), 2) does not have "regressions" to support ideas, 3) author confuses reader with the mixing of true and fictional characters such as Nero Tulip, 4) digresses away from what they thought was "main topic", 5) Talks too much about randomness and not enough about investment strategies, 6) "will never sell more than a few copies", etc. One imbecile wanted a discussion of Alan Greespan's policies. But mostly publishers could not crystallize the idea, which they perceived as a problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 8:34:13 AM UTC
Yes!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 10:01:05 AM UTC
Actually a big part is the collective/individual problem, reciprocal and nonreciprocal altruism
I say "follow the money!"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 26, 2015 3:16:45 AM UTC
Jon Entine is a paid lobbyist... I never read him.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIQlFtRUVxZGJRZ2s/view
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 24, 2015 2:15:51 AM UTC
2nd categories: papers were peer-reviewed.
---
Relational vs transactional: when you buy goat cheese from your grocer, you have a relationship, not just a transaction, with some kind of bilateral committment, loyalty, friendship.
----
Process vs result: in virtue ethics, what makes you a hero is how you fight, not at all whether you win; what you do rather than the outcome. It clashes with the newfound notion of "success" .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 20, 2015 11:47:45 PM UTC
This is BS. Not saying that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 26, 2015 3:16:03 AM UTC
Rory Sutherland incidentally I cite you in a fotnote to this remark in the real text.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 16, 2015 5:17:16 AM UTC
This is more cogent: 20 years ago in DYNAMIC HEDGING:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 17, 2015 2:26:02 AM UTC
Only when it matters!
I am considering revising by putting "neck" in place of "skin".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 14, 2015 10:46:31 AM UTC
Pietro Bonavita people here know it is not an incentive. But the preceding expression meant incentive.
Otherwise Jaipur after Jan 21.
----
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/pm-narendra-modi-top-thinkers-and-industrialists-to-mull-indias-future-at-et-summit-on-jan-16-17/articleshow/45846455.cms
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 12, 2015 1:43:34 PM UTC
Please suggest venues: large open air café.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 12, 2015 2:32:31 PM UTC
I am not doing a big "event", no lecture, just saying hello.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 12, 2015 3:15:47 PM UTC
PM? 4ish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 14, 2015 10:03:39 AM UTC
How about Humayum's tomb?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 14, 2015 3:03:33 PM UTC
Will advise will be in transit the rest of today/tomorrow.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 16, 2015 10:46:43 AM UTC
4 pm but lets decide on location
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 17, 2015 3:37:17 AM UTC
How about 4 pm, open air in Lodhi Gardens near the India International Centre? If the group is large we stay outside. Otherwise we find a café. OK?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 17, 2015 6:32:44 AM UTC
The 23rd? let me confirm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 17, 2015 4:29:50 PM UTC
So to confirm, tomorrow 3 pm LODI Gardens.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 18, 2015 3:03:37 AM UTC
LODI Gardens is large, let's meet next to India House.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 18, 2015 4:45:55 AM UTC
The place suggested is the gate next to Main India International Centre.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 18, 2015 8:48:58 AM UTC
3 PM see below
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 18, 2015 10:11:56 AM UTC
3 we are at the lodi garden restrnt
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 18, 2015 1:02:25 PM UTC
I will be in Jaipur 21-24. But 24 is crazy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 18, 2015 5:41:57 PM UTC
You guys owe more pictures ...a lot of selfies were taken...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 19, 2015 1:17:56 AM UTC
We were 25 people in Delhi. Doesn't look like we have a quorum for Jaipur.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 19, 2015 8:14:34 AM UTC
I can do the 22!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 19, 2015 8:14:46 AM UTC
Coffee somewhere
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 19, 2015 11:17:51 AM UTC
Are we confirmed for the 22nd? Who is coming?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 20, 2015 8:34:50 AM UTC
Hihi I am free the 22nd in Jaipur. But I will be visiting Mumbai in the near future.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 20, 2015 10:02:23 PM UTC
OK then, 6-7:30 PM on 22.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 21, 2015 1:34:16 PM UTC
Found a café at the venue. Details TK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 22, 2015 6:05:43 AM UTC
We should meet in front of the AMAZON bookstore at 6. OK?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 22, 2015 6:07:27 AM UTC
6 PM in front of Amazon bookstore?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 22, 2015 8:53:44 AM UTC
630
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 24, 2015 10:42:09 AM UTC
Abhi Manyu Thanks a trillion!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 24, 2015 5:23:58 PM UTC
Thanks a million everyone for coming!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 10, 2015 9:50:59 PM UTC
Pietro, the type who offer you "the cook in Venice"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 10, 2015 10:28:21 PM UTC
Please explain what is "insulting to poor people".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 11, 2015 12:20:40 PM UTC
Please explain what you mean by stereotypes in this context.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 11, 2015 3:04:48 PM UTC
Good point; people go into a prepackaged mold once they get rich...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 11, 2015 9:40:01 PM UTC
Why the fuck can't people get context before posting?
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/genealogy.jpg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 9, 2015 11:03:40 PM UTC
Paul Wehage I understand that you live in Paris but I wish you made the same remark when thousands of Yazidis Shiites and Christians were massacred by ISIS a few months ago.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 9, 2015 11:25:10 PM UTC
Paul my generation is composed of war refugees from a more severe version of the same problem so we find remarks like yours insulting selfcentered (your little Paris is more valuable than our homes) and the idea to stop discussing anything that doesn't fit your spoiled child emotional needs? Fuck off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 9, 2015 11:34:43 PM UTC
This said calm down we are all offended by these events.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 10, 2015 1:41:51 PM UTC
Added FAT TONY!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 10, 2015 1:41:55 PM UTC
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/genealogy.jpg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 11, 2015 12:15:06 AM UTC
Simple example: a car bomb blew up 10 people 14 km from my house in Amioun where I am heading next week. My mother was within earshot of the explosion. But I do not blame people for talking about something ELSE than that as my private security is not of general concern.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 11, 2015 11:24:57 AM UTC
corrected!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 11, 2015 11:25:01 AM UTC
thanks
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 9, 2015 2:43:21 PM UTC
Joe Norman Actually this maps to Kolmogorov complexity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 9, 2015 10:38:22 PM UTC
You did not even summarize the prologue.
Because of lack of erudition (typical of economists), and an overriding desire to simplify, some say about the INCERTO "nothing new, Hume did that" (not only wrong, but Hume was rephrasing Bayle's ideas), other imbeciles say this is just "Mandelbrot" (not realizing fat tails originate with Pareto and Mandelbrot was "gray swans" not black ones), others attribute the idea to "Frank Knight" (who missed both fat tails and skeptical philosophy), others "Kahneman-Tversky" (limited, according to Daniel Kahneman to thin tails), etc. This chart makes it clear. Incidentally people who know little tend to make statements overestimating similarities and eradicating differentiation: "Tolstoy? Nothing special. Just a novel in Russian. Dostoevsky did that".
For comments as there may be connections to improve.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/genealogy.jpg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 11:36:38 AM UTC
The point is that because of lack of erudition (typically economists), some people say "nothing new": "Hume did that", other say this is just "Mandelbrot", others "Frank Knight", others "Kahneman-Tversky", etc. This makes it clear.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 11:42:59 AM UTC
No overlap in the research traditions/literature.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 12:11:15 PM UTC
Let me see where I can add it: different bubble this is not the CONVERGENCE tradition ( limit theorems ).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 12:25:49 PM UTC
The reason we can ignore "knightian uncertainty" is because there is no such thing as computable risk. All probabilities subjected to error terms (metaprobability Chapter 1 of SILENT RISK).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 12:48:25 PM UTC
Heuristics and biases
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 1:20:09 PM UTC
Yes I put that in LOSS MODELS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 1:21:11 PM UTC
This is covered in antifragile...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 1:21:44 PM UTC
I will remove insurance and keep LOSS MODELS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 1:22:26 PM UTC
Yes it is the center circle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 4:42:22 PM UTC
See Chapter 1 in SILENT RISK. "Knightian uncertainty" is simply the probability as defined by Cicero in de Academica, except poorer. See metaprobability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 7:48:44 PM UTC
They are powerful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 8:07:42 PM UTC
You meant Shakespeare?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 3, 2015 8:49:22 PM UTC
Moved insurance http://fooledbyrandomness.com/genealogy.jpg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 4, 2015 9:17:50 AM UTC
New version http://fooledbyrandomness.com/genealogy.jpg
1) Call someone who has no friends, just to say hello, letting the person know that you do not need anything specific from him/her. Have coffee with lonely people twice a month.
2) Do not read more than one new book a week –if needed re-read (and read no book you wouldn’t reread). Read no book written by, or co-authored with, a journalist. Do not do write more than 2 hours a day. Do not do mathematics more than 4 hours in any given day. Walk 2 hours every day regardless of weather. Do not go the gym more than 5 times in any given month and/or do not spend more than 30 minutes per visit.
3) Fast one day every week on average. Eat meat only on festivals, but then splurge.
4) Respect the janitor more than the chairman and respect those who respect the janitor more than the chairman.
5) Do not read the latest "breakthrough" experiment in psychology about, say, the effect of taking cold showers on grammatical ability. Better even read nothing about these "experiments".
6) Pick a lobbyist (preferably Monsanto/GMO) or some economist harmful to the collective and make life mis- erable for him, especially if the reaction entails some personal and reputational risks for you.
7) Give to someone who needs money but doesn’t ask for it while finding an excuse to preserve his/her dignity.
8) Use courage and wisdom, not labor, for your income.
9) Humiliate people who define success in any other way than honor. In the end realize that you are only as valuable as the risks you are taking for the sake of others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 31, 2014 5:33:54 PM UTC
No I mean you can visit more than 1 week if less than 30 min per visit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 31, 2014 9:52:38 PM UTC
Gigantes with garlic and lemon
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 27, 2014 8:17:03 PM UTC
"Before the fact empiricism"! Bingo!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 28, 2014 7:42:06 PM UTC
Actually, there is a "the".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 26, 2014 9:23:35 PM UTC
The INCERTO
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 26, 2014 9:24:18 PM UTC
Read fiction. Fictionalized autobiography. Works best.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 26, 2014 9:52:52 PM UTC
I have a minibiography made by Gladwell...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 26, 2014 10:26:39 PM UTC
But.... It is noooooooooot me
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 27, 2014 2:03:47 PM UTC
Who wrote that bio?
In the pre-monotheistic ancient Mediterranean tradition, people shared holidays and festivals (along with gods and shrines), a tradition still found in the Levant (in spite of recent acute bouts of mono-monotheism).
PS- Just figured out that the ancient Greeks ate meat only on festivals and special occasions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:10:18 PM UTC
Not for the Greek Orthodox
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:11:45 PM UTC
Cadiz is from Phoenician, means "Wall".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:12:55 PM UTC
What do you think?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:31:31 PM UTC
About that. At my age (remember I was born in 1924)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:37:00 PM UTC
Kitto also had a few flaws concerning survivorship biases by looking at the age of Socrates, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 9:12:58 PM UTC
I am not in a bad mood I was concentrating... But might as well be the picture.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 28, 2014 6:16:20 PM UTC
Robert Barnard-Weston it has to be a strong link. Indeed.
Vileness: when the rich prefers wealth to freedom.
Now generalize to societies...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 1:01:36 AM UTC
Why did Nick Hayek hide his Lebanese origin and upbringing? He comes from a village < 1mile from Amioun.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 1:42:51 PM UTC
EXACTLY. He lived in Lebanon much longer than I did (I left as a teenager he left in his twenties) yet I never never never hid my origin (in the West I am Levantine but I am discriminated against in the East because I am Christian). Someone in South Africa told me he befriended him for 35 years without knowing it...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 1:45:21 PM UTC
What kind of BS is this? Didn't you consider that I was ALSO very independent when I had no money? Do some thinking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 3:05:27 PM UTC
Ibn Cme I meant MORE wealth
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 3:07:01 PM UTC
Not everyone has a price. That's my point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 8:43:09 PM UTC
Please explain... It is a great book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 3:43:59 PM UTC
The aphorism is not really new, I am replacing older less crisp ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 4:18:20 PM UTC
Things people never do... such as... nitpicking posts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 5:15:53 PM UTC
Do you realize that some people NEVER write nitpicking posts like these incongruent with the aphorism?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 6:01:28 PM UTC
Why don't you GMO imbeciles try to do the same with our paper?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 8:13:02 PM UTC
Some people have been tested by circumstances... refused to do the easy thing...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 11:23:01 AM UTC
As I said, imbeciles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 11:59:31 AM UTC
THis is for the GMO retards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 12:23:24 PM UTC
Posting this for GMO retards
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 1:31:16 PM UTC
Only if you are concave in reputation, setting yourself as infallible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 1:59:37 PM UTC
Imbecile I said
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 1:01:08 PM UTC
Any Entropist INFORMATION THEORIST in the Room?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 1:30:44 PM UTC
This is not thermodynamics, but informational entropy, in the statistical domain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 4:20:30 PM UTC
No João Pires da Cruz you gain information via maxent by checking what happens as you relax constaints.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 12:02:59 PM UTC
Posting this for the GMO retards
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 24, 2014 6:58:20 PM UTC
Both, but I prefer mathematics and philosophy to science.
+ GMO Lobbyists working for Monsanto or others, along with the "sponsored" scientists and, easy to buy/influence, science journos. Likewise companies s.a. Starbucks financing lawsuits against states mandating labelling.
+ EBOLA: Naive empiricists using bogus "empirical" arguments against worrying about Ebola (comparing a fat-tailed multiplicative process to a thin-tailed one). Typically journos or paternalistic "psychologists of risk" with misdefinition of "rationality".
+ WAHABISTAS: Saudis, Qataris and other Gulf people financing terrorism & religious intolerance.
+ NAIVE EMPIRICISM: Scientists ignorant of statistical methods making statements about an "evidence" they "discovered" that does not match the statistical statements in their own paper made by some statistician who processed data.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 20, 2014 3:11:42 PM UTC
Very optimistic...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 11:20:57 AM UTC
This is the vicious "excuse" to fund EXPLICIT Salafi terrorism or absolve the Sheikhs who have done so. The US did not EXPLICITY fund Bin Laden in the 80s to kill innocents, it was the SIDE EFFECT of the policy, an UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE. You judge first by the AIM. Funding intolerant Wahabi/Salafi activism is immoral and people like you with your arguments should be dealt with very very harshly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 22, 2014 11:21:20 AM UTC
Before uttering your moralizing BS look at data.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 24, 2014 10:49:28 PM UTC
You said "the risks are foggy". And if you are not convinced, you will NEVER be convinced.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 25, 2014 1:54:09 AM UTC
Marco Costa bravo! This is why it is hard for nonfinance people to understand risk...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 17, 2014 12:27:40 PM UTC
I don't call ALL people idiots, only those who make remarks like these.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 17, 2014 1:59:25 PM UTC
Will small probability events, one needs to persevere much much more than in a simpler probabilistic frame.
Note the error in the title. "State failure" is not a bad thing.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142494/nassim-nicholas-taleb-and-gregory-f-treverton%E2%80%A8/the-calm-before-the-storm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 12:36:12 PM UTC
You can register for free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 5:34:22 PM UTC
Philip, 1) Catholic church has subsidiarity, from Roman empire, decentralized, 2) Chinese bur came AFTER success and prior to collapse. 3) IBM is a statistical oddity... so far.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 5:36:00 PM UTC
Alas Naomi they are clueless about statistical properties, includes Cederman... Most are bullshit vendors using regressions or worse, powerlaws... "Complexity" for them is the opposite of what it means to me. See my SILENT RISK. Good luck.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 5:37:43 PM UTC
See Chapters 6-7 to see what I mean by their cluelessness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 6:18:15 PM UTC
I meant 8-9. Cederman is targeted in my "Pinker Problem".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 6:48:55 PM UTC
Actually I showed that powerlaws don't show up as powerlaws Chapter 4
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 16, 2014 6:49:14 PM UTC
Of silent risk not AF
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 17, 2014 6:27:41 PM UTC
You need to contact Foreign Affairs. thanks
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 24, 2014 10:57:19 PM UTC
It is small. Like Singapore, even smaller.
(Post artisanal medicine)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 15, 2014 12:36:08 PM UTC
By doctor is meant the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 15, 2014 8:23:01 PM UTC
Brilliant, Killian Denny.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 14, 2014 12:56:38 PM UTC
Cancer is noise overcoming signal.
http://recode.net/2014/12/11/harvards-david-keith-knows-how-to-dial-down-the-earths-thermostat-is-it-time-to-try/
Two fat-tailed beasts - one being rapid climate warming from CO2, the other being effects from 'managing' the climate ourselves - based on results in Keith's model. Or is there enough certainty in the political dialogue to rule-out global warming as fat-tailed?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 13, 2014 10:27:56 PM UTC
Hihi I am less worried about geoengineering because of lack of multiplicative effects. But need a few weeks before I can talk about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 14, 2014 12:18:39 AM UTC
I meant not like plants. I look at geoengineering as akin to chemotherapy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 12, 2014 5:08:41 PM UTC
Adding conversation with JFH
----
(Re: torture etc.)
A self driving car doesn't have skin in the game, though owner is liable. But no tailgating, inebriation, road-rage, speeding, bullying, etc. So I wonder where one should stand there as far as harm to others. Recall that skin-in-the-game removes from the gene pool those harmful to others...
Further, this is a logical continuation of the information revolution. Cars have been progressively turned into computers, and if it weren't for Detroit bailouts, they'd be made in Silicon Valley (rather, assembled, with parts made in China, just like a computer).
One can estimate that a taxi ride would drop by 50-80%... Think of car rentals.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 9:38:44 PM UTC
Tesla
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 9:39:04 PM UTC
(I know it is LA but still )
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 10, 2014 9:25:47 AM UTC
When you fly a plane, mistakes are typically yours (collisions take place on the ground, in which case the mistake is that of the control tower). When you are on the road, the mistakes can come (and usually come) from others, mostly drunken drivers or hormonally unstable teenagers who try to make you leave the gene pool along with them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 8, 2014 10:24:00 PM UTC
random order
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 8, 2014 2:36:25 PM UTC
Excellent remark!
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/LargeN.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 1:49:58 PM UTC
Carl Key-Mouse It only works for symmetric. But one can show other results actually slower from more general forms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 1:50:40 PM UTC
I am discovering that bing can't translate the Lebanese language.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 2:04:33 PM UTC
9/8 is the equivalent of the 80/20
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 2:12:24 PM UTC
It is not Lebanese "arabic" but the Lebanese version of Aramaic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 2:17:17 PM UTC
Much more, directly or indirectly via Arabic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 2:38:54 PM UTC
Brent Halonen this is a pre-draft cut/paste. But the point is to know what one talks about when discussing "n". BTW Pinelis worked with Nagaev the great
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 6:36:12 PM UTC
Ban Kanj shu yamli?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 8:10:54 PM UTC
Paul Bartlett you INCREASE sample size when you analyze the tail
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 11:53:12 PM UTC
Ilya Kuntsevich this is not modeling. Simple statistical properties... I do not model.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 4, 2014 5:21:35 PM UTC
Risk is an abuse of language, meant to be "exposure". Fragility based.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 4, 2014 5:22:40 PM UTC
Hence the "silent" if you see ... the trouble is that the word "risk" exists and I am trying to make it rigorous by asymmetries.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 4, 2014 11:31:44 PM UTC
Thanks! This is real "risk" management.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoP32AesRzE&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 1, 2014 10:37:41 PM UTC
Jerry Msu yes but pharma can only kill the people taking the drug. This is worse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 1, 2014 11:16:06 PM UTC
Steven Lam yes! Because the left tail is not affected. But we are talking about the opposite here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 2, 2014 9:11:46 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn makes little difference to the story.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 30, 2014 10:28:12 PM UTC
Corrollary: "good" students aren't the ones who know how to fail.
---
For standard statistical theory doesn't allow "acceptance", it only allows "failure to reject". Even when someone in prose says "accept that" he mathematically means "failed to reject at some significance level...", i.e., "BARRING A TAIL EVENT". Similarly, when someone is indicted, he is treated as innocent unless proven otherwise. This principle is adopted by scientific journals (remember that statisticians are the "evidence" police). This is a big thing and it is ironic.
---
The biologists after us don't appear to be aware of the central fact that evidence = "barring a tail event" and argue they have "evidence there can't be a tail event". The fact that statistics is hard for scientists AND they need to use it (as part of their own canon) means they rely on computers or some statistician who happens to be passing by... We mentioned that >50% of published neurobiology papers in "prestigious" journals making comparisons make an elementary (but severe) statistical mistake. But it looks like things are a lot, a lot worse.
---
P.S. As I show in SILENT RISK, acceptance can be done but it needs to be nonprobabilistic s.a. "there exists at least one black swan as I have seen one". As such it is never part of hypothesis testing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 7:59:41 PM UTC
Neal DeGrasse Tyson is a science journalist, from what I can see. Nothing wrong, but he doesn't appear to do science. He needs to write his proGMO in scholarly format. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,33&q=degrasse+tyson
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 8:07:18 PM UTC
See our paper, p 17
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 9:48:23 PM UTC
Angel Simeonov you mean I should be careful if someone shows up close to me with an umbrella?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 30, 2014 11:46:21 AM UTC
I don't know...the minute people learn a bit of statistics they become mechanistic and start making claims...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 30, 2014 2:26:37 PM UTC
William Geoffrey Smith I just ordered Hacking's textbook, will see if it can be recommended to students as it requires no prior knowledge. His other works are great.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 30, 2014 7:09:22 PM UTC
John Soriano they are not even at the level at the conceptual mistake detected by McCloskey and Z.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 30, 2014 10:11:32 PM UTC
Steve Laudig Barring a tail event. Fixed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 1, 2014 6:59:59 PM UTC
Stephen Bachelor the real reason is that in quantum uncertainty the variance of average converges to 0 rapidly, n is trillions, so all testing is just deterministic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 9:09:59 AM UTC
Guy André Pelouze Science and "evidence" doesn't work that way -- by looking up databases for attribution of harm for a condition that has no classification. The real risk is lateral: there has been no formal proper testing of safety to ecosystem, one that deals with cross terms, period, so I suggest coming back with something real.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 9:12:39 AM UTC
Guy André Pelouze to "agree" with such statment means knowing ZERO about convergence.I n quantum uncertainty the variance of average converges to 0 rapidly, n is trillions, so all testing is just deterministic. We don't have true Gaussianism in biosystems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 1:46:51 PM UTC
Michiel Van Herwegen solved.
--
"For GMOs, all contexts are foreign in this sense as their construction process bypassed the normal coevolutionary context (...) all ecosystems have evolved in the absence of GMOs."
--
http://necsi.edu/research/social/pp/responsetrevorcharles.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 28, 2014 10:56:18 PM UTC
I eat seeded grapes, hard to get these days in the US
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 1:24:18 AM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou Yaneer knows his shit as he is familiar with the complexity of interractions: co-evolution is different from evolution, or what we call multidimentional processes are different from lowdimentional ones. For instance 2-d and 3-d are not layers of each other: "a drunk man can find his way home but a drunk bird is lost forever".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 9:30:36 AM UTC
Lucio Fariano You can prove that something does not *spread*.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 1:30:12 PM UTC
A few trolls came... routine... rehashing arguments that were in paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 29, 2014 3:41:10 PM UTC
Kevin McKernan it is NOT correlative but MATHEMATICAL. Two different tail properties emerge. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 27, 2014 2:10:52 PM UTC
Aaron Elliott mathematics is a special case as it is only abstraction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 28, 2014 7:01:09 PM UTC
Monogamous, perhaps not, but promiscuous, no.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 27, 2014 9:54:06 AM UTC
A la Napolitaine.
Using the fact, the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg reckons that the average reader of the 655 pages of text and footnotes of Capital in the Twenty-First Century stops somewhere a little past page 26, where the highlighting stops, about the end of the Introduction.
He proposes that the Kindle-measured percentage of a book apparently read, once called the Hawking Index (most readers of A Brief History stopped annotating it at 6.6 percent of the book), be renamed the Piketty Index (2.4 percent)." - Dierdre McCloskey
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 26, 2014 8:14:41 PM UTC
Not true. There is a bias in nonficton where most of the juice is upfront and most of the backup is in the back, so information weighted this is not bad.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 23, 2014 3:46:44 PM UTC
Making more than 100k IS the elite on planet earth. And that's the problem. It is that the nonelite is free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 23, 2014 6:41:28 PM UTC
Fucking idiot i am saying corporates are slaves not that all slaves ate corporate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 24, 2014 1:25:36 AM UTC
This post has been an excellent filter of people who misunderstand aphorisms and/or what "elite" means.
---
Thanks for attending the lecture I apologize I wasn't talkative I was distracted/had to make it to the airport through the NY rush hour.
---
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 12:54:37 AM UTC
Mark Hubey sorry to see you go.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 1:04:53 AM UTC
Kierin Mackenzie "All metrics are questionable, some are useful, none is useable for certainty".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 10:22:12 AM UTC
Louis Lebbos don't blow my excuse
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 11:51:46 PM UTC
Gil Friend This explanation surprises many environmentalists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 20, 2014 11:25:58 AM UTC
Bill Gray writes: "You're not a geneticist or food scientist. So please shut up and leave it to the scientific community to sort out; they have already as the overwhelming consensus is that GMOs are safe and pose no more of a risk than "conventional" crops."
This is by Mark Buchanan, a physicist.
http://bv.ms/1vfU8oK
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 17, 2014 1:13:38 PM UTC
Brett Bonner did you read our paper? If not, then go delete your post, read it, then come back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 17, 2014 4:08:47 PM UTC
Brent Sitterly Two of the coauthors are biologists, in the sense they published papers in biology and/or have degrees in biology. OK?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 2:33:55 AM UTC
Bryan Holmes antibiotics DO NOT MULTIPLY.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 11:22:29 AM UTC
The point is about probability & biologists are clueless about probability, 50% of their papers make elementary mistakes see page 12-13. Zapped a few trolls asking for "evidence".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 11:39:10 AM UTC
As a rule, never come back offering an argument already addressed in PP, and drag the discussion into some bioBS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 5:58:45 PM UTC
Some troll was arguing that market collapse is predictable, so the question is : how rich is he?
A child has much larger head relative to his body than an adult (this even applies to GMO biologists). I am adding this slide to Tuesday's lecture on scaling and cities. It shows how the relative size of parts scales differently as the unit grows. There is abundant work on this by physicists (G. West of Santa Fe), but what I am adding to the picture (and the research) is the link to fragility, how fragility is necessarily tied to scale, which comes out of the notion that fragile=nonlinearity (concavity).
A restaurant has a scale beyond which it transits into something horrifying, fast food. Same with wineries, etc. This applies to all corporations (there is a sweet spot of fragility) but academics haven't noticed yet. And of course the same to political units, etc.
Of course we can use this in the "local" vs "global" with GMOs as risks do not scale linearly.
More generally, our society under commoditization and pseudointellectualization lost control of our natural intuitions on how things should grow (especially economists who see GDP growth as a mission). But somehow the Ancients did, with this obsessive "metrion", the balance: a man should not be too strong (leave it to an ox), too fast (leave to a horse), too tall, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 16, 2014 9:22:20 PM UTC
Being Human = Being at a scale.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 16, 2014 10:14:46 PM UTC
Robert J Frey SOmething interesting about small city states. The ones that had commerce (Phoenicians) were protected by their wealth as they were left alone by invaders who got tax money, literally protection money, out of them. So empires take the slack.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 16, 2014 10:47:26 PM UTC
Philip Murtagh ask Yaneer Bar-Yam. He spent his career on that question.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 17, 2014 12:48:52 AM UTC
Paul Mertens indeed horrible to extend life too much.
----
People make the mistake of engaging a paid shill. All one should do is *expose* them.
---
Finance people were risk-blind, but were a 1000 times more sophisticated than GMO-biologists (at least finance people can understand an insult). I noticed that the GMO promoters make elementary risk mistakes of showing the "benefits" of GMO (which I don't contest) as if it meant anything about the "risk" of GMOs. This is the standard Russian Roulette fallacy by which someone tells you the probability of getting the bullet is lower *because* the money you win is now larger.
So far all arguments are fraught with these fallacies: 1) The "evidentiary fallacy" (or Turkey problem, mistaking evidence of absence for absence of evidence), 2) The potato fallacy, 3) The technological salvation fallacy (risk-blind), aside from other similar elementary mistakes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 16, 2014 4:28:14 PM UTC
There is a conflation HUNGER => GMOs. We flip the argument. You need to prove that GMOs do not INCREASE risk of future hunger (they do).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 16, 2014 10:49:11 PM UTC
Anyone commenting here on "benefits" who did not read our PP manifesto ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 17, 2014 12:45:19 PM UTC
We cut the trolls who just repeat propaganda stuff that are ANSWERED in our PP.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 17, 2014 6:31:28 PM UTC
Bryan Elliott Can you repost something shorter? Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 17, 2014 7:07:22 PM UTC
Donna Pascoe I am not saying that anyone who has an opinion is a paid shill, look up confirming the antecedent. I am talking about PAID SHILLS, and those only. OK?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 4:46:38 PM UTC
Posting GENETIC LITERACY sponsored by Jon Entine a charlatan (Monsanto paid to trash people), we saw evidence of trying to distort arguments... Not here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 15, 2014 6:52:08 PM UTC
Fuhgot from where. G I realize had a natural dislike for calculus. Which is why he reinvented the Lebesque measure to replace the Rieman integral.
The interest isn't just in the mathematics, so much as in his character: he was a maximally intolerant of BS. He was also intense.
Coincidentally, after yesterday's post announcing it, I had dinner with someone who grew up knowing him and broke the news to him. Both he and his wife grew up with (coincidentally) G as a friend of their respective families. There are plenty of G stories. One of the stories, he said G once opened one of his high shool math books, looked at it with horror, then ran to show it to Dieudonné (another giant), shouting: "look at the garbage they teach students".
G was self taught; he believed that school couldn't teach anyone anything except junk, and that academia was the refuge of the corrupt, the uninspired, and the incompetent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 14, 2014 1:12:18 PM UTC
Ban Kanj I don't accept the "non-conformity" notion. Some people conform to things, but not others. Should be "independent"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 16, 2014 2:23:58 PM UTC
Viktor Novák Please don't play games here. Making the case that Reading and writing /elementary skills acquisition come in school doesn't translate to other domains. We don't like this kind of BS here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 14, 2014 7:31:48 PM UTC
Recoltes et Semailles
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 14, 2014 9:57:43 PM UTC
Paul Wehage I am not into his type of mathematics. I stay in probability a field he hated. Not formal enough for him.
[NOTE: This is the Math version of a simple verbal argument made elsewhere, but cristallized formally here for rigor, not clarity or communication. Some who have argued that "this is complicated" (and lectured me on "being simple") is silly: go read the main article or find another site.]
[NOTE: We get trolls here every time there is a discussion on GMOs.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 5:27:37 PM UTC
There is EVIDENCE that people who are financed/employed by Monsanto are posting comments on this. Google Val Giddings and Jon Entine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 6:19:30 PM UTC
No trolls here
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 6:36:48 PM UTC
Mike Ar he is a journalist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 6:58:28 PM UTC
Jay Ring not at all, This is a method to be NOT paranoid outside the 4th quadrant by knowing the limits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 7:11:59 PM UTC
Andre Lorenzo there IS a paper explaining all this. The PP.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 9:05:55 PM UTC
Trolls coming out of nowhere...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 9:14:14 PM UTC
James William you don't need to measure, just show the properties. Will expand on this.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 9:14:51 PM UTC
f(breeding) is a Schwartz distribution (see Sigmoidal). Or Heaviside . That is key. It has circuit breakers and an upper bound.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 13, 2014 9:41:59 PM UTC
MArco, sort of, yes. Gaussian or other distr.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 14, 2014 11:14:23 AM UTC
This is the Math version of a simple verbal argument made elsewhere. The argument "this is complicated" is silly. Go read the other one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 14, 2014 1:11:26 PM UTC
Jon Entine has been outed here. He has been posting crap regularly. Another fellow Val Giddings doesn't hide that he is paid by Monsanto. http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/02/atrazine-syngengta-tyrone-hayes-jon-entine
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 14, 2014 2:24:28 PM UTC
Nadim Haddad a journalist warned me last night about what they will try to do.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 11:53:20 PM UTC
Phillip Crews There is NO continuum for ruin probability, they converge or diverge.
http://www.nyudri.org/events/2014-annual-conference-cities-development/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 10:14:28 PM UTC
Serge Oligny It is in SILENT RISK
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIeTV2dkFoTWZqQTg/view
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 4, 2014 8:27:12 PM UTC
I will be direct: I did not read the comment. All we need it a link to our paper... Just consider that science journalists are not (fairly or unfairly) allowed into a risk debate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 5, 2014 1:24:06 AM UTC
Just looked at it. 1) It got retweeted minimally (these people are in a closed circle with no followers). 2) The imbecile didn't realize Yaneer Bar Yam has numerous papers in molecular biology in such journals as Science/Nature.
A Ponzi scheme increases in fragility over time; it requires more and more new funds to keep it going, so it collapses when one eventually runs out of suckers.*
Now it looks like it is a universal property of fraudulent schemes: you need more and more PR, lobbyists, shills, and repetitions of the narratives to keep the story going, particularly in the age of the internet. This is what I am observing with my current fraud-busting projects, with the Saudi-Wahabi government (funded intolerant version of the religion), GMOs (maquerade of "science" and "evidence"), the economics/macrobullshit establishment, the "education" bubble (student loans helping real-estate developers), etc. You can see it particularly with GMOs as all the lobbying efforts can evaporate in the face of a single probabilistic argument; tens of thousands of comments do not measure up to a single derivation.
---
*A Ponzi scheme is one by which one finds new investors to pay off old investors: think Madoff or many heavily endebted governments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 4, 2014 3:42:54 PM UTC
Social networks are disinfectants.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 4, 2014 5:42:32 PM UTC
Nidal Abed Please no conspiracy theory about 9/11 here, or it is automatic zapping.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 4, 2014 6:12:06 PM UTC
Mirza Baig The cost of education is going through the roof.
Guess who the risk expert is :-)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 30, 2014 2:37:50 AM UTC
hahahahaha.... I started reading not knowing who the risk expert was...
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/genetically-modified-organisms-risk-global-ruin-says-black-swan-author-e8836fa7d78
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 28, 2014 2:42:44 PM UTC
Some troll came to use our argument for space alliens... did not read the paper that the purpose of PP is against this class of foolish paranoia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 28, 2014 5:20:33 PM UTC
I am noticing that a bunch of morons are coming here from some GMO site and commenting on "irrational fear" or some other bullshit not realizing it is in the paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 25, 2014 2:47:33 PM UTC
Weightlifting...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 25, 2014 2:53:21 PM UTC
The only way to not pearshape is to lift very heavy weights.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 25, 2014 3:39:11 PM UTC
Six pack abs is for retards
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 25, 2014 3:51:33 PM UTC
The point is that weighlifting and stressing bones is NECESSARY but not sufficient. As to protein, it is pure BS that we need it regularly; we need it by lumps.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 25, 2014 4:15:25 PM UTC
Exactly, metabolic health means burning fat when deprived of fuel. Intermittent fasts and NO sugar help, with weightlifting when fasting...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 26, 2014 11:23:28 AM UTC
Alex Dumortier no endurance sports makes people skinny fat. Guru will explain.
We thank all the people here who helped with the development and refinement of the idea.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 11:51:45 AM UTC
Ron Elliott What the fuck do you mean by "bias" in a mathematical argument.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 12:22:27 PM UTC
Comments are welcome provided they address central arguments, not repeat fallacies debunked in the last section of paper. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 12:49:02 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn, you got the point right. A large ecosystem is better than a small one, but there are many, many, many, many more small ones...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 12:50:58 PM UTC
The typical troll here asks for *evidence* in a paper that is precautionary and pre-evidentiary, that is, based on absence of evidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 12:52:49 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn actually the number of species per square mile follows an inverse square of size of the isolated unit (invariant to definition of "isolation")...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 1:06:58 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn actually the answer is clear. No brainer: a large connected ecosystem, say a single unit, will eventually go bust. But the good news is that there will be parts of it that remain nonconnected at some micro or macroscale, or because of weather differences, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 1:26:48 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn The only way to convince you/others is by simulation... Mathematica has nice tools...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 23, 2014 3:37:43 PM UTC
There was a diatribe here against nuclear. Where did it go?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 24, 2014 11:26:58 AM UTC
Daniel Hogendoorn it becomes risk management.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 24, 2014 2:40:31 PM UTC
Daniel Hogendoorn if your error doesn't threaten me, it is risk. REcurse
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIdlJNSXo1dkMzOVU/view …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 18, 2014 7:01:12 PM UTC
Örjan Lundberg this is BS both analytically and statistically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 18, 2014 7:30:57 PM UTC
Aneesh Karve alas, this PDF is not for you. I can't babysit everyone so look for popular science sites.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 18, 2014 7:41:40 PM UTC
The PDF is not meant to convince (yesterday's post does that), but to prove (sort of). I am putting more formal proofs in Silent Risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 18, 2014 7:56:51 PM UTC
Aneesh Karve why don't you go troll elsewhere. If you can't get that fatter right tail means higher probability of catastrophe/deeper worst case scenario this is not for you. And if you can't figure out that a researcher is not a marketer of ideas, fuck off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 18, 2014 8:26:53 PM UTC
Alexey Turchin we get same conclusions but you think deterministically and I think stochastically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 19, 2014 1:04:45 PM UTC
The great thing about social networks: one can have an effect on public policy without being journalistic.
---
[Added: Something that doubles every 24 days multiplies by 37,000 every year. The doubing period is 15-20 days in Libera. So the idea proposed by Yaneer Bar Yam is to slow it down in the place of origin. You can't rely on the medical establishment here to screen propery (too risky). And you want to avoid having ebola spread out of Africa too much before the winter up North when epidemics grow faster, and avoid having consumers panicking ahead of the Christmas season as they become agoraphobic.]
[Comment: This should be familiar to people here as it is the same nonlinearity behind fragility and antifragility.
Naive evidentiary methods lead people to focus on death rate (which is lower than mortality from hitting one's own furniture) and deem overreaction or even concern to be "irrational". But these rates do not grow exponentially. These are the same evidentiary idiots who refused to see financial risks in 2007. Much psychologists of risks don't know probability and think people are "irrational" when it is the psychologists who confuse, Pinker-style, naive evidence for statistical property.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 17, 2014 2:59:11 PM UTC
The problem today is connectivity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 17, 2014 3:30:58 PM UTC
Bruno Boni infection rate is already 5 digits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 17, 2014 6:46:24 PM UTC
Matt Dubuque something that doubles every 24 days multiplies by 32000 in a year. But if it doubles every 2 weeks => multiplies by 67 million. EXPONENTIATION is fucking scary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 17, 2014 7:13:42 PM UTC
Friends, is it really doubling every 24 days? Can't believe it. 2^(365/24) per year, times the 5,000 to 10,000 existing cases... that's 2 10^8 to 4 10^8. Are they right about 24 days?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 17, 2014 7:31:29 PM UTC
I am worried because transmission is faster in the winter in Western cities...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 17, 2014 8:08:18 PM UTC
Added comments above.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 19, 2014 5:36:42 PM UTC
Jacques Kools "run out of fuel" is euphemism for 'run out of (weak) people".
---
Some philosophy now. One brilliant contribution by economists is the concept of "cheap talk", or the difference between "stated preferences" (what you say) and "revealed preferences" (from actions). Actions are louder than words: what people say (in opinion polls or elsewhere) isn't as relevant, as individuals reveal their preferences with hard cash or, more generally costly action, or even more generally risky action (which, invariably, brings us to *skin in the game*). This is why opinion polls are considered largely BS. I also believe that the notion of "belief" is largely misunderstood.
Likewise I consider the difference between "believer" and "atheist" as mere verbiage unless someone shows difference in action.
--
In Chapter 1 of SILENT RISK, the notion of "probability" is shown to be verbalistic and empty (probability maps to "degrees of belief" mathematically, is ~ belief), largely INCOMPLETE, while revealed preferences via decisions is what matters (more technically probability is something deeply mathematical, useless on its own, an integral transform into something larger, and cannot be "summarized" in words). And decisions and decisions ONLY can be a metric for RATIONALITY. [Footnote 1]
--
In our paper Rupert Read and I wrote that the "belief" content of religion is epiphenomenal ("pisteic" not epistemic), it is merely like believing in Santa Claus makes Christmas a more colorful event.
Belief is cheap talk (to oneself). Western society, particularly the U.S., has managed to marry deep religiosity (in talk) with total atheism (in words). What matters in the West, is the action by the state never impacted by religion. In rational decision-making it has a small cost.
---
If you want to know if someone is a believer in words not in action, just observe whether he relies on some supernatural force to get him out of trouble or if he'd rather rely on the laws of physics and the logic of biology. An individual who goes first to the doctor and as a mere luxury to the priest (without paying for immediacy) is technically atheist though nominally a religious believer. So it looks like religion is something left to the spiritual, socio-ritualistic.
--
The idea hit me when I saw a joke of a cleric who said "I throw charity money in the air, letting The Lord take what share He wants and I keep the rest". People have adapted to the idea for millennia.
---
Finally "Christianity" has evolved since the Middle Ages to become "atheistic in decisions and Christian in beliefs".
---
Some unrigorous journalists who make a living attacking religion typically discuss "rationality" without getting what rationality means in its the decision-theoretic sense (the only definition that can be consistent). I can show that it is rational to "believe" in the supernatural if it leads to an increase in payoff. Rationality is NOT belief, it only correlates to belief, sometimes very weakly (in the tails).
******
[Footnote 1] See in Silent Risk the paradox of the trader who makes a bet against the "probable" though he believes it will eventually happen.
------
SILENT RISK(S) is at:
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 2:20:58 PM UTC
David Pelleg your "epistemology" is flawed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 2:22:47 PM UTC
Read Chapter 1 of silent risk and my paper with Read. 2) We are discussion pisteic not epistemic, 2) epistemic degrees of belief are not binary (Chapter 1 of Silent Risk).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 2:29:23 PM UTC
David Pelleg yes that's 1. But 2 is the deep flaw is epistemology defining a binary (yes no) not a continuous with various weights.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 2:30:11 PM UTC
Neil Kandalgaonkar The "Four Horsemen" of contemporary atheism are charlatans, particularly Sam Harris.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 2:32:25 PM UTC
THis is the central paper showing how "opinions" end up contradicting themselves, as they are largely inconsistent, though not action. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.8.4.45
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 4:28:13 PM UTC
Note that people talking about rationality don't usually know what they are talking about. Rationality can only be expressed in nonviolation of axioms: probabilities cannot be >1, preference ordering (A>B, B>C, not C>A), etc. These are hard violations. These are logical rules.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 5:11:03 PM UTC
Ben Knight Your comment does not make sense. Rationality is defined as transitivity, logical consistency, nonviolation of axioms without constraint on types of preferences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 16, 2014 10:50:18 PM UTC
Let me stop some people here. Rationality is not about words and beliefs. It cannot be MATHEMATICALLY so. It is about acts. Kapish?
TWO QUESTIONS, one easy one hard (the second --more uncomfortable-- one should come next post).
So step 1 (the easy one).
QUESTION " Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?"
One step further, "Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?
--
This is in fact the incoherence that Goedel (the grandmaster of logical rigor) detected in the constitution while taking the naturalization exam.
I wrote about idiots asking me if one should be "skeptical about skepticism", using a similar answer put to Popper about " if one could falsify falsification".
--
Please answer. People who agree may not like the next question.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 15, 2014 3:43:44 PM UTC
Remember Hilter gained power via elections!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 13, 2014 5:34:35 PM UTC
Antonella Capatti what flood in Genoa?
(Note that a change of timescale would explain material fatigue).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 2:02:14 PM UTC
The grandmother example is not as sophisticated mathematically. But I am glad people are complaining about the technical part. This page is like a newspaper, previous post was in General Life Tuesday, this one in Science and Mathematics Wednesday, different audience. Next post might be in Philosophy Friday...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 2:18:46 PM UTC
Joe Norman Better to stay out of theorizing and empirical games & study probability and a priori truths.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 2:03:52 PM UTC
BTW I teach Engineering/Statistical problems, in Engineering School.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 4:29:15 PM UTC
Elia Ferracuti this is how I got disgusted w Bus Schools. I shd have NO affiliation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 4, 2014 1:56:56 PM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli What did Caesar say?
The idea of democracy is to take the citizens' location as fixed, and the identity of those in government as variable, the "representatives" matching the preferences of the people. But you can get similar results of representation, even under dictatorships, by varying the people's location instead.
Assuming you are able to move to the canton or municipality where you feel the dictators represent your tastes & beliefs, such competition would put pressure on local municipal dictators to please taxpaying constituents so they stick around.
So the smaller the size of political units (and the larger their number), the more democracy we get in the system.
[Note: many commentators here missed the point. The discussion is not about mobility, whether it is prevalent, etc., but that a measure of mobility imparts an additional dimension, like an option, the possibility of voting with your feet.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 1, 2014 1:30:13 PM UTC
Nothing to do with HK I am not into the details there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 1, 2014 1:37:53 PM UTC
Aashu Vijynt economies of scale are bullshit empirically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 1, 2014 1:42:07 PM UTC
Nelson Yao Yang Neo this is NOT a political commentary site so please do not turn it into journalism. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 1, 2014 2:09:09 PM UTC
The point is that it is best to have BOTH: small unit and democracy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 1, 2014 6:33:23 PM UTC
Jim Chappelow you seem to be an economist at the useless nitpicking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 1, 2014 6:34:59 PM UTC
Patrick McQuade can you try to respond 1) very short, 2) no Bullshit?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 2, 2014 1:22:57 PM UTC
Tom Pompowski can you try to think of the problem without nitpicking assumptions? Make an effort.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 3, 2014 1:57:45 PM UTC
The point is not that it is EASY for people to move jurisdiction, but that it is POSSIBLE to do so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 4, 2014 1:25:39 PM UTC
I noticed in this post that many reponses were of the kind J-L calls : pointing your finger and getting comments about your nail. The discussion is NOT about mobility but bi-dimentionality of representation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 28, 2014 5:13:04 AM UTC
The experience is in NY. When you are jetlagged you want to sleep... not converse... and when you tell people you are an author, professor, hell breaks loose...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 28, 2014 9:30:35 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita mobsters never tell you they are mobsters they say they "do business",
https://www.google.com.sg/maps/place/Biopolis+Way/@1.3042383,103.7916869,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x31da1a43e92dde01:0x17a7993a85fcc05?hl=en
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 24, 2014 12:05:21 AM UTC
Sanjeev Solanki can you answer Hale Soydan Worthy ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:51:06 AM UTC
So the coffee shop is called Matrix? Same S last year?
Born in, of all disciplines, Electrical Engineering, the field has progressively infiltrating probability theory, computer science, statistical physics, data science, gambling theory, ruin problems, complexity, even how one deals with knowledge, epistemology. It defines noise/signal, order/disorder, etc. It studies cellular automata. You can use it in theology (FREE WILL & algorithmic complexity). As I said, it is the MOTHER discipline.
I am certain much of Medicine will naturally grow to be a subset of it, both operationally, and in studying how the human body works: the latter is an information machine. Same with linguistics. Same with political "science", same with... everything.
I am saying this because I figured out what the long 5th volume of the INCERTO will be. Cannot say now with any precision but it has to do with a variant of entropy as the core natural generator of Antifragility.
[Revised to explain that it is not *replacing* other disciplines, just infiltrating them as the point was initially misunderstood...]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 7:26:54 PM UTC
Jake Shannon any relation?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 7:31:10 PM UTC
Information by someone Von Something. Short, great book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 7:40:43 PM UTC
Vlk Tala Kyiyu it is not unitarian, rather distributed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 7:44:38 PM UTC
Carl Key-Mouse entropy is in probability space. You need something in payoff space to characterize the complexity of the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 7:45:48 PM UTC
Also Yaneer Bar Yam just showed it is single scale it should be multiscale http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4708
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 8:06:30 PM UTC
And finance: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_-wPw8tudmrb2lWVkMxX1JGbkk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 8:47:27 PM UTC
Carl Key-Mouse look at Tsallis entropy (or nonextensive entropy). The idea is along the similar lines to "normalize" probabilities so to speak.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 8:48:41 PM UTC
Pete Wung excellent! Someone told me "a mathematical theory of information" in 1948 was renamed "the mathematical theory of information" 20y later as NOTHING came to replace it or to bypass that paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 8:56:09 PM UTC
Someone put a pirated version of my class 10 y ago, discussed Information/Entropy http://nassimtaleb.org/wp-content/uploads/amherstclass.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 9:03:04 PM UTC
in 2005" psychology is part of info theory" http://nassimtaleb.org/wp-content/uploads/amherstclass.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 9:40:29 PM UTC
Gerard Blais It works (Kelly criterion is robust.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 9:40:47 PM UTC
See comments in Antifragile on Kelly Criterion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 11:33:49 PM UTC
The great Wolfram used cellular automata, part of info theory, in his book NEW SCIENCE.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 22, 2014 4:07:33 AM UTC
Carlos Eduardo Vieira Read the FAQ this is trolling.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 23, 2014 12:06:59 AM UTC
Arturo Gutierrez there was a Romanian who did same thing... Great book. How different is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 23, 2014 12:09:42 AM UTC
A fellow Jean Pierre Aubin joined our center. He does Maxwell's demon http://lastre.asso.fr/aubin/cvjpa.htm#CITEab2sp00
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 24, 2014 10:21:19 PM UTC
George Gilder is Clueless...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 20, 2014 9:22:27 PM UTC
Homer did not tell you what to eat/not eat.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 20, 2014 9:22:36 PM UTC
or do / not do.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 20, 2014 11:09:08 PM UTC
Not generalization. Without a HOLY Book nothing is authoritative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 12:24:56 AM UTC
All I am saying is monotheism is centralized theology. The Romans shared gods with everyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 21, 2014 12:33:19 PM UTC
The arabs call the jews "people of the book" اهل الكتابand the Jews call themselves 3am spharim "people of books" more than עם הספר not meaning the same thing (rather people who love books). Am I right about the Hebrew expression?
To predict, find events that have certain occurrence but uncertain timing (say, the fragile will break) rather than certain timing but uncertain occurence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 16, 2014 1:36:28 PM UTC
Balkan Devlen No.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 16, 2014 1:46:15 PM UTC
Balkan Devlen In that sense, yes, since we are fragile and that is the exact process. But Keynesians mean something unrigorous by the statement, to not worry about long term, etc.
http://www.nlb.gov.sg/golibrary/Programmes/Business/57689/Antifragility__Gaining_From_Volatility__Stress_And_Disorder.aspx
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 8:03:41 PM UTC
Somehow the last time I met the people here was in Singapore.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 12, 2014 6:35:24 PM UTC
Sanjeev Solanki rule number one: don't eat Indian in Lebanon (eat Lebanese), don't eat Lebanese in Singapore (eat Indian).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 16, 2014 1:32:50 PM UTC
Dan Coman let me check schedule.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 17, 2014 11:16:54 AM UTC
Friends, looks like the best place for informal coffee would be Wednesday after 4:30 PM --as we did last time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 18, 2014 9:23:56 AM UTC
Sanjeev Solanki there are other things after the talk. I am the guest of the government and need to go to meetings till 430.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 23, 2014 9:32:45 AM UTC
Hihi, can we do it at 5:30 or 6 so people can finish work?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 23, 2014 10:57:07 AM UTC
Is there a place to advertize with a new post?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 4:34:55 PM UTC
The ERI doen't consume time since I am not the office manager and go there 4 days a month.
Most journalists are trapped in verbalistic concepts devoid of logical/empirical clarity, & are to be taken in reverse. A New York Times article (posted here by Bryan Jack Bryce) claims: "big countries tend to be more resilient to shocks.", which is pure BS.
This is similar to the "breakfast is an important meal" situation.
Just look around: Singapore, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Dubai, compared to their neighbors. Focus on otherwise same ethnicity (Cyprus vs Greece, Lebanon vs Syria). Things are a bit more complex: it is the decision-making unit which would put federations like Germany and the US in the same group).
So 2 articles by people affilitated with the Extreme Risk Institute.
+ One on SIZE (by yours truly): mathematical derivation of the statement that small is MORE resilient of in SILENT RISK:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIQnpwZEdFNjRlRGc/edit
+ Another on how SEPARATION by ETHNICITY brings peace by Yaneer Bar Yam on "Good fences make good neighbors". http://www.world-science.net/othernews/070913_ethnic.htm
Note that for small state to do well, all we need is a "pax" of an Empire, "pax Romana", "pax Ottomana", etc. Which we have with EU, US, Nato, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 1:27:32 PM UTC
David Bookless Governance is higher because corruption is more visible. Like bottom-up friction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 1:29:45 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn they do... But the press coverage is about DC.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 2:19:31 PM UTC
Vincent Leung this is BS. you need to manipulate A LOT of small elections.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 2:38:46 PM UTC
Daniel Obloja what you wrote is just BS as it applies to ALL situations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 4:03:18 PM UTC
Nami Mehr why are small states NOT open borders? Some logic, please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 4:28:50 PM UTC
I think Tom Shelling got the same idea: people's preferences in to NEVER be a local minority.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 4:30:04 PM UTC
Here is the Schelling paper http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/15/1/6.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 5:31:48 PM UTC
Alex Cook we ALREADY have federalism in America.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 10:01:40 PM UTC
If you have 5 units in place of a large one you need 5 decisionmakers not onew.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 13, 2014 5:05:30 PM UTC
I just don't read Fukuyama because too verbalistic to check rigor of reasoning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 13, 2014 8:13:36 PM UTC
Ziad Ammar compare Dubai to Saudi Arabia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 14, 2014 8:10:11 PM UTC
Ziad Ammar this is not a statistic but an example. Try again.
Any help with data would be welcome. The concern is city-states in 18th C Europe (and 17th)...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 9:28:28 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer the discussion with Pinker is.....DONE. Here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbzRrRkhhc1RNY0U/edit?pli=1 coming out in PHYSICA A: STATISTICAL MECHANICS AND APPLICATIONS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 9:35:45 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer PInker made the same mistake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 10:03:13 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita is on to something. Were these "wars" wars?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 10, 2014 8:42:47 AM UTC
rory winn Italy had a population of 17 million in 1700 C
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 10, 2014 12:13:14 PM UTC
Rayan Beydoun Indeed the civil war in Mount Lebanon in 1960 killed <5-10K people. They had no mortar shells.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 10, 2014 12:15:15 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita The Roman army was genocidal: in the AD 70-1 massacre in Jerusalem they tried to leave no prisoners.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 12:09:53 PM UTC
No, no, no, no Paul Wehage. I am eliciting logical inconsistency in what historians say... they are in consequence space not probability space but don't know it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 12:15:54 PM UTC
And no, no, no, no, a binary relation is not 0 1 it elicits LOGICAL ordering which turn into continuous valuation. This is rigor not narrative. Logic is NOT narrative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 12:16:43 PM UTC
1+1=2 is NOT a narrative and we derive it by logical binary relations (Russel and Whitehead).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 11, 2014 1:32:46 PM UTC
Paul Wehage it is just a method to detect inconsistency in a narrative or a statement.
RESULT: 12 academic papers (9 accepted so far), finished a book (Silent Risk)--well, almost, wrote 100 aphorisms, ate 2 Beijing ducks, learned to typeset books as a self-standing publisher, found 4 investments ... and this is 3/4 of the year.
NOTE: To do things make sure you have no assistant. They drag you into doing things for the sake of "work".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 11:37:04 AM UTC
Another thing: zap sophistry from around me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 1:46:57 PM UTC
Joe Clark can you take a look at the typesetting in www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html ? I like writing in FINAL form, then ask a specialist to fix corners.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 7:12:49 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic bingo! I had the same attitude when I had no money.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 9, 2014 11:47:33 PM UTC
james marsh I am not allowed on this page. I obey the rules.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 10, 2014 7:28:49 PM UTC
Frank Nova never. Just go to restaurants. But an outside helper who comes to clean is important, provided you are not there .... they kill your privacy.
I am trying to provide a probabilistic structure for fasting in nature assuming meal frequency follows a certain power law of various thickness of tails and scale.
Assuming that nature has traditionally delivered food to us with some periods of famines, it is foolish to think that it would have irregularity at a single scale, say one a week, but not at a different scale. So if we are deprived of food once a week for about one day, we should also be deprived of food for 2 consecutive days every month (or fortnight, etc.), and for an entire week every couple of years.
Recall that we are calibrated for occasional deprivation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:23:18 AM UTC
Tue Kehlet Krogh Rasmussen these are 4th order effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:33:02 AM UTC
Yuri Vilmanis What you wrote "too far in reducing it to a mathematical model" makes NO SENSE since what I am trying to do is REMOVING the reduction of studies to a SINGLE mode to see the effect. This is called EXPANDING, EXPANDING, Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:39:33 AM UTC
James Marsh evidence on animal models is powerful but only 3-5 days weaken cancer cells in humans. This is why I am enriching with scale.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:40:41 AM UTC
So far I've done 23 fasts of 40-47 hours, and only 1 of 72 hours. The 72 hours felt HUGELY better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:51:25 AM UTC
Orestis Tsinalis it is actually the other way. The older you are the more necessary it is to fast as aging comes from the dulling of receptors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:54:09 AM UTC
James Marsh very little tested there... Except for Brown Fat under very cold conditions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 12:07:33 PM UTC
Ayman Samamry no, with water. Without water you die in days.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 12:31:54 PM UTC
Guru I added a Monte Carlo generated series.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 12:34:46 PM UTC
Naomi Oliviae to be technical, it should be low cal as hungry people eat roots, anything around them, etc. The Christ spent 40 days "fasting" in the desert eating roots. But the difference remains minimal for this.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 12:46:50 PM UTC
Taka Okubo I lift weights for 10 minutes, 1 max, just to signal my body. And I walk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 12:48:55 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic look at the Monte Carlo generated data.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 12:51:14 PM UTC
Paul Wehage I did add a dimension, quantity fed WHEN eating, but it is ~Gaussian, and no big significance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 1:22:46 PM UTC
Paul Wehage Claude Levi-Strauss is considered an anthropologist by writers, but a writer by anthropologists. I wouldn't trust his research.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 2:18:26 PM UTC
Naomi Oliviae days between meals is not discrete. Look at Monte Carlo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 2:19:12 PM UTC
Ban Kanj I actually lost weight from the exercize, only to realize that weight loss is meaningless for me; strength is my department.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 2:25:00 PM UTC
No, Naomi Oliviae I only count meals that are in excess of some qty under the condition that time between meals does not have anything beyond minor consumption.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 9:45:20 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic I am in. Actually with a headstart 24 h
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:27:32 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic fasting is only good if one is ketoadapted. Diabetics are not so... But they can progressively get rid of diabetes via fasting, w /evidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 8, 2014 10:48:14 AM UTC
What I mean by ketoadapted: someone should start with an Atkins-style ketogenic diet (high fat, low protein, very low carbs) as "training" before jumping into fasts. The test is "do you get weaker or angrier if you don't have a meal?" The latter means you have the right response.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 8, 2014 10:53:29 AM UTC
Robert J Frey Calories consumed are thin-tailed (sort of left-bounded Gaussian) thanks to upper bound (stomach size). The same for deficit and surplus. But time BETWEEN meals should follow a power law. Necessarily perhaps. Why necessarily? I can only prove by elimination of the family of processes (Poisson is not it). Further calorie excess is fat tailed at longer scales because of correlation: when you eat too much Monday, you are likely to eat too much Wednesday, owing to absence of equilibrium in the presence of carbs, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 8, 2014 11:49:05 AM UTC
Ali Qathi you wake up feeling light and extatic. The problem is that I am meeting people for lunch...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 8, 2014 12:30:18 PM UTC
look at the link above for the BBC thing. It cannot be accessed from the US but that link works ( it has Slavic subtitles)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 12, 2014 8:21:23 PM UTC
Insulin insensitive people.
Answer: "Fuck off."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 5, 2014 5:14:50 PM UTC
Rony Muffarrij The same?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 5, 2014 5:40:51 PM UTC
Rony Muffarrij waynak?
(Continuing the previous post).
The Precautionary Principle paper is here
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit?pli=1
The previous post has not been well digested as people still argued in about "benefits" not realizing the relation (many who did not seem to have read PP and repeated the Russian Roulette fallacy were zapped). Further, it looks like people are still mistaken about the concept behind our PP: it is NOT conservative, as it encourages (actually begs for) risk taking but confines it to safe domains.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 4, 2014 9:01:20 PM UTC
Jeff Dumps exactly, but ONLY in Extremistan is the problem severe.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 4, 2014 9:34:55 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic let me show you the graph in Mediocristan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 4, 2014 10:13:15 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic here you can compare.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 5, 2014 8:20:22 AM UTC
Guru Anaerobic thin tailed are immune over a broader range, and because the information ratio is more stable for them we don't have to go look too far to the left.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 5, 2014 10:39:29 AM UTC
BTW Guru Anaerobic how do you find Silent Risk? Dense?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 5, 2014 10:40:24 AM UTC
Mona Lidji Fishman as a libertarian, how do you find the idea of controlling GMOs?
Added the section to the precautionary principle. Please discuss but stick to rigor and avoid buzzwords. (Also do not think that the idea is falling from the sky: it is a mere application of the fragility theorems).
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIUUthSzJqUnRPbDg/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 3, 2014 6:49:50 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou for common distributions, say the Gaussian, the scale is the Variance (or rather Standard deviation)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 3, 2014 7:19:19 PM UTC
Scott Nicholson Kurland nonsense: intervention has errors. Polluting IS intervening.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 3, 2014 8:38:27 PM UTC
Many people commenting here do not seem to link it to the fragility argument.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 3, 2014 9:16:32 PM UTC
Binyamin Lachkar read the fragility argument before commenting, as well as PP.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 4, 2014 12:40:00 PM UTC
Few are getting the point of nonlinearity of dose response.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 4, 2014 3:49:25 PM UTC
Looks like I will be zapping many here who do not read the PP before reacting with strawmen arg.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 4, 2014 10:20:26 PM UTC
Jean Klotz van Damme People can go berserk if they want my duty is to communicate the message.
Some systems are very intelligent in the aggregate while composed of unintelligent units (Ant colonies).
Some systems are very unintelligent while composed of very intelligent units (certain countries on the Mediterranean).
Some systems are intelligent while composed of intelligent units (19th C science, legal systems throughout history).
And some systems are very unintelligent while composed of unintelligent units ( Washington, finance, modern academia, economics).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 27, 2014 8:38:21 PM UTC
Mohammed AlQatari Wayn?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 29, 2014 5:25:35 AM UTC
Mohammed i am in istanbul on way to beirut
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 29, 2014 8:17:55 AM UTC
I will be in Amioun for the weekend leaving monday. Ca u email your number?
Adding (p 55) a definition of a Charlatan. Why verbalistic "predictions" (and prediction markets) are nonsense.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QINW1YQm1uSmRjcmc/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 22, 2014 7:54:14 PM UTC
Abhijit Parashar what you are writing is pure bullshit unrelated to the text in the document.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 22, 2014 10:52:01 PM UTC
Ricky Omnom, Explained in the rest of SILENT RISK
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 23, 2014 3:16:28 PM UTC
Jean Klotz van Damme of course, between 2015 and 2034
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 23, 2014 4:42:28 PM UTC
Probability belongs to jurists and legal philosophers. Mathematicians have butchered it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 21, 2014 11:11:32 AM UTC
Emil Mirzayev can you rephrase?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 21, 2014 11:57:36 AM UTC
You can *train* your logical mind, via practice not textbooks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 23, 2014 8:18:59 AM UTC
Studying wiki fallacies makes it worse: people start mounting fallacies out of their context.
The initiative will include a collection of collaborators. Co-director Charles Tapiero.
OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION
In spite of the importance of extreme/hidden risks, there has not been a rigorous methodology to deal with them; statistical or mathematical approaches have not been formally reconciled with real-world decision-making the way engineering has traditionally integrated mathematics and real world heuristics. Extreme risks require both more mathematical and more practical rigor..
The "Extreme Risks Initiative”, ERI, is an NYU-School of Engineering interdisciplinary open research agenda, based on research axes defined by its members and a global research collaborations. Its approaches are at the intersection of the technical and the practical, based on a rigorous merger of theory and practice across interdisciplinary lines. These may include financial and economic engineering, urban risk engineering, transportation-networks, bio-systems, as well as global and environmental problems. A selected series of research axes as well as publications drawing on members’ Initiatives are included in the ERI a working paper series as well as current research enterprises.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 18, 2014 9:37:37 PM UTC
No, I just do research, but facilitate a certain brand of research for others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 18, 2014 9:38:27 PM UTC
And put together a place for real no BS research can take place. No teaching/ dissemination of work, no distractions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 19, 2014 10:10:26 AM UTC
Lorenzo Benedetti let's talk after Sept 4.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 22, 2014 5:19:57 PM UTC
Tom Martin I am the founder... but Plan B, finance it myself... so, yes.
Comments welcome, but only for those who have read the paper and do not rehash fallacies addressed in it.
https://t.co/XRcCMHWi9L
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 18, 2014 3:46:11 PM UTC
Joe Norman read carefully. You are.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 18, 2014 4:06:39 PM UTC
GMOS => Monoculture, but the opposite is not true.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 20, 2014 12:14:41 PM UTC
Thanks Daniel Bernoulli. The problem is not the biology but the "no catastrophic issues". Or, worse, "there is no visible catastrophic risk".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 11:18:49 PM UTC
Sava you made a logical fallacy. All crows are black doesn't mean everything black is a crow. Very bad.
Reason: Irrigation during the summer months, planting of cypress tress, and the disappearance of the goat (which wrecked the Mediterranean after the elimination of the lion that kept the numbers in check).
This may not be true for the Bekaa valley and AntiLebanon. I haven't been there since my childhood.
http://www.greenplan.gov.lb/index.php
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 2:50:15 PM UTC
Georges El Ojaimi no Kfar 7azir , betw AMioun and SHekka
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 2:57:31 PM UTC
I go there every 2 months, but only to Amioun/Tripoli
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 3:09:27 PM UTC
No, deddeh is on the other side.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 3:10:34 PM UTC
Simon Abdallah no, it is not Fi3. Kfar-7azir
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 3:50:03 PM UTC
Jounieh a generation ago. Less green https://www.facebook.com/559370377423773/photos/a.809439285750213.1073741844.559370377423773/881140568580084/?type=1&theater
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 6:20:46 PM UTC
Abou El Gab you are right for the urban areas. Overbuilding. Look at Amioun 1999l : very dry compared to today. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152282970632543&set=a.10151897874202543.1073741826.591792542&type=1&theater
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 17, 2014 12:42:10 AM UTC
People who tend to win battles are those who go there to die. Why is why conventional armies are doomed in front of ISIS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 15, 2014 5:01:52 PM UTC
I was expecting the usual troll who would write "nothing original" (while he himself has never said anything original). Or did I miss such a comment?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 14, 2014 12:31:49 AM UTC
I think Jazi Zilber detected it 3 years ago.
Compare constipated old Park Avenue couples riding first class, for whom traveling is some kind of exercise in bitterness, to partying passengers in the back of the plane for whom any beer is "good enough". It is as if life wanted to get even with them.
Which leads to the paradox that the only way to properly enjoy wealth is to avoid spending it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 13, 2014 1:01:08 PM UTC
Ban Kanj pls translate
[Added: Religion without tolerance.]
(courtesy Cyrus P. , Ban K.)
(Reframed)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 9:18:30 PM UTC
Nothing, I just thought that a friend is someone you can make angry but never harm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 9:25:35 PM UTC
Yahia Loubbidi exactly! Before you engage in business partnership, or marriage, put them through the test.
The point was NONLINEARITY of Number Needed to Treat to condition and its probabilistic consequences.
Now 3 years later the side effects are starting to show. We can expect similar effects for any drug mass marketed to a wide semi-healthy patient, rather client base. Remarkably pharma understands the local problem (side effects) not the metaproblem (iatrogenics & small deviations). We called this NAIVE INTERVENTIONISM.
http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot/2014/08/08/pfizer-faces-numerous-lawsuits-over-lipitor-side-effects/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 9:56:15 AM UTC
Grace Haddad please do not post before understanding the problem/reading discussions about it. Thank you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 9:57:12 AM UTC
We are not saying cholesterol is good or bad, only the nonlinearity of the Number Needed to Treat to condition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 10:20:23 AM UTC
Alex Cochrane-Davis try to read backfground of point before uttering nonsense about overall benefits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 10:37:22 AM UTC
Doctors involved here fail to see the statistical nature of the discussion and someone was bullshitting about risk of diabetes, etc. Benefits can ONLY be assessed from increased life expectancy, which once one does segmentation, fails to materialize. Statins DO NOT appear to increase life expectancy (except in acute cases) and specific medical problems will eventually show up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 11:44:24 AM UTC
Ryan P. Long I am saying that a drug that "saves lives" can only be shown to save life in longitudinal data not in some narrow experimental setup.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 2:37:54 PM UTC
Art M. Altman is exactly the sucker drug companies are looking for. "Lower cholesterol". What does it do to life expectancy for people with very mild conditions?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 7:23:42 PM UTC
Peter Everett, this is excellennnnnnnnnt! Now statistically you can define these populations as >s standard deviations away from "normal", typically s~3.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 9:13:46 PM UTC
Art M. Altman You said need a "small" dose to return to normalcy. Can you rephrase in standard deviations? Thank you for your patience.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 11, 2014 4:41:11 PM UTC
Richard Green can you disclose if you work for pharma?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 14, 2014 5:42:15 PM UTC
The risk estimation is most probably flawed, but the real problem is adding in the risk of intervention + risk of NOT DOING ALTERNATIVE.
I wonder if something has changed in the smear campaign business. Not that it has ever been a great idea. Ralph Nader a lone activist faced a smear campaign by GM (failed). Same with Edmond Safra with American Express paying journalists to smear him (failed too, but he got them to pay big bucks and benefited hugely from the affair).
Anyway, worth inspecting how these things work.
------
UPDATE: So far reactions by lobbyists to our paper are not worth answering scientifically so far as they have been ALREADY addressed in text. The lobbyists just perform strawman deformations. Answering these other than telling them they are spinning means entering their game.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=51&page=G
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 3:04:02 AM UTC
You can't invoke "appeal to motive" fallacy when daving an argument by a paid lobbyist hited to troll you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 3:04:44 AM UTC
Joe Prosciutto that'S what happnd in finance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 3:12:17 AM UTC
Pascal Wallisch delegitimize, find enemies etc. use my nonBS intransigeant approach in dialogues with his friends as nonscientific approach etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 9:05:06 AM UTC
Our paper is here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 12:35:07 PM UTC
Yes but climate change has a special discussion. Shd be dose specific.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 9, 2014 12:47:04 PM UTC
THis is another paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 8, 2014 12:23:22 PM UTC
Aaron Elliott that's not the problem is they don't harm anybody.
I noticed that many papers, researchers, decision-makers conflate many things, especially academics (recall the Pinker Problem), with results patently opposite to what they claim. The GMO debacle and the sloppiness of the discussions on Black Swan risks by "scientists" not only clueless about probability but not aware of their ignorance makes this project essential.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 7, 2014 3:33:20 PM UTC
Treatise ob ConTracts
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 6, 2014 4:20:45 PM UTC
Math can be debunked with math, and this as well is like symbols pulled out of a hat
Most people claiming a "scientific" approach to risk management do not quite understand what "science" means and how applicable it is for probabilistic decision making. Science consists in a body of rigorously verifiable, replicable, and generalizable claims and state- ments –and those statements only, nothing that doesn’t satisfy these constraints.
Science scorns the particular. It never aimed at covering all manner of exposure management, and never about opaque matters. It is just a subset of our field of decision making. We need to survive by making decisions that do not satisfy scientific methodologies, and cannot wait a hundred years or so for these to be established. So phronetic approaches or a broader class of matters we can call "wisdom" and precautionary actions are necessary. But not abiding by naive "evidentiary science", we embrace a larger set of human endeavors; it becomes necessary to build former protocols of decision akin to legal codes:
rigorous, methodological, precise, adaptable, but certainly not standard "science" per se.
Indeed the rigor of the 12th Century legal philosopher Pierre Jean de Olivi is as close to our model as Kolmogorov and Paul Lévy. It is a fact that stochastic concepts such as probability, contingency, risk, hazard, and harm found an extreme sophistication in legal texts, from Cicero onwards, way before probability entered our scientific vocabulary, and of course probability was made poorer by the mental gymnastics and ludic version by Fermat-Pascal-Huygens-De Moivre ...
Text is here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QISHRiY1VLTkRiS1k/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 3, 2014 6:27:16 PM UTC
Not talking about New York lawyers but MEDIEVAL legal scholars
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 3, 2014 10:16:42 PM UTC
Randy Bosch are you a lawyer? Anyone in the tribe a lawyer?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 4, 2014 10:52:26 PM UTC
The problem is lack of precise definitions of things that NEED a definition such as payoff, risk, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 5, 2014 10:29:48 PM UTC
By "Lawyer" I mean think rigorously in terms of probability.
(The full book is here in prelim draft https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QISHRiY1VLTkRiS1k/edit)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:27:26 PM UTC
Figured out the preasymptotics error.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 2, 2014 10:32:35 PM UTC
The full book is here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QISHRiY1VLTkRiS1k/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 3, 2014 10:16:04 PM UTC
Joe Norman The fallacies I mention here are mathematical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 1, 2014 12:17:02 PM UTC
Soon Chong Tan it CLAIMS to model volatility empirically and it doesn't.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 1, 2014 5:12:08 PM UTC
FindClique command in Mathematica is great!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 1, 2014 5:15:36 PM UTC
Gad Saad one thing I can say is that one may disagree with you but your work is not job market science. Test: can someone outside the circle care?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 1, 2014 7:12:43 PM UTC
יובל מרקס I am fucking offering one! see SILENT RISK and measurement of fragility. But nobody is acknowledging.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 2, 2014 8:10:20 PM UTC
Google taleb Canetti heuristic
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 30, 2014 3:10:46 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn another derivation of Antifragility that converge to the convex one... Which is why I don't get antirobust. http://www.fmf.uni-lj.si/~podgornik/download/Liquids-2014.pdf
(Follow up on previous chart on the mission of "Silent Risk").
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 28, 2014 1:00:52 AM UTC
Michal Kolano this is the whole story.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 26, 2014 6:08:58 PM UTC
Vergil, B and A not C is rather how I would see it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 26, 2014 6:22:05 PM UTC
C entails rigorous logic
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 26, 2014 6:52:27 PM UTC
Vergil Den I need another graph... give me time for a formal answer. The fact is that there is opacity YET we need to survive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 27, 2014 3:45:31 AM UTC
Frank Nova this is very very incorrect. Fire is local. Our paper aims precisely at avoiding such questions (we even answer your point with precision).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 28, 2014 7:22:54 PM UTC
Yes but please take it from SILENT RISK (next update) as it has been changed and the final one is there.
----
(Adapted from a Levantine proverb, via Samir El-Zein.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 26, 2014 2:15:44 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita modified
(Heuristic)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 25, 2014 1:49:26 PM UTC
Dermot Dorgan you should resist the temptation of explaining an aphorism by imparting some intention (subliminal or not) to the author. I find this approach 1) fallacious (it is linked to the genetic fallacy), 2) downright disgusting, beyond the inelegant 3) intellectually vapid, especially in the presence of incomplete information on YOUR part, particularly that as in this case it came up as an advice, trying to give solace to a rebel scientist who has enemies. People like you pollute this forum.
We are not adding the math appendix as it intimidates people and might cause them to stop attacking our paper .
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 25, 2014 10:23:16 AM UTC
Anshu Sharma reread.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 25, 2014 2:30:25 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn thanks... Will discuss next week and add you in ackn.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 26, 2014 4:46:10 PM UTC
Tony Apuzzo your argument is addressed in paper. So you either did not read the paper & have a silly knee jerk reaction or fail to understand probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 26, 2014 5:03:05 PM UTC
Collin Webb Excellent! This is called technological salvation --actually two errors: 1) belief that technology is unconditionally good (no iatrogenics), and 2) the notion that the solution to a problem is necessarily the most technological possible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 22, 2014 10:06:33 PM UTC
Siva Rama Krishna Boddu the way to look at blood pressure is mostly as a barometer. You care largely about variations, what makes it go up could be a defense mechanism, hence indication that something is wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 23, 2014 2:52:05 AM UTC
Anand Venkatraman So if you have "better things to do" why don't you leave this site instead of wasting your time on "empty intellectualism on facebook"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 23, 2014 1:15:52 PM UTC
Siva Rama Krishna Boddu it is partly a barometer, partly something that goes out of control when system is informationally confused, and partly a compensatory/protective mechanism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 21, 2014 5:45:42 PM UTC
That was what I saw with Fannie Mae... negative convexity...
People tend to write using the script of their religion. Serbians and Croats speak what can still be considered identical languages, but write it in Cyrillic (the Orthodox Serbs) or Latin (the Catholic Croats); You can tell which Slavic population is Catholic (or Protestant) by the use of Latin script (Polish, Czech,Slovac), and Orthodox at the Cyrillic (Bulgarian, Ukranians, Russians).
Hindi and Urdu are almost the same language (with now different accents) but Urdu, spoken by Muslims, is written in Arabic script. Turkish (pre-Ataturk), Persan, Kurdish, etc. use the Arabic script which came with Islam.
+ Jews write Aramaic using the Hebraic script, Christian using the Syriac (Estranghelo, Sirto) versions.
+ Maronites in Lebanon histotically spoke Levantine, which they wrote in Syriac script ; Arabophone Jews wrote Arabic using Hebrew letters, as it was the same alphabet (Maimonides wrote Guide to the Perplexed in Arabic "Judeo-Arabic"). Of course languages start to diverge once they are spoken by separate populations.
+ Now what is the exception? Which population? I found one counterexample.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:27:53 AM UTC
Dan Bărbulescu, Bingo! That is the exception that I found! Now is there another?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:30:23 AM UTC
Antonio Jimenez ignore cases of switching like modern Turkish or Tatar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:40:42 AM UTC
About 10 people figured out the ROmanians. I found another very historical one but will not reveal yet!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:44:03 AM UTC
I am told that Romanian is a case of rebranding... they used to write in Cyrillic https://twitter.com/TimLeary75/status/489373756008435712
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 12:08:26 PM UTC
Coptic is written in Greek alphabet, demotic Greek, not Arabic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 4:24:48 PM UTC
OK,OK, nobody found the historical counterexample... Mozarabs were Christians who wrote in Arabic script not Latin in Spain during the Arabian period. A friend, Robert Shaw, pointed that out to me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 5:58:16 PM UTC
Pascal Venier sorry, I meant they wrote Romance language in Arabic script
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 6:35:14 PM UTC
Urdu and Hindi, as someone commented, have been drifting apart over the past 60 years...
A small group of cardiologists have advanced a hypothesis that suggests an excess of exercise actually damages the heart.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:46:03 AM UTC
It comes out of Jensen's inequality...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 12:03:29 PM UTC
Finishing BoP-2nd ed.
You can estimate the life expectancy of a given single human that is, *over time*, using the average of all humans over a *given moment in time* (snapshot), by looking at a given day, say yesterday, the age of people who are alive/died, sometimes called a "cross-section". The *time average* is similar to the *space average*. Otherwise it would be impossible to understand humans. Clearly, if there are a few 1000 year old persons in yesterday's sample, you can assume that your great uncle might live that long, and delay plans for spending his inheritance.
A day in all the casinos should resemble the life of a given casino.
Likewise you can see how books, companies, etc. fare over time by taking a given snapshot, in the absence of systemic risks or contagions that effectively eliminate ergodicity.
Assuming ERGODICITY, we can look at nature, and consider the various species at a different stages in their cycles, and say that the future for a *given* species will "resemble" (that is for specific statistical properties) that of all other species.
----
Philosophically, the problem of (enumerative) induction is circumvented in our wisdom; we do not say "Greenspan never died" and infer that he could be immortal, so such wisdom includes the detection of ergodicity where applicable. But we fail to use it properly in social science because of BS-artists who use mechanistic statistics a-la-Pinker, with claims of the style "it never happened before" for a given company, asset class, etc.
----
This is much, much, much more technical, but we can go in the reverse direction: imply ergodiciy from long-term survival of a high dimensional system (say the planet), with no terminal blow-up. In the Precautionary Principle paper, we can use the argument of "absence of ruin" of the planet on a given day to assert ergodicity, i.e., to say that there are enough independent dynamics of sub-components on earth to warrant that had the earth produced systemic risks endogenously, it would have blown up already, on a single day. And we have several billion of such days! In other words, the Markov Chain does not produce absorbing states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity
or, clearer,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 12:51:44 PM UTC
Vergil Den you can derive the statistical properties of Broadway Shows (lengh in days) on one day, and apply them to a single one over time. Same with technologies: how many technologies failed last year? Etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 12:52:11 PM UTC
Dru Stevenson Not quite, you are not average.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 1:14:16 PM UTC
Dmitry Afanasiev We are not assuming, just inferring that transition probabilities not 0 or 1. That is the tack I am taking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 1:25:17 PM UTC
I used ergodicity in Fooled by Randomness to say that in the long term a lucky idiot will end up giving back his profits...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 1:53:58 PM UTC
Jaffer Ali some things are ergodic, some things are not, for humans and in the planet. You want to MAKE things ergodic or KEEP things ergodic for life on planet to continue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 2:34:44 PM UTC
Sherif R. Fahmy i am away from computer but if you are defining stationary as time invariant transition probabilities then we can prove that one can be stationary but not ergodic (absorbing states) but I conjecture (can t prove) that the reverse is not possible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 2:45:38 PM UTC
A lucky fool (FbR) is defined as someone with patently negative expectation but DOES NOT KNOW THAT FACT ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 2:50:42 PM UTC
And an unlucky nonfool the converse
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 5:12:13 PM UTC
Benjamin Brockman see Chapter 6 of SILENT RISK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 7:03:51 PM UTC
Adam Hendricks, this discussion is about *endogenous* variations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 14, 2014 9:28:09 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn this post emerged from a reply to one of your comments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 1:56:58 AM UTC
Vergil Den , bingo! I am implying ergodicity not decribing it ex ante.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 1:11:13 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn these are not the same... I will restart and explain the connections... the lower part needs to be fragile in a hierarchical system, for it to be ergodic...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 16, 2014 12:23:25 AM UTC
Jaffer Ali anything that puts a Palestinian and an Israeli on the same page is a good thing.
http://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0716711869
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 1:57:43 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn in pure math it was still done. But books don't count for academic promotion in science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 2:20:06 PM UTC
Scott Wright actually Google Scholar is rectifying it by showing that books carry more influence (they are cited more often).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 3:11:12 PM UTC
I am not talking about scientific education or promulgation, but FORMULATION.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 2:00:59 AM UTC
Igor Rivin this is disgusting Mathematicians don't like Mandelbrot because they can't connect the dot. He had a coherent, universal view of nature and geometry, as well as statistics not some chicken shit set. Unsurpassed. He didn't prove theorems, something for clercs and disliked derivations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 2:13:24 AM UTC
Igor Rivin take your defamatory shit elsewhere. Kapish? Les Objets fractals : forme, hasard, et dimension, trad., Flammarion, 1973.
Les Objets fractals, survol du langage fractal, Flammarion, 1975, 1984, 1989, 1995.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 2:54:46 AM UTC
(comment to others: Rivin was making claims that someone in 1980 preceded Benoit M when his book was published in France in 1973. The only precedence was Gaston Julia for a set that was a special case, not a general geometry of nature. It irks me to see BS claims like these, commonly made by smalltime mathematicians jealous of M's success.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 10:33:51 AM UTC
Mandelbrot is not about the Mandelbrot set or some idiot-savantic derivation but the general view of nature, rugosity, self-affinity. He himself accepted that people have detected similar structures like Julia, but did not connect it to a general representation of nature. He connected the dots.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 12:38:54 PM UTC
Mandelbrot kept discussing this. He suffered quite a bit with imbeciles trying to change the nature of his contribution, from a comprehensive theory to small-time derivations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 2:40:02 PM UTC
Actually I was present at the "reconciliation" between Adrien Douady and Mandelbrot... At the end both got the point that it was a different business, like grammar vs poetry
Descartes could not live in Paris because he had too many interesting friends. He moved to Belgium and Sweden (then very very poor and rural) so he could reduce noise of ideas. And he also did turn down a university position as too distracting.
(One can enumerate accounts: Jules Vernes also left Paris for Nantes, partly for family reasons, mainly because it was boring enough... but his argument was "good for a day trip to Paris")
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 1:43:45 PM UTC
Hamza Al-Kindi don't say "sampling error" gratuitously here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 1:46:23 PM UTC
Someone mentioned barbell. Descartes went to Paris on the occasion, then ran away. He was in physical contact with the greatest minds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 2:02:37 PM UTC
David Zuccaro mentioning Descartes philosophy of mind here in this context is highly... out of place in an intelligent discussion. People like you are usually invited to leave this forum. And how about his mathematics? I am saying this because of the zillions of morons who put down Aristotle on some "mistake" he made.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 2:10:56 PM UTC
I have in my hands Descartes' complete works. He touched on ...EVERYTHING.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 2:18:06 PM UTC
Feyyaz Alingan I don't live in NYC. I live in a boring place not far from a natural preserve. But it is not far from NYC. 40 min travel time is a great hurdle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 4:16:23 PM UTC
Geoffrey F. Miller but you live in a university... BTW are you going to NHS this year?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 8:45:45 PM UTC
John Humphrey thinkers were incredibly connected throughout the Middle Ages.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 13, 2014 10:25:51 PM UTC
Eleni we need people. Village life is great.
This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 11, 2014 10:12:00 PM UTC
Nicholas Vardy Long time!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 11, 2014 7:37:29 PM UTC
Benjamin Peterson you just fell for a logical fallacy, & illustrates the trap. I am not saying ALL but ODDS ARE meaning a small minority of what you will remember will be public events. I am fed up with logical flaws on this page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 12, 2014 2:55:26 AM UTC
I am getting a lot of anecdotal nonsense here. Will you remember a game more than a job promotion, a life event, a tragedy, a professional setback ????????
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 12, 2014 2:56:13 AM UTC
The idea is HOW MUCH of the news driven you will remember compared to the life-driven, and HOW MUCH time you devote to news. Kapish?
Considering example on the popular topic, when simple skipping of sugar, previously abused, will not work, and individual should strongly consider regular fasting.
Or, like Strogatz says: "The system is not reversible under this policy reversal".
Same domains?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 11, 2014 11:18:07 AM UTC
Then the system is not ergodic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 11, 2014 11:22:16 AM UTC
If there is an absorbing state then the long term properties are not similar to the short term cross-sectional ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 11, 2014 1:16:32 PM UTC
I am preparing a lecture/chapter on ergodicity in SILENT RISK & will put here in plain English.
So embedded in the idea is that (positive) knowledge about the world is incomplete, transitory, continuously revised, but wisdom (what to do about knowledge) doesn't change.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 10, 2014 1:34:49 PM UTC
This matters because information changes with time, wisdom doesn't .
-We are shown identical twins, one chewing gum, the other completely idle (or trying to be so). We are told that the majority of people impart positive qualities to the one who is chewing gum ... and that the experiment was done with a "large n" of twins. But these results come from the fact that one of the twins is animated while the other one is frozen; it has nothing to do with gum --plus the fact that someone standing still in front of a camera looks devoid of human qualities.
-Note that the chewing gum industry is financing the "experiment".
-To make the experiment "real" or "ecological", you need to film the twins in real life doing real things, only one of the two chewing gum.
- GENERALIZING: In a nutshell, although this is not a real experiment, it shows in a carricatual way why many academic papers in social science are BS in spite of looking like a "controlled experiment".
PS- Most research on biases in the evaluation of small probabilities fall into the same class of errors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVsD8Pm0gBI
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 9, 2014 5:59:01 PM UTC
Loris Bangolis this is bullshit. On camera still is more salient than in real life. Since the OBSERVER is moving.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 9, 2014 9:08:46 PM UTC
Most research on biases in the evaluation of small probabilities fall into the same class of errors.
Jean-Louis Rheault, on this site.
(J-L was commenting on how people in general interpret aphorisms).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 8, 2014 11:25:28 AM UTC
Cristina Capuse alas you just used words... What I meant is not using words (mathematicians use words), but thinking ONLY in words. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 8, 2014 10:11:51 PM UTC
Actually Wittgenstein was not literal about words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 7, 2014 11:52:12 PM UTC
Jack Dorso , or, worse, talking to him.
***
(Without an emotional draw it is literally impossible to follow the game.)
I accidentally discovered a way to change the behavior of unethical and abusive persons.
1) The other day, in the NY subway corridor in front of the list of exits, I hesitated for a few seconds trying to get my bearings... A well dressed man started heaping insults at me "for stopping". Instead of hitting him as I would have done in 1921, I pulled my cell and took his picture while calmly calling him a "Mean idiot abusive to lost persons". He freaked out and ran away from me, hiding his face in his hands.
2) A man in upstate NY got into my parking spot in as I was backing into it. I told him it was against etiquette, he acted as an as**le. Same thing, I silently took his picture and that of his license plate. He rapidly drove away and liberated the parking spot.
3) Near where I live there is a forest path/preserve banned to bicycles as they harm the environment. Two mountain cyclists ride on it every weekend during my 4 PM walk. I admonished them to no avail. The other day I calmly took a dozen of pictures, making sure they noticed. The bigger guy complained, but they they left rapidly. They have never returned.
Of course, I destroyed their pictures. But I never thought handhelds could be such a weapon.
DEEPER DISCUSSION: See Plato's Republic, Book 2, the discussion between Socrates and Glaucon on whether people behave in a right manner because they are watched, or (according to Socrates) because that is what makes them tick. The ring of the Gyges gives its holder the power to be invisible at will & watch others.
Clearly Plato anticipated the later Christian contrivance "you are watched".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 4, 2014 2:07:03 AM UTC
Eugene Roumie I am looking for a fight... Why not. Should someone strikes first it would be legitimate defense. And remember a cyclist is more vulnerable than a pedestian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 4, 2014 12:28:05 PM UTC
Krishna Nyapati I love streetfights. But I can only trigger them in defense. Otherwise it would be assault.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 4, 2014 12:29:10 PM UTC
In France I am not sure you are legally allowed to firm someone without permission. In the US/UK you do.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 4, 2014 12:54:00 PM UTC
Charles Babbitt indeed ! DEEPER DISCUSSION: See Plato's Republic, Book 2, the discussion between Socrates and Glaucon on whether people behave in a right manner because they are watched, or (according to Socrates) because that is what makes them tick. The ring of the Gyges gives its holder the power to be invisible at will & watch others.
Clearly Plato anticipated the later Christian contrivance "you are watched".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 5:33:25 PM UTC
Thought of the Saudi prince who sued Forbes for underestimating his fortune.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit?usp=docslist_api
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 1, 2014 6:14:27 PM UTC
Looked at natural random radiation. The rate of change is tiny.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 1, 2014 8:18:11 PM UTC
PP might apply there. We are not listing many examples to avoid distraction as it is a methodology paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 1, 2014 11:52:02 PM UTC
Andrew Davies the question is IS it Repeated?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 12:54:02 AM UTC
The point of PP piece is to argue based on probability structure, not anecdotes or GMO propaganda.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 1:38:14 AM UTC
I thank those who mentioned CERN... Dicy but necessary perhaps as a case study.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 1:40:14 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn you are right. We need to worry about success not failure. Did not read rest as I am away will continue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 11:08:20 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn you say we have ecocide every 150M years. Was any endogenous to life on planet? We excluded the meteorite induced ones as we can't control them. Can the inner functioning of a system allow for ecocide?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 12:48:41 PM UTC
Michael Clarke you seem TOTALLY TOTALLY not getting the point. We wrote the paper to propose a formal distinction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 2:44:53 PM UTC
I can prove endogeneity using ergodicity: trillions of variations.
Look up ergodic in probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 2:55:42 PM UTC
David chexk this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 2:55:58 PM UTC
Adding a comment to the paper
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 3:15:00 PM UTC
The underlying idea is that for certain systems the time average of their properties is equal to the average over the entire space.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 3:42:33 PM UTC
Joe Norman exactly but exogenous shocks cause absorbing states ... Nonmarkov
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 2, 2014 6:48:10 PM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli anything you want
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:20:28 PM UTC
certainly not
1) That people are overly concerned by hierarchy (and pecking order), and that hierarchy plays a real role in life, a belief generalized from the fact that *some* people care about hierarchy *most the time* (most people may care about hierarchy *some of the time* but it does not mean hierarchy is a driver). The problem is hierarchy plays a large role zero-sum environments like academia and corrupt economic regimes (meaning someone wins at the expense of others) so academics find it natural so they tend to see it in real life and environments where if may not be prevalent. Many many people don't care and there is no need to pathologize them as "not motivated" --academics who publish tend to be "competitive" and "competitive" in a zero-sum environment is deadly. I haven't seen any study looking at things the other way.
2) That "competition" plays a large role compared to *cooperation* in evolutionary settings --of course if you want ruthless competition you will find examples and can model it with bad math. The latter point is extremely controversial, Wilson and Nowak have been savagely attacked for their papers (with >130 signatures contesting it) and, what is curious NOBODY was able to debunk the math (very very very rigorous backup material). If Nowak/Wilson were wrong someone would have shown where, and in spite of the outpour of words nobody did.
(Hint: whenever I see "math" with linear regression, my BS-detector gets fired up. See commentary on "scientists" and regression in SILENT RISK)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20740005
For comments: http://plektix.fieldofscience.com/2013/12/whats-deal-with-inclusive-fitness-theory.html
Cooperation:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279745/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:19:29 PM UTC
Ginette Blansjaar you are not getting the point: HOW MUCH does hierarchy drive people's actions? I am not saying it is not there, so the discussion is not the EXISTENCE of hierarchy but the role it plays in the CHOICE by agents in front of a payoff. Please stick to point at hand and do not divert the discussion. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:27:39 PM UTC
Tautologically, if people cared about hierarchy they would be ambitious. Some are. Does it mean ambition is a central driver? Not shown.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:29:03 PM UTC
Elizabeth Theiss Smith the "Selfish gene" (actually Trivers not Dawkins) has been debunked by Wilson-Nowak. That's my point. There may be selfishness, but there is a lot, a lot, a lot of altruism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:40:30 PM UTC
Rory Sutherland indeed this has been the subject of our discussions: this imparting to people some motivations because you have them is a failure of theory of mind, making people think the way you do. Trivially, motivated students get A and become academics, not all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:42:17 PM UTC
The best test of how much people care about hierarchy is laying in front of us: how many people are motivated to study/work extra hours to get a better SAT/bonus etc? Is it age dependent?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:44:11 PM UTC
The way we are going with this discussion is towards skin-in-the-game. If people care about hierarchy => they are harming others by rising, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 1:51:44 PM UTC
Elizabeth Theiss Smith indeed but singling out a segment you just proved the point that saying the motivated ("grad students") care about hierarchy is tautological hence limited to the motivated and NOT necessarily a general traint.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 2:12:24 PM UTC
Jazi Zilber I had been looking for something of the sort as the selfish gene cannot explain suicide bombers, clergy, soldiers, martyrs, then my eyes opened when as I was writing Antifragile I went to South Africa and noticed the cooperation between species... not just within group. We are all part of a larger system and defining the unit as the individual is very reductive. Nobody put a fractal layering from the cell to the species to life on earth and looked at the analytical consequences...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 4:29:34 PM UTC
Aaron Elliott Indeed if you read Adam Smith The Wealth of Nation is unveiling a mechanism of cooperation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 28, 2014 4:43:44 PM UTC
Indeed in the math Nowak looked at the strategy with highest growth, hence expectation not probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 29, 2014 2:19:02 PM UTC
My point about hierarchy is "how much of your desire to rise in a hierarchy" enters your decisions as a ratio of the aggregate?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 29, 2014 6:50:35 PM UTC
Noah Carl the point is "self-interested"... and how narrow "self" is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 23, 2014 7:06:49 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou which Athenians was it who required legislators to disown their friends?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 25, 2014 11:32:48 AM UTC
The whole point is the tension between universal and particular. When you are a saint you are committed to universals, not particulars. Friendship is universal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 24, 2014 12:08:57 AM UTC
Zapped someone who fell into the trap of mistaking aphorism for scientific statement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 23, 2014 9:51:08 AM UTC
Disruption is not mathematically compatible with the Lindy effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 23, 2014 11:21:54 AM UTC
Not at all... Fragility affects the new, so disruption disrupts the recent...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 23, 2014 12:58:21 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn Black Swan is rare but convex. His ideas are BS, I mean utter BS. Nothing systematic as Jaffer Ali is pointing out, and a lot of promises.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 22, 2014 12:30:22 PM UTC
What many economics imbeciles don't get is that the next generation gets priced out of the real estate market... All this economic benefit business is not taking into account side effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 22, 2014 1:04:07 PM UTC
There are two types: 1) Tourism (say Paris) , 2) Vacation Places (Say the South of France). The latter is the total killer.
The Silver Rule Under Uncertainty requires *skin-in-the game*, so "you can only expose others to risks that you are taking yourself", in the sense that "we cannot see adverse consequences of all actions, but should there be a negative one I will pay the price and will be eventually incapacitated".
So there is an evolutionary argument that those who systematically cause harm to others, willingly or unwillingly, will eventually exit the system --along with their genes.
"I share the opacity of future consequences if there are potential benefits to me".
---
Broadly seen, this is (probabilistic) SYMMETRY, the working title of the short book I am now working on.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 21, 2014 12:09:58 PM UTC
Martin Schwoerer if by the categorical imperative you mean the universality rule (only do acts that satisfy the universality criterion), then this makes it operable. Note that it is not quite the SILVER rule, but SILVER+SITG
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 21, 2014 12:47:25 PM UTC
Basil Alsamarai skin in the game = DISINCENTIVE, talking your own book = INCENTIVE. Please stop making the mistake here. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 21, 2014 12:56:35 PM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli Symmetry links to convex/concave and upside/downside. No risks for one, rewards for another. Symmetry allows links to mathematical notions/proofs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 22, 2014 12:19:40 PM UTC
James Junghanns this is pure bullshit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 22, 2014 12:31:51 PM UTC
Evolution ENTAILS cooperation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 22, 2014 7:13:31 PM UTC
Frank Nova you need to read stuff a bit deeper than your first order reasoning http://plektix.fieldofscience.com/2013/12/whats-deal-with-inclusive-fitness-theory.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 22, 2014 7:17:31 PM UTC
Read this too Frank Nova and do some thinking before posting 1rst order remarks http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279745/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 21, 2014 12:37:08 AM UTC
Dru Stevenson think of allegiance to the community...
The Golden Rule (do to others what you want them to do to you) is an invitation to interventionism, utopianism, and meddling into other people's affairs, particularly poor nations, as represented by the the NGO clowns at TED conferences trying to "save the world", and causing more harm with unseen side effects. Remember that Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and were following the positive Golden rule. At the personal level, I may feel good trying to nudge a vegetarian to eat raw kebbeh (Lebanese steak tartare) because I like it myself.
---
The Silver rule (do NOT do to others what you don't want them to do to you) leads to a systematic way to live "doing no harm" and gives rise to a liberating type of ethics: your obligation is to pursue your personal interests provided you do not hurt others probabilistically unless you are yourself exposed, & not transfer risks to others (skin-in-the-game at all times). But, and here is the key, should there be a spillover, it will necessarily be positive. It is therefore convex.(Typical via negativa rules are convex). It separates the "self-interest" in Adam Smith from the "selfish" version. And if you want to help society, just try to benefit WHILE at least harming no one.
---
This distinction puts a lot of clarity behind the idea of free markets and morality. You should never have to prove that what you do is GOOD for society (hard to express in words and rationalistic framework), but you can certainly show you are NOT hurting others more than yourself via skin-in-the-game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 19, 2014 1:22:16 PM UTC
A lot of posts by people who are not getting what I am saying. It is NECESSARY, not sufficient. To simplify discussions I may zap people falling for logical flaws here (see FAQ).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 19, 2014 1:26:24 PM UTC
Jonathan Leighton you appear to have a logical hangup. The silver rule is REQUIRED, but does not PRECLUDE helping others in need. Stop the bullshit here as you are creating a problem where there is none.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 19, 2014 1:33:08 PM UTC
Stefanie Kraus explain what you mean with some precision.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 19, 2014 1:49:48 PM UTC
Felipe Camargo if you don't see difference between VIA POSITIVA and VIA NEGATIVA, you need to do some homework.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 19, 2014 2:13:33 PM UTC
George Christiansen "Nobody forcing their solutions on others is following the Golden Rule" is BS: just recommending and nudging is sufficient to cause harm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 19, 2014 2:35:30 PM UTC
Larry Bernard actually, ISOCRATES.
What is her real sin: having flouted the academia, or having been bad at her job?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/us/27mit.html?_r=5&
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 19, 2014 8:26:02 AM UTC
You cannot tolerate false credentials. You just can't.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 17, 2014 4:59:17 AM UTC
Cats are included in comment... They don't commit genocide of other cats.
(It makes so much sense but I wish I was aware of it before engaging Larry Summers.)
(This is the first aphorism here that is not mine.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 15, 2014 5:24:39 PM UTC
Ban Kanj A Syrian lady from near Amioun (Marmarita) said it I forgot the original I translated. It was not in Arabic, in Levantine.
This is the main benefit of acceleration in the information age: the fragile breaks faster.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 15, 2014 5:39:29 AM UTC
David, bullshit is fragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 15, 2014 6:04:11 AM UTC
David, exactly. Bullshit fails if it harms the offender...
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIaW44R1dlbldiUHM/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 15, 2014 5:38:56 AM UTC
Toby sorry typo. It is h. Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 15, 2014 6:04:49 AM UTC
I posted the equation with a typo but generated graphs with right equation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 15, 2014 8:24:45 AM UTC
Samir EL Zein all corrected now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 15, 2014 9:22:05 AM UTC
Philip Murtagh So far I see few true tradeoffs, such as when for instance the Fourier tr represents the function in the frequency domain. But we need to look for convolutions (f * hat{f}) where the problem prevails.
--
Also, people like to eat fish by the waterfront (with white wine, naturally) even if the fish was caught far away and transported by trucks (in the picture I was told the fish came from 100 km away), and even if they prefer cow meat to fish. As to red meat, they only eat it when there is no view of the water, though not necessarily with a view of grassy fields.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 13, 2014 7:27:14 PM UTC
I spent part of a day in Troblis.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIODdHYl95d1dWNE0/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 11, 2014 12:25:39 PM UTC
Note that only fucking idiots would analyze these aphorisms as anything but part of the INCERTO.
Terrible news, the FDA has decided to ban the age old and artisan practice of aging cheese on wooden boards because one bureaucrat deemed it unsanitary.
Another example of the state destroying practices which have been tested for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Could it be lobbying by Kraft etc.?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 11, 2014 5:52:10 PM UTC
We won! http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/10/fda-backs-down-in-fight-over-aged-cheese/
http://www.freep.com/article/20140606/NEWS01/306070028/Detroit-goats-brightmoor-farm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 12, 2014 12:19:05 PM UTC
https://mobile.twitter.com/RonPaul/status/476109958132408321
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 8, 2014 10:32:58 PM UTC
Paul Wehage is there a way to listen to analog music?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 6, 2014 8:30:06 PM UTC
Positive Black Swan man qala hatha?
Let us discuss if fever suppression is necessary beyond the potentially lethal, or if it is harmful.
I experienced yesterday the first bout of fever in about a decade. Having read Antifragile, I wondered if there was a real need to lower it (other than the discomfort) and avoided antipyretic drugs. But it raised an interesting question: if we are made to be subjected to occasional episodes of fever, can we live completely without them? We get mild infections all the time and tend to supress fevers... Now I can understand that the antibacterial benefits of fever can be dealt with with pharma products, but how other benefits, such as thermal variability, or the heating up of the cells?
I cannot ethically report on my own experience (sample of 1) except to intimate that it was not negative (far from it), except for an outpour of bad aphorisms as I was not able to read at all.
Let us go through the medical evidence-based literature, combined with rigorous logic of Jensen's inequality and nonlinear responses.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 1, 2014 10:17:32 PM UTC
The benefits came with the vanishing of the permanent small muscle and joint pains one gets from weightlifting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 2, 2014 12:52:45 AM UTC
The secret we are looking for is not so much the effect on the infection as the potential effect on OTHER things, like mental associations, joint pains, cancer cells (as pointed out by Maria), hormonal circuitry, insulin sensitivity. Data could be available...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 2, 2014 12:55:16 PM UTC
Good point fever makes you avoid noisy work
{Bed of Procrustes, 2nd ed}
{Lindy Effect, Bed of Procrustes, 2nd ed}
{Bed of Procrustes 2nd Ed}
(50 more aphorisms)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 6:37:16 PM UTC
perverse. Corrected
http://econjwatch.org/articles/religion-heuristics-and-intergenerational-risk-management
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 11:45:15 AM UTC
Andy Catsimanes Sam Harris is the epitome of the intellectual fraud.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 11:59:57 AM UTC
Superstition in my opinion is extremely rational: just consider its side effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 12:36:07 PM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli this is a problem of teleology. The assumption that we do things for the exact reason and there are no invisible side effects to outcomes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 1:05:49 PM UTC
Ban Kanj and David Boxenhorn the key that people don't realize is that no established intellectual in 1960 predicted religion would be on the rise (except for such people as André Malraux: "Le 21e siecle sera religieux ou ne seras pas"). Go to the Levant, and you will figure out that all we need to do is to manage the side effect of intolerance, which is not proper to religion, rather than criticize religion. And religious intolerance has killed fewer people than ideology: compare the Greek civil war to the Syrian one: the former was at least as murderous and brutal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 1:28:39 PM UTC
יתגבר כארי we limited to Abrahamic but not Protestant
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 2:05:26 PM UTC
Ban Kanj don't tell a Salafi. Please don't. I will be in Tripoli next weekend.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 31, 2014 11:48:38 PM UTC
The Kashrut had the side effect of uniting them... heuristics, still.
Static measurements of inequality are defective (in addition to their traditional lack of mathematical rigor). True equality in income is probabilistic: it requires downward mobility. This should map to opportunity. I quickly wrote down the sketch of what such a true measurement of equality would be like.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIX3AzcHFkaGtORkU/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 29, 2014 2:39:34 PM UTC
Pascal Wallisch no, we are talking income, not wealth and it is very very unstable in tail.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 29, 2014 2:41:24 PM UTC
ban kanj what is b/o?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 30, 2014 5:22:39 PM UTC
Greg Juhasz why the fuck don't you read the paper? It doesn't say it is empirically right or wrong, it DEFINES inequality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 31, 2014 11:45:16 AM UTC
Andrew Davies but this is a homogenerous markov chain, so if the probability holds at all times everyone will end up spending same time in the top quantile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 1, 2014 8:11:31 PM UTC
No, Andrew Davies 3 states are more complicated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 26, 2014 12:15:01 AM UTC
Luiz Comar what's the IKEA effect?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 26, 2014 1:51:59 AM UTC
القرد بعين امه غزال
"An investigation by the Financial Times, however, has revealed many unexplained data entries and errors in the figures underlying some of the book’s key charts.
These are sufficiently serious to undermine Prof Piketty’s claim that the share of wealth owned by the richest in society has been rising and “the reason why wealth today is not as unequally distributed as in the past is simply that not enough time has passed since 1945”.
After referring back to the original data sources, the investigation found numerous mistakes in Prof Piketty’s work: simple fat-finger errors of transcription; suboptimal averaging techniques; multiple unexplained adjustments to the numbers; data entries with no sourcing, unexplained use of different time periods and inconsistent uses of source data.
Together, the flawed data produce long historical trends on wealth inequality that appear more comprehensive than the source data allows, providing spurious support to Prof Piketty’s conclusion that the “central contradiction of capitalism” is the inexorable concentration of wealth among the richest individuals.
Once the data are cleaned and simplified the European results do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970.
The US source data are also too inconsistent to draw a single long series. But when the individual sources are graphed, none of them supports the view that the wealth share of the top 1 per cent has increased in the past few decades. There is some evidence of a rise in the top 10 per cent wealth share since 1970."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 25, 2014 7:19:11 PM UTC
The red flag is that the errors are one-sided.
Unlike most websites, we don't get too many "trolls" on this page because, simply, it is a v. small minority of people who post disruptive (or irrelevant) comments and these people get identified very early on and zapped before they degrade the page. I estimate less than 1% of people who have posted here.
---
The strategy on this page is not to moderate comments but to moderate people. Those who post regularly have a nontroll status & can say whatever they want.
---
It could be that the negative aspect of the web in the article below is only coming from a small percentage of users.
---
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9c0cf256-e197-11e3-b7c4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz32ZFi6GwG
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 25, 2014 1:44:51 PM UTC
John Keck we do attract a lot of weirdoes here but they get zapped out at the early stage... It takes 2 comments by a newcomer to know if he is a weirdo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 25, 2014 4:25:24 PM UTC
Some don't realize is that this page is specific to the topics covered in the INCERTO, and not a forum for discussion of the lifecycle of butterflies or English country music. Nor is it for the exchange of "opinions" so much as it is here for the presentation of facts or logical inferences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 25, 2014 5:16:21 PM UTC
David Heath exactly the aim here is development not debate or convincing others. The web has other sites for that. Development requires thin lines...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 26, 2014 2:32:13 AM UTC
Peter Elliott yes, but a most trolls are outright trolls, just like a fellow who barged in and got zapped.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 26, 2014 4:05:19 PM UTC
People are OBLIGATED to read the fucking FAQ for the page before posting. FAQ is https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIOTV3Y3RhLVpLZVk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 29, 2014 1:59:58 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer This is wrong use of terms. A gadfly is not a troll. A troll does not engage on logical grounds.
A "diplomatic debate" is defined as a conversation in which one looks for synthesis (as opposed to one in which one is trying, as in war, to win the argument, as with political debates). Clearly this type of debate only works when the two parties are scientists not marketers, Larry Summers, or something of the sort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuvbghZuM8U&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 25, 2014 9:39:21 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn I don't know if Sornette predicted the crash, but not the point. Prediction is in binary space. And it is only as good as the convexity as the exposure involved.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 25, 2014 12:56:22 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn it is an error to think that humans "build" systems, both Sornette and I believe that complex system have their own organic emergence, even if there are humans along the way.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 26, 2014 9:28:44 PM UTC
Stanislav Yurin we think alike, which is not random... The first thought to cross my mind was: start with fasting (easy solution), then work your way up...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 29, 2014 12:46:53 PM UTC
Look at the bullshit by journos "In a lively debate, Didier Sornette, ETH Zurich and Nassim Taleb, New York University reminded participants of the resilience of New Yorkers during hurricane Sandy and in the aftermath of 911." http://bulletin.sciencebusiness.net/news/76571/ETH-Zurich-has-met-NY
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 29, 2014 1:23:59 PM UTC
Indeed it is foolish to equate fasting with ketogenic (carbs deprivation). Proteins are potent in signaling. Elimination of hormonal/ endocrine noise is what fasting is about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 25, 2014 11:17:49 AM UTC
There is an untested heuristic in trading that Bridge players do better than chess champions.
---
This is the natural evolution of every enterprise under the curse of success: from making a good into selling the good, into progressively selling what looks like the good, then going bust after they run out of suckers and the story repeats itself ... (The cheapest to deliver effect: "successful" cheese artisans end up hiring managers and progress into making rubber that looks like cheese, replaced by artisans who in turn become "successful"...).
("You will be pleased to hear that due to the popular request on your Facebook page for a live webcast of your seminar today, we will be doing exactly that. Lukas Fitze,ETH Festival Project Manager".)
http://new.livestream.com/ethglobal/ethrisk
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 22, 2014 1:22:58 PM UTC
Why don't you all come to the party? 6-7 drinks there. I need to zoom out at 7.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 23, 2014 11:41:40 AM UTC
is there a recording somewhere?
Brenner doesn’t hold back, saying that publishers hire “a lot of failed scientists, editors who are just like the people at Homeland Security, little power grabbers in their own sphere.”
http://retractionwatch.com/2014/03/03/nobel-prize-winner-calls-peer-review-very-distorted-completely-corrupt-and-simply-a-regression-to-the-mean/#more-18896
Full interview at
http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and-publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 20, 2014 2:11:52 PM UTC
Very very true.
Answer: try to do nothing. The best way to have only good days is to not *aim at* getting anything done.
Actually almost everything I've written that has survived was written when I didn't *try to* get anything done.
[Flaneur, Filtering, Convexity]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIODdHYl95d1dWNE0/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 18, 2014 2:40:30 PM UTC
Mervin Chan thanks! But don't they all say the same thing?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 18, 2014 3:09:10 PM UTC
Leland Gilsen when people nitpick on MAN vs PERSON (when it clearly means person) I tell them to fuck off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 18, 2014 3:48:38 PM UTC
Panici Alexandru updated! That was from a different file. Thanks.
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/05/15/too-big-to-fail-battle-between-larry-summers-nassim-taleb/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101678460
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 16, 2014 1:42:42 PM UTC
The picture is from 2 years ago. I am 15 lbs lighter...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 18, 2014 6:17:35 PM UTC
No, ascott was last year...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 15, 2014 7:41:40 PM UTC
The weather is great... Dry .... Reminds me of Damascus.
---
Every human should learn to read, write, respect the weak, disrespect the strong when warranted, and fast.
---
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 11, 2014 2:05:30 PM UTC
Tim Rayner I only lift a little bit to signal to my system not to go cannibalize muscles, and this may be a bad idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 12, 2014 11:05:53 AM UTC
Gunter Busch the idea of fasting is to go into withdrawal mode, go inside. Lifting weight disrupts that. And not cannibalizing your proteins might prevent autophagy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 12, 2014 4:21:31 PM UTC
Jonathan M. Ayoub it is very silly to call an ancestral pattern of energy deficit a "fad diet". Very silly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 11:30:22 AM UTC
I did 6 episodes of >40h fasts in 22 days. All I can report (aside from the normally expected benefits) is that I lost a taste for wine. And, to a lesser extent, for coffee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 11:32:59 AM UTC
Yes. Some disturbance after you start eating. But I ate v. large portions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 11:47:47 AM UTC
No, but I am not enjoying it, strangely . Cold beer works better, when thirsty.
http://www.zurichmeetsnewyork.org/events/risk-towards-more-resilient-systems-and-societies
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 10, 2014 6:46:54 PM UTC
I requested filming. But a volunteer would be welcome.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 10, 2014 6:48:11 PM UTC
Also debating (in a very friendly way I promised) Larry Summers next week in Las Vegas http://www.hedgeco.net/news/05/2014/skybridge-alternatives-salt-conference-may-13-16-in-vegas.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 10, 2014 6:49:14 PM UTC
Just show up with a camera... Then Youtube...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 11, 2014 9:00:55 PM UTC
I promised to be diplomatic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 5:09:04 PM UTC
Anyone coming with a camera?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 14, 2014 5:10:58 AM UTC
Only 1 hour... TK
***
You are honorable in proportion to the number of people to whom you can say "fuck you" but don't.
***
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 9, 2014 11:54:48 AM UTC
You are constrained by courtesy not fear.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 9, 2014 1:58:56 PM UTC
Jj Peralta why don't you go nitpick elsehere?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 9, 2014 10:08:29 AM UTC
Nothing to do with smash, has to do with contribution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 9, 2014 11:20:51 AM UTC
Added "depth"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 9, 2014 10:31:32 PM UTC
I truly believe that my real book is SILENT RISK.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2434363
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 8, 2014 12:20:51 PM UTC
One theorem eradicates thousands of pages of sociobullshit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 8, 2014 12:46:00 PM UTC
Filipe Brás Almeida this is worse: he is saying that violence has declined (as an estimator), or PERHAPS has not.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 8, 2014 12:47:00 PM UTC
Rhodeslover Peeb dismissing bullshit detecting as "academic disagreement" as a form entertainment is offensive to knowledge ... particularly when it comes to safety.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 10:20:36 PM UTC
Ibn Cme a religious ritual is not a business meeting but a way to be part of a community and separate from your self, accept higher orders of spirit. It is exactly what a business meeting is trying to replace (unsuccessfully).
-----
http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 1:36:54 PM UTC
James Altucher I don't like "promotion".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 1:51:18 PM UTC
all books will be under the label
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 8, 2014 10:38:06 AM UTC
Michael Kay They just announced it and added INCERTO to all titles but the books are not merged yet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 4, 2014 5:11:39 PM UTC
I drank water, some black coffee but lost taste for it. I walked a bit and lifted weights for 10 min per episode,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 4, 2014 5:26:18 PM UTC
42-46 hours without food...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 4, 2014 9:03:25 PM UTC
In kuntum ta3lumun i
Am ta3lamun? Ma altarjama?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 4, 2014 9:54:25 PM UTC
So "in kuntum ta3lamoun" means "if you are informed" (in the practical sense) or "if you are knowlegeable" (in kuntum 3ulama2)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 4, 2014 10:08:39 PM UTC
(I am on an Amtrak train reading the texts in Arabic on my screen with people around me looking with concern.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 4, 2014 10:36:57 PM UTC
Mike Ar I never have breakfast. So last meal is dinner, next is late lunch or dinner on +2 (or hopefully +3).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 5, 2014 1:23:12 AM UTC
always water. Corey law, please try again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 5, 2014 11:46:30 AM UTC
Ben Lambert I wonder if it is truly scientific but the Russians advocate 21-40 day therapeutic fasts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 2:12:51 PM UTC
Anand Venkatraman Shalizi seems to be into interesting things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 2:27:45 PM UTC
Russians had 7, 21, and 40 day water fasts... I wonder what would happern at 40 days.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 3, 2014 11:45:49 PM UTC
I don't do it to help in thinking I do it because I can't live without it.
It seems that people get only one part of the rule: the disincentive or deterrent. But that's not what it is about: it is mainly a filter, which has been missed.
Bad drivers who tend to kill others by incompetence end up leaving the gene pool. Same with academics who trade and blow up: they become history. Same with people who give bad advice.
But there are many areas for which only TIME is a judge of competence --not the reasoning of men. The Silver Rule cancels the effect of rationalizations and intelligent-sounding BS: survival taks and bullshit walks.
There is also a main element that is missed: prediction. Predictors have an incentive to predict likely-events-of-low-consequence when they are not harmed by their errors. But in the real world, what matters is warning about events of high consequence. In the real world, the latter can only be revealed through skin-in-the-game as the supposedly "good predictors" go bankrupt.
Likewise a population that ignores signals goes extinct.
--
The Silver Rule was a chapter in the back of ANTIFRAGILE, missed because people could not connect it to asymmetry of payoff in general. I am tempted to issue a political policy pamphlet or short book on a deepening and broadening version of skin-in-the-game that would stand outside the *Incerto*.
Would add some elements of "inequality" and the Soviet aberration of manufacturing artificial equality without silver rule.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 11:29:51 AM UTC
But there are many areas for which only TIME is a judge of competence --not the reasoning of men. The Silver Rule cancels BS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 12:14:55 PM UTC
Aaron Elliott it is at the level of the population... A population that ignores signals goes extinct.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 12:31:48 PM UTC
David M. Snyder I don't give a fuck of what people think of me, I have DUTIES. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 1:40:49 PM UTC
Ross Williams you are committing a very ugly logical fallacy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 1:58:31 PM UTC
Please close this warming idiocy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 2:15:53 PM UTC
Gordon Prince Bringing warming into this and in such a form is the idiocy. And considering that old people don't have an interest in the world surviving beyond them is a fallacy. Warming brings a lot of fallacies of mistaking absence of evidence & the DO NOT HARM imperative, do not fuck with nature ... I do not want discussions of warming here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 3:06:42 PM UTC
My point is that it is necessary, not sufficient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 3:15:00 PM UTC
Distributive justice isn't taking the money from a risktaker who earned it honorably, it is keeping his probability of losing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 3:44:53 PM UTC
Robert Russell the point is MAKING money via skin in the game. Once made it's his; to make more you need more risks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 4:08:13 PM UTC
Academics, the worst, particularly in economics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 5:28:34 PM UTC
Killian Denny the worst point of inequality we've had was when the US bailed out bankers but not limo drivers... And the statists are responsible for that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 6:02:34 PM UTC
A policy book is one in which there are simple heuristics that can be implemented. At a state level: subsidiarity of sorts. At a personal level, it is dishonorable to predict unless you are affected. For the compensation of corporate managers, clawback + net loss, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 1, 2014 12:12:59 AM UTC
Ole Fredrik Baadshaug great point. A builder will eventually die. But there will be a sweet spot of how many can be tolerated... otherwise no builders, no houses. So the idea is to kill less people than other builders. Same with the airline industry. A crash is OK, not too many. For many businesses insurance enforces such probabilistic equilibrium.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 1, 2014 12:27:13 AM UTC
Ben Brady when someone is zapped all his previous contributions become hidden. The rate of zapping is low, though.
He was a man of integrity, of intellectual thirst, and a real friend: he truly had skin in the game (he experimented on himself).
--
We are considering a memorial a-la-Seth: A memorial one-day conference for all his friends and admirers, organized by his pals: John Durant, Tim Ferris, Tucker Max, Gary Taubes, and other members of that independent thinking clique who connected socially through Seth.
Ad vitam aeternam.
http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/04/27/seth/#comment-1195110
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 8:37:10 PM UTC
Banned someone who just spoke ill of the dead.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 9:20:16 PM UTC
(Zapped one more. A person who does not respect the dead (when the body is still warm) should never be on this page).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 3, 2014 3:09:16 AM UTC
Donna Warnock that was my idea: open but using the structure of AHS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 8, 2014 11:17:38 PM UTC
Gerry Mandel looks like it will be in August in Berkeley.
Recall that the Antifragile likes stochasticity and variability (by Jensens's Inequality), up to a point. So in order to allow myself to comment on the literature on Intermittent Fasting and modeling it mathematically (skin-in-the-game), I just completed today 3 fasts of ~44 hours each over 11 days (only water & black coffee) and I can report the following.
1) BARBELL - It is easier to fast completely than diet. The idea of life is to never have the brakes on when eating. But also when fasting, it is not a good idea to be tempted: you put yourself in a state of arousal for food by eating "a little bit". Hunger comes and then goes away after a cup of coffee.
I would say the combination fast+good meals with no inhibition was absolutely thrilling.
2) MAIN INSIGHT- The body is effectively an information machine, food brings metabolic noise, and it thanks you for resting.Fasting is like silence after being in NYC's Time Square. It is like not watching the news. Then food becomes more differentiated...
3) HEALTH BENEFITS - I may be subjected to placebo effect, so I can't comment except via negativa: nothing wrong.
4) WEIGHT LOSS - beyond expectation, and in the right places, but that was not the point. I lifted weights during fasts to signal the system to avoid cannibalizing muscles, but maybe it's a bad idea.
5) CRITICAL COMMENTS ON LITERATURE-
A- Caloric restriction may not extend life expectancy, and it is a completely different mechanism from IF (Intermittent Fasting). We are made for unsteadiness, not to be "thin". Data shows that thin people don't outlive slightly overweight ones. We have hints that diabetes seems more the result of hunger-deprivation than being overweight since diabetics can be cured after a long fast and weight loss and do not immediately relapse upon gaining back the weight. It takes ~ 3-6 months which hints to us the frequency of famine. So it looks like we are made for a cycle of deprivation, on which next:
B- Matching the randomness in nature, it is silly to want to inject routine into fasting. We need (say) 1 day a week, 2 days a month, ..., and 1 week a year, with powerlaw frequency. My next fast will be 4 days, etc.
C- The video below has some focus on metrics like IGF shIGH, but it includes the best researchers. Valter Longo is the most rigorous and understands proteins are bad for us, see Orthodox fasts. Proteins harm our kidneys, but we recover if we ingest them-then rest, like acute-stressor-with-recovery vs. a constant-dull one.
D- Discovered that there is a huge Russian literature on fasting as it was clinical practice (21 days), discounted because it doesn't follow modern protocols, but should be replicated.
http://vimeo.com/54089463
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 12:52:04 AM UTC
Ban Kanj Not good idea. Go for 100% fast; they recommend 500 calories which is torture.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 12:55:35 AM UTC
Ban Kanj also I've been fasting 14-17 hours every day for 5 years (no breakfast). Ramadan works if one does not wake up to eat, so 1 meal ~ 22 hour fast. When is the next Ramadan?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:01:38 AM UTC
The writer Upton Sinclair has a book on fasting... Anecdotes but worth looking at.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:02:40 AM UTC
Ben Hughes have you looked at what the Russians do? 21 days, up to 40...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:11:02 AM UTC
Ken, google Mattson, Valter Longo, Martha Varady, the researchers...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:11:43 AM UTC
Ben Hughes will be back... Wanted to read about the Russians, because they were very, very successful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:15:15 AM UTC
Ben Hughes I was told that the 3rd day is when the action is. Valter Longo thinks 4 is optimal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:16:01 AM UTC
Ryan Atkins I personally was estranged from food after 22 hours...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:40:58 AM UTC
It takes ~ 3-6 months for diabetics to relapse after regain weight which hints to us the frequency of famine in our biological history.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 1:43:32 PM UTC
Greg Linster look at ANTIFRAGILE where I show that we are part cow part lion, the variable needs to be the meat, the steady the cow part (grass, herbs, the vegan). I suggest nothing but vegetables on these days.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 8:05:20 PM UTC
The reason is to drink water with fast: We Semites had dry periods in our history, but much rarer than lean ones. But if you have Irish genes I doubt you need to deprive yourself of water. As to coffee, it was necessary to divert me from food. Herbal tea is boring to me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 28, 2014 9:21:53 PM UTC
Peter Margetiny sorry, but there is evidence that chronic supply of protein is harmful overall, which includes kidneys, the exception is that it is less harmful when accompanied with fat. And protein throws you off ketosis (it turns into carbs).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 29, 2014 3:18:09 AM UTC
Ben Lambert Absence of occasional diarrhea might be a problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 29, 2014 3:20:44 AM UTC
Dru Stevenson Semitic practices (Judaism, Islam) ban liquids and are global, Greek-oriented ones are partial, banning one class of items. The Southern Levant tribes (Jews, Arabs) had different exposures from Northern Levant (Antioch in Syria), with different mentalities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 29, 2014 12:52:34 PM UTC
Fergus Sinnott what do you call 1 day? 23-24 h or 36 hours between meals?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 12:02:01 PM UTC
Does the 5/2 fast entail 2 consecutive days?
Note 156
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 1:55:58 PM UTC
Panov Papaoikonomiyaki I do not comment on books I didn't read. Expropriation is not Republican BS, and the mathematics of decision making prevail over handwaved relation between r and r. Piketty does not address the instability of wealth in the US (unlike Europe) where the top is transitory. Wealth destruction is the norm here from fragility once one rises to the top, as a natural regulator.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 1:57:11 PM UTC
Fuad Fouad Khan people who are rich, without government bailout, become vulnerable, very vulnerable. It shows in data as top very unstable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 1:57:46 PM UTC
So the Black Swan effect is self regulating. I described the process in The Black Swan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 3:16:51 PM UTC
John Macy what the fuck are you saying "not perfect". They are drawing MONSTROUS conclusions from his DATA.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 4:39:47 PM UTC
Added on asset price inflation. Please reload.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 4:59:33 PM UTC
Here are asset prices . Compare to inflation and there you have an effect.
http://therealasset.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2004/01/Asset-prices-Fed-period.png …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 6:39:49 PM UTC
My problem is class inequality, inequality of opportunity, not inequality of results. Fairness and poverty should never be conflated with inequality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 7:44:17 PM UTC
Fouad Khan you are spurting out logical fallacies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 8:32:42 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic I agree, the problem is privilege.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 9:53:27 PM UTC
Lyndon Peters the bottom 50% pay ~2% of taxes already while getting the same service. You can't try negative tax.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 9:54:28 PM UTC
Paul Wehage I am in the US not the UK and rapidly left France 34 years ago because one feels trapped compared to the US where you can be aggressive, breathe, make it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 25, 2014 10:05:52 PM UTC
Paul Wehage I am letting some French people do that... if you see what I mean. We are getting mail from France.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 26, 2014 7:00:04 PM UTC
Fouad Khan NEVER use "there is no evidence that" on this page. One more bullshit and you are zapped out of here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 27, 2014 10:26:14 AM UTC
Please note that every person engaging in personal insults is zapped from discussions here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 27, 2014 12:20:45 PM UTC
Greg Box this is BS. Sorry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 27, 2014 2:09:35 PM UTC
DISCUSSION CLOSED. IF YOU HAVE COMMENTS GO PUT THEM ON SOME OTHER SITE. KAPISH?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 27, 2014 2:10:17 PM UTC
Too many bullshitters who don't get the argument.
المسيح قام! χριστος ανεστη
For all others, happy rites of Adonis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 22, 2014 1:47:27 AM UTC
Compare, 1) Greek-Orthodox Easter in North-Syria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1aQKTqVpeY vs Beirut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2L-CWls9uU
In a way it was easier to eat nothing than comply by the grueling Orthodox lent, just bread and vegetables. I can report that much of the benefits in the literature are indeed there; one feels great not eating, and, strangely, also after eating. There is no loss of energy, but I can't lift as heavily as usual, while paradoxically feeling detectably lighter walking up the stairs or standing up from a couch. Mental clarity and allergy for economists and BS operators are unimpaired.
But most at the end, one feels reborn... Will celebrate Happy Easter /Rebirth of Adonis in another post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 7:47:12 PM UTC
Jazi Zilber what is the max you did?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 7:48:18 PM UTC
Nadim Shehadi except for black coffee and water.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 7:56:07 PM UTC
Pascal Wallisch I wrote two papers during the fast, including the one on inequality. Maybe because I've spent the last 4 years skipping meals between dinner and lunch, about 15 hours every day.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 7:59:56 PM UTC
Charles tell us more...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 8:13:52 PM UTC
If you are already ketogenic, from low-carb + exercise, then you enter in that state.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 8:45:14 PM UTC
Ban Kanj allergies come from a confused information system that make one overreact and inflame. Food confuses the system, particularly carbs (too much metabolic noise). Resting the system sensitises it better so it knows how to react.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 8:58:16 PM UTC
Ban Kanj it is not food triggers but your entire information system. It has been shown that intermittent fasting reduces asthma symptoms (an allergy sort of) in a broad class of people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 9:08:15 PM UTC
Kurosch Daniel Habibi One of the authors here has papers Johnson et al + I have others somewhere. (look inside for asthma) http://www.amazon.com/Alternate-Day-Diet-Skinny-Pounds-HealthierLife/dp/0399534903/ref=la_B001JRREO8_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397941571&sr=1-2
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 9:11:15 PM UTC
Kurosch Daniel Habibi http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1859864/?tool%3Dpmcentrez
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 9:17:02 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic it is not effective for weight control; it is the ONLY powerful one for diabetes, etc. We are looking at hormesis/cell repair.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 9:48:46 PM UTC
Sorry about your dad, Guru Anaerobic I was mistaken about your genes seeing you so fit. My grandfather Nassim and his 3 brothers died of Diabetes, my uncle died when he was younger than I am now, and everyone alive who is older than me yet not dead has it...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 10:00:50 PM UTC
Charles congrats!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 10:09:06 PM UTC
Art De Vany welcome, very honored to see you here! You were the one who started this whole thing, plus the link between variability/stochasticity and health.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 10:12:38 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic I apologize again about my rash assumption your genes, seeing you so fit and healthy... And sorry again about your father.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 10:44:44 PM UTC
Art De Vany is the best person in the world to answer that question...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 10:50:27 PM UTC
Collin Webb for asthma you might want to try 4 full days of fasting... Check Valter Longo's work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 20, 2014 4:23:20 PM UTC
Intermittent fasting makes me feel rebirth, which is why it is important to break the fast on Easter day.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 7:17:50 PM UTC
Very classic, vey honorable. Just like Thierry de la Villehuchet 106- On Killing Oneself
Thierry de la Villehuchet --an acquaintance of mine -- just killed himself in the aftereffects of the Madoff case. He had dragged his clients into investing with Madoff . "Killing himself over money?" I kept hearing. No, it is not about the money --it was other people's money. It is about dignity. I could not help comparing it to Madoff, pictured walking around Manhattan with a faint smirk --totally insensitive to the harm he caused.
This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere -- and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably ("it is all about money"). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate.
Thierry, veuillez recevoir l'expression de mon respect le plus profond.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 4:44:29 PM UTC
There is what is sometimes called "envy", whoch should rather be called "desire to emulate", that aims at spurring people into ambition... and there is envy that makes you want to harm the person (a la Pikettism). It is the latter that I mean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 5:56:03 PM UTC
In Arabic there is a word, 7asad, entirely negative (unike "envy" which might be ambiguous).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 7:01:24 PM UTC
I've started reading "Envy and the Greeks" and they have our evil eye, baskanein, which corresponds to 7asad. Zelos is not it. And I'm glad Eleni Panagiotarakou is back for our tutoring in the matter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 7:16:02 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault the Greeks used "emulation" and "rivalry" vs "envy" (negative).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 9:00:39 PM UTC
How about Schadenfreude when others fail? It is one step below causing their failure, but still in that direction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 9:07:13 PM UTC
Colten Knull You are conflating inequality and injustice, possession and theft, etc. This is incoherent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 9:13:24 PM UTC
Once one accepts property rights, then things become easy: at one point is someone NOT allowed to have more than you? $1? What if he took more risks, worked harder, etc? Which is why this institutionalization of envy is idiotic and inconsistent unless it cancels *all* property rights, not something they accept. The focus shd be on opportunity + skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 9:45:43 PM UTC
Now the interesting part is Pikettism= turning ressentiment into economic theory with some causal narrative built into it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 12:44:46 PM UTC
Killian Denny inequality has been dropping very very fast outside the West.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 1:27:08 PM UTC
The point is that entrepreneurs and regular people aren't bothered with the idea that someone can be weatlthy because THEY can also get wealthy (the idea of opportunity) and create wealth for others in the process. Civil servants, academic economists and other parasites want to CONFICATE the rich because 1) conditional on neing an economist they LIKE money and think it is important, 2) they can't get it with no hope, and 3) they want to prove that those who have money "stole" it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 2:20:47 PM UTC
Nadia Braun I am "envious" because I am angry because a BS operator (Piketty) who doesn't know statistics wants to tax me at 85% ? Or confiscate my money? Are you delusional?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 2:25:45 PM UTC
Preparing a post about the conflation of inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcomes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 2:30:02 PM UTC
Yes, hijacked by lobbyists and bankers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 2:54:13 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault in natural systems size makes you fragile. Look at the list of Forbes richest 2014 and 1984. The 1984s are severely damaged in the US (but not in Europe where the states are involved). Let people's own greed help them destroy themselves. Managed systems have a tendency of creating a class of CRONIES ... check France .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 3:24:11 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault the system is managed, as a heuristic, in proportion of central gov't share o GDP
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 4:52:22 PM UTC
Please do not use my idea of fragility for an dispossing people to give to someone else, simply "do not covet". And to give it to the government? Fragility at the top is GUARANTEED if economists shut the fuck up and leave the system alone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 5:25:05 PM UTC
They want to take my money and give it to bankers... who paid themselves >2010 than they ever did... NO WAY.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 6:03:50 PM UTC
Nadia Braun stop the bullshit on this page. Stop now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 6:50:02 PM UTC
The problem is justifying transfers to bankers can be rationalized "to help the poor" in a monstrous stretch of logical arguments, but using scare counterfactuals is not part of a rational argumentation, like "let us not harm drug dealers because it would hurt hospitals".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 7:13:45 PM UTC
James Marsh indeed. Teo Liberis again the argument in favor of extortion by bankers is morally disgusting, which explains my distate for the logic by Nadia Braun.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 7:29:47 PM UTC
Exactly and the fallacy is to go from "I'm envious" =>unfair
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 8:16:38 PM UTC
I wonder if we can propose SITG as necessary in the presence of inequality. Ergodicity: the lucky rich winner will eventually go bust...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 1:01:47 PM UTC
It looks sad, overcast and rainy where I am. Nature is mourning. In Lebanon when that happens on Orthodox good Friday, we say "Allah Rum", literally "God is Byzantine" or "God is Greek-Orthodox", to annoy the Catholics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 1:44:51 PM UTC
When I am with an Arab I feel I am a Greek, when I am with a Greek I feel I am an Arab, but when I am with a Levantine I know I am a Levantine.
---
Please make no comments on whether inequality is good or bad, etc. or engage in the politics of envy. This is a technical discussion about a technical *nonpolitical* problem.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbzRrRkhhc1RNY0U/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 17, 2014 5:35:17 PM UTC
Rami Victor Tabri thanks! They don't look like they got the consistency problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 17, 2014 7:09:49 PM UTC
Actually was shown a methodologically sound paper that shows inequality has... decreased. Trying to redo the math... http://www.voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-distribution-income
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 17, 2014 7:32:48 PM UTC
Actually my results hold even under lognormal distribution. Added comment. Still waiting for Raphael to check a few proofs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 17, 2014 8:35:07 PM UTC
Edwin Hauwert can you summarize Sen? He uses a lot a lot of words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 2:13:48 AM UTC
Added thank you to the staff at Luciano Restaurant in Brooklyn and Naya in Manhattan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 18, 2014 4:00:08 AM UTC
I like aphorisms...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 19, 2014 3:01:20 PM UTC
Killian Denny stop the BS: the paper says 80/20 is NOT true, that it is worse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 21, 2014 11:16:15 AM UTC
Ken B This paper is nonsense. Flawed.
(Note: I was asked by many where I was so this is to explain that I am not playing doctor mysterious).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 14, 2014 3:11:19 AM UTC
John Macy Actually I am running a Monte Carlo simulation on his point, as we speak, showing it is not rigorous
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 14, 2014 3:29:08 AM UTC
Ammar Ammar I will be publishing it soon. It is about the distribution of centiles as poor and BIASED estimators of inequality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 14, 2014 4:05:50 AM UTC
Ramona Ortega I was asked why my silence and didn't want to play mystery.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 14, 2014 4:13:27 AM UTC
On Pickety , 1) I am computing the bias in his estimator analytically, 2) I am running progressively several trillions pieces of data. Clearly a "naive" centile and decile are poor estimators. BTW the same problem as with Pinker. This is what I am doing tonight. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIcEJ5RW9NNmhPQnM/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 10, 2014 3:20:23 PM UTC
The human race is most certainly NOT going to be there...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 6, 2014 6:17:18 PM UTC
BS, binary space. Stupid article.
---
(Also note that the acting boss in the Obama household is Mrs Obama).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 6:33:10 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita, yes, the confidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 7:48:39 PM UTC
المال ما يخلق الرجال
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 8:13:07 PM UTC
The waiter also tends to sleep with the wives.
---
For, I am unhappy to report, many people make it in real life, along with its variations. Further, this is not just journalism: I saw it made just so frequently by PhDs (in the GMO and Pinker debates) that I am totally disgusted: better be a truck driver with logical abilities, than a PhD with such elementary defects. Indeed it is so prevalent in social science it is not even funny.
--
Finally, I find it horrifying that people make it here on this page (these people are now gone). Forget all the complicated stuff, focus on the elementary, the basic, for Baal's sake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:42:57 PM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli would love to take a look at the book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:47:12 PM UTC
Soon Chong Tan I was not in the system, was only employed for 7 years.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:55:33 PM UTC
Paul Hartyanszky good point, but the genetic fallacy is not always bad in consequence space. You do not listen to medical advice coming from a belly dancer. On that, a bit later. Same with ad hominem: can be used as "he is not even wrong" and can't debate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 3:38:58 PM UTC
The post hoc is related. See the error in Inside Job. All financial problems entail greed, but all instances of greed don't lead to problems
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 5:01:56 PM UTC
Matthew Stern excellent, but only in probabilistic terms, which would require members of the Smith family to be 1) much taller than average, 2) more numerous than other families, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 1:32:40 PM UTC
Steve Weinberg you made a logical fallacy something we DO NOT TOLERATE here. So please leave this site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 1:37:26 PM UTC
Steve Weinberg nothing to do with trying to offend, but throwing a journalistic anecdote + fallacy as counter destroys discussions. Sorry but you need to refrain from ever posting here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:15:42 PM UTC
Tracy Kruzic Taub: we remove bullshitters who do not understand that an aphorism by an author (whose page one has joined) doesn't have to be backed WITHIN itself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:21:31 PM UTC
Ban Kanj figured out the core of the problem: those who talk about money are both interested in it AND do not have skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:40:36 PM UTC
BTW this is the FAQ for here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIOTV3Y3RhLVpLZVk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:42:10 PM UTC
Shawki Daou read the FAQ, then skin in the game, then come back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 2:56:59 PM UTC
Mahmood Tabaddor nobody is talking about people in power.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 6:24:39 PM UTC
Adam Braff people who get zapped get zapped before the 3rd posting. Lindy effect.
It is a (sort of) truism that we make the mistake of thinking of the past in terms entire made in the present, making the mistake of propagating backwards such notions as "religion", "values", "Gods", "success", "happiness", "ambition", "meaning of life", and attribute it to motives of action, when these either didn't mean much for people in the middle ages and antiquity or had different significance for them. For instance, for Semites, religion meant "law", didn't have the spiritual dimension we attribute today; it didn't care of the notion of "belief" (and Christianity didn't have a word for it other than "trust"). For pagans, Gods were cultural artifacts... For Romans, freedom meant not being a slave and *having no debt*.
---
What I am now trying to do, in a systematic way, is the opposite operation, that is, to reexpress the present entirely in terms that an ancient person would have grasped, that is, to propagate the mentality forward, while incorporating modern gains in ethics such as "equality", social justice, etc.
---
So using Lindy as a bullshit detection mechanism, I can eliminate modern notions such as "success", "achievement", etc., those that do not have a moral dimension.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 3:19:07 PM UTC
The problem is that we shoot for economic equality. How about skills? How about looks? How about intelligence?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 4:03:06 PM UTC
Frederick Steinmann zero "brain porn", except for the separation between reason and emotion in, say Plato.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 4:19:04 PM UTC
Bullshit has lindy effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 4:20:20 PM UTC
"Brain porn" means people think that any explanation entailing some brain operation is more scientific, particularly when supplied with images.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 4:36:31 PM UTC
Ban Kanj you mean لأتمم?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 5:15:02 PM UTC
Alden Harris it is not that the ideas survived criticism, it is those who USED them survived death... very different. Why is why it is not ideas but what they make you do that is important.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 5, 2014 6:18:51 PM UTC
Matthew Ainslie why not?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 12:32:41 PM UTC
A lot of BS comparing vanillas and binaries.
---
He is the author of this passage on the contrast between the true scholar and the professor:
"There is nothing more striking than the contrast between images which show the intellectual in the Middle Ages and the humanist at work. The former is a professor, caught up in his teaching (...) The other is a solitary scholar, in his calm chamber, at ease in the midst of the private, luxurious room where his thoughts can move freely about. The former shows the tumult of schools, the dust of classrooms, the collective worker’s indifference to beauty,
The latter shows all is order and beauty,
Luxe calme et volupté"
I wish you eternal "Luxe calme et volupté", Jacques Le Goff.
http://lyonelkaufmann.ch/histoire/2014/04/01/jacques-le-goff-1924-2014-leclaireur-du-moyen-age/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 4, 2014 8:19:45 PM UTC
Randy Bosch next post, above...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 1, 2014 9:23:52 PM UTC
Someone calls this patronizingly an "undue generalization" 1) To repeat, an aphorism is NOT a fucking generalization, 2) I am myself employed as a professor. 3) Never comment on an aphorism unless you know what it means.
(Otherwise the system collapses under its complexity).
Two millennia ago, Sallust wrote the following:
"When I was a callow young man, I plunged enthusiastically into public life. Instead of modesty, brazenness flourished; instead of self-restraint, bribery; instead of merit, avarice (...)my youthful weakness was corrupted and gripped by ambition. Although I refrained from the wicked ways of the rest, still the same craving for advancement that plagued them with ill-repute and jealousy plagued me too."(Bell. Cat., III.3)
---
22 centuries from now (if we make it), someone will be writing the same. Yet we hear utopianizing idiots (such as the maker of the movie "Inside Jobs") bemoaning the "greed" of bankers, the bureaucratizing minds of bureaucrats, not realizing that these are embedded in human nature. Anyone who think we can correct humans is similar to those who think that they will get it right "the next time"...
ANTIFRAGILE-The only strategy for us is to build a greed-resistant system... or go further benefit from the greed of humans. And build systems in which politicians are harmless.
http://www.uq.edu.au/hprcflex/lt2310/sallust1.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 28, 2014 12:02:10 PM UTC
Decentralized systems. Only solution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 28, 2014 7:30:15 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic which is why free markets exist as the collective benefits from the greed of the individual, and wants greed to remain...
When you imagine future outcomes, you change one variable not many together. If you did, you'd have surprises.
http://edge.org/conversation/on-kahneman#25630
The best way to beat economists is to be more rigorous mathematically than they are, not discard the math.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/OptionPricing.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 27, 2014 12:57:28 PM UTC
My point is to show that economists are less rigorous than practitioners and time-experience of the collective.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 27, 2014 1:08:18 PM UTC
Sanjeev Solanki \delta. Corrected! Thanks
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 27, 2014 1:24:30 PM UTC
David Pelleg thanks! fixed
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 27, 2014 7:59:35 PM UTC
Thanks Brent Halonen . BTW are you a mathematician?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 27, 2014 8:18:04 PM UTC
Brent I was asking to see when you meant "clear" if it were clear for a mathematician. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 27, 2014 9:34:07 PM UTC
This is not a discussion on whether one should or should not use mathematics, the answer is we can't avoid mathematics for formal and logical reasoning; the point is that heuristics are more powerful than bad math used by economists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 29, 2014 11:31:41 AM UTC
Robert J Frey, adding equations, reload.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 30, 2014 11:49:17 AM UTC
Nicolas Kseib , yes, thanks. Eq 5 and 7 wrote sign wrong but result is same.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 30, 2014 6:59:10 PM UTC
Nicolas Kseib Thanks again added a section proving something else...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 26, 2014 8:35:53 AM UTC
Great Jordan
Please don't comment on prediction markets unless you have either read the paper of watched the video.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 5:20:31 PM UTC
Carsten Bergenholtz they were part of the discussion and failed to understand the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 5:37:36 PM UTC
Carsten Bergenholtz I don't give a fuck.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 6:49:12 PM UTC
Prediction markets for vanilla become regular future markets... which necessarily entails margin calls for at least the short side.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 11:09:39 PM UTC
Jazi Zilber exactly, they have the illusion that the crowd can deliver a vision of the future.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 11:26:59 PM UTC
Jazi Zilber the idea that markets are smarter than government doesn't mean markets are smart.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 24, 2014 7:57:39 AM UTC
Christian Kleineidam callin a spade a spade is not a
Marketing strategy. It is called intellectual honesty and intellectual obligation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:21:46 PM UTC
Carsten Bergenholtz one piece of advice: never lecture an author on HOW to write. Don't buy his books and get the fuck out of his environment. Or go write your own books. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 5:16:50 PM UTC
What's the 960?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 5:40:37 PM UTC
what's WTP?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 23, 2014 6:49:56 PM UTC
I like the idea: Aquila non captat muscas, don't beat around the bush, don't waste time on small stuff...
ANSWER: Infinite. A very tiny probability of crash makes the unconditional expectation infinite.
All other answers with finite duration are conditional on the plane eventually making it to destination.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 21, 2014 1:05:38 PM UTC
Changed from flight to diff between departure time and arrival time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 21, 2014 1:20:40 PM UTC
ANSWER: Either Infinite or undefined (does not exist). A very tiny probability of crash make the expectation infinite
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 21, 2014 2:18:52 PM UTC
Fabio this is BS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 21, 2014 2:21:06 PM UTC
Unconditional means including outliers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 21, 2014 4:49:31 PM UTC
This does not affect your decision to fly: you have to die of something and you are safer on the plane than walking on the streets.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 21, 2014 5:05:44 PM UTC
Alan Davies where the fuck did you get the idea that mathematics is making a joke?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 21, 2014 5:53:52 PM UTC
Alan Oursland that's exactly the point: it is very hard to rely on unconditional expectation without pathologies!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 22, 2014 1:45:11 PM UTC
No, Michał Gmytrasiewicz a finite sequence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 22, 2014 4:00:49 PM UTC
fabio, not necessary
( Which is why complaints don't just deliver complaints, they mostly reveal your weakness.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 20, 2014 12:38:43 PM UTC
Which is why complaints don't deliver complaints, they just reveal your weakness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 20, 2014 1:23:10 PM UTC
Tahir Chad if they are sensitive to phrasing, fuck them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 20, 2014 1:58:15 PM UTC
DEpends if you take risks while saying it. Or insult rather than complain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 20, 2014 8:01:18 PM UTC
Curtis Lewis you can complain by doing, ... rioting.
INVERSE SKIN IN THE GAME/CRONY CAPITALISM. Peter Orszag is one of those Obama cronies who wrote the report about Fannie Mae being safe (while I was shouting that it was sitting on dynamite) and, thanks to absence of skin-in-the-game, or inverse skin-in-the-game, got a job in the Obama administration (Chapter 23 in ANTIFRAGILE) after Fannie Mae went bust (and had a taxpayer backup).
Now as predicted he is making >$3 million from Citibank a firm that the taxpayer saved!
Here is how his taxpayer-backed income was revealed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/wp/2014/03/12/peter-orszag-and-ex-wife-in-contentious-court-fight-over-child-support/?tid=pm_lifestyle_pop
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:19:52 PM UTC
Now let me be brutally honest: No sour grapes. I made more than he did without gaming taxpayers...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:44:43 PM UTC
Jon Lubin he IS a Rubin protege
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 10:20:08 PM UTC
Killian Denny this is nonsense: you can speculate WITHOUT being an insider. The fraud is when you have informational advantages or access to positions others can't get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 10:22:17 PM UTC
Karen Brennan for all their ills, the "others" were not as much into revolving doors and cronyism. Remember the Bob Rubin fraud (legal fraud), and the protection of the banks under that fuck, the Treasury Secretary Geithner ... whose house I can see from my study where I am writing these lines.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 20, 2014 1:02:25 PM UTC
Also Jaffer Ali they are going to be tatooed on the way out!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:25:12 AM UTC
Valentina McInerney your comments are sophistry. You are countering the proposition that people should be free by discussing the freedom of dictators. Can an argument be more misplaced? Stop right now.
Skip the why.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:18:37 PM UTC
Did anyone guess the "why" of the statement? One word for it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:22:28 PM UTC
5 letter word, come on!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:26:24 PM UTC
L....
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:27:30 PM UTC
LINDY!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:38:08 PM UTC
I suggest that nobody should contribute further without looking up LINDY. It is otherwise foolish and some are reinventing the wheel. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:54:26 PM UTC
Jayesh Gala and Marc Mark Casino-Brown what the fuck are you doing on an author's page if you are not interested in his work? Explain or leave right away.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 1:12:56 PM UTC
Nicolas M. Kirchberger ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:36:24 AM UTC
Ross Williams excellent!
They will complain but will be thankful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 17, 2014 1:02:27 PM UTC
Sybrand Badenhorst please stop this sophistry. Kapish? This is not a place for these silly nitpicking arguments against a statement that is not categorical. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 17, 2014 2:55:43 PM UTC
Viktoria you seem to be degrading the discourse into BS and distracting other posters. Stop right now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 17, 2014 9:51:30 AM UTC
call it indirectly probabilistic
The adage "magna civitas magna solitudo" (big city, big solitude) started in Arcadia, referring to a "large" city that would be smaller than today's small towns. Not Sao Paulo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 15, 2014 10:00:58 PM UTC
I grew up in Beirut and lived in big cities. Always depressed me to realize I was a number. For >20 years I have been living in a suburban village in the US and in a village in Lebanon. Haven't slept in Beirut in 6 years. Nothing better than take a walk in the evening and running into faces you know every day. All my writings have been done in villages.
http://necsi.edu/education/antifragile.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-taleb-blasts-bitcoin-newsweek-article-2014-3
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 13, 2014 11:48:19 AM UTC
MY point is not the veracity of the press, but the invasion of privacy --exploitation of the 1rst amendment, gaming it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 13, 2014 12:02:49 PM UTC
I agree with Aaron Elliott . In such a system, without ethical bounds, the product will be easily corrupted, packaged and sold as something else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 13, 2014 12:04:49 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn what does the 1rst amendment have to do with disclosing his train habits, taking to his train suppliers, and the fact that he lives with his mother?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 13, 2014 12:32:48 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn I agree. SITG: journalism is committing suicide.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 13, 2014 3:30:18 PM UTC
Dorin Ciobanu I was not talking about MY privacy but that of quiet train collectors.
:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 13, 2014 8:53:42 AM UTC
First time I hear of this ritual!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 12, 2014 12:30:10 PM UTC
The first batch of commentators focused on the behavior of Hipomachus which was a standard treatment of pupils at the time. The point is the audience and masses, not cruelty in pedagogy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 12, 2014 2:43:11 PM UTC
Respect time, not crowds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 10, 2014 4:30:17 AM UTC
I am there now.
Neckties are fragile and delicate; they force people into a tame social behavior; they get damaged in fights and when one rolls in the mud.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 12, 2014 1:50:46 AM UTC
I wear an Ascott (foulard) ... I was forced to wear a tie to enter the House of Lords and did not want to break my rule, so I went to the Tie Rack and bought an Ascott. After some negociations, it worked.
On the other hand, when an academic writes the overly hedged statement "it appears that under some conditions, there have been historically a high percentage of bureaucrats who did not prove have courage", he generally truly believes that "all bureaucrats don't have courage".
----
I am writing this because Aaron Haspel and I noticed that when I write the aphorism "most bureaucrats don't have courage" it is transmitted and repreated in its shorter version: "bureaucrats don't have courage". Many of the nitpickers on the web are after the straw man of "generalization" when a heuristic is not categorical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 5, 2014 8:37:28 PM UTC
Yuri Vilmanis there is a heuristic "never sell a quiet market" but i never interpreted the "never" as unqualified.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 6, 2014 2:08:04 AM UTC
Reallife language is fuzzy; we contextualize (a diplomat's "yes"/salesman's no=maybe); on the web people read aphorisms as literal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 4, 2014 8:14:35 PM UTC
Would be great to have the "academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love..."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 4, 2014 9:55:25 PM UTC
Don't see nothing in link
(temporary posting)
----
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbnNhNlE4cFQ5YjA/edit?usp=sharing …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 3, 2014 10:18:22 PM UTC
Gökhan Çiftçi Thanks a million I removed the redundancies
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 3, 2014 10:27:06 PM UTC
Sybrand Badenhorst reload... Thanks a million
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 3, 2014 10:35:32 PM UTC
Milan Quentel yes, the heuristics school.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 3, 2014 11:02:36 PM UTC
Fixed! Thank you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 4, 2014 1:54:30 AM UTC
Sanjeev Solanki you got 144.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 4, 2014 12:21:57 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer while tawking, #21 on a trading desk, "he too is ..." don't work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 4, 2014 12:32:07 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer it don't work in any other way.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 3, 2014 1:33:48 PM UTC
The case is obvious with cancer and tooth decay remedied w/novacaine...
---
You can have 4 out of 4 (Thales), 3 out of 4 (Plato, who had poor practical sense), 2 out of 4 (most great scientists and great businesspersons), 1 out of 4 (the typical "incremental" modern academics, or people you tend to find in jail), or 0 out of 4 (journalists).
(Exception for journalists who take personal risks, of course. Also the "balls" tends to be present in women at least as often as in men).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 2, 2014 5:40:20 PM UTC
The list misses Honor. BS detection is part of business sense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 2, 2014 5:58:43 PM UTC
Lucia Cipolina Kun "Balls" are usually more present in women than men.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 2, 2014 11:04:07 PM UTC
Just hit me that evil 4/4 like Prof Moriarty or the bond villains are just in fiction... Can't find may examples in practice (unless they are too smart to get caught).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 3, 2014 1:39:52 AM UTC
Oskar Oskar Proust was sickly. Clear cut.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 3, 2014 1:37:44 PM UTC
Francisco Salgado Cerredelo learn to comment on aphorisms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 28, 2014 11:46:31 AM UTC
Risk management not PP here...
I have this nagging sense that humans are wired to try out nearly every shinny new thing they encounter, and learn to avoid certain ones only after they have seen other people actually harmed by it.
This strategy may be beneficial for our species in a historical world when the harm was contained to a few people, and the potential benefits of a discovery great.
In the modern world the potential benefits remain great, but some of these shinny new things have staggering potential for harm, so that continuing to use a naive trial and error approach may lead to a catastrophic error.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 25, 2014 11:00:51 AM UTC
bingo. Modern world has systemic effects.
--
Or, even better, for those who can, not being aware of, or not giving a f*** about hierarchy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 23, 2014 10:31:46 PM UTC
hierarchies are fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 24, 2014 8:50:04 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault Is the inner ring a very short essay? Here http://doczine.com/bigdata/1/1366453406_b7c7d640e9/theinnerring.pdf
[Note for commentators: I am not talking about afterlife]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 22, 2014 6:11:33 PM UTC
I recently had a meal in a fancy restaurant with complicated dishes ($125 per person), then enjoyed a pizza afterwards (straight out of the oven), $7.95. I wondered why the pizza isn't 20x the price of the complicated dish, since I'd rather have the former over the latter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 22, 2014 1:18:08 PM UTC
Jack Hsu Jack Excellent question. We need to simplify the model (or theories/heuristics) and have more redundancies, rather than complicate the model (or theories/heuristics) and have more so-called "efficiencies". Clear?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 23, 2014 3:56:34 AM UTC
nick gall page 23, 104 of AF, and postcript of TBS, also called "functional redundancy"
"The professor, Robert Trivers, had objected to teaching a course called “Human Aggression” this fall, reports The Star-Ledger. However, his anthropology department superiors told him he had to teach the class anyway.
In the first lecture, Trivers informed the 30 or so Rutgers undergrads who had signed up for the class that his plan was to learn the course materials gamely along with them."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 12:05:27 PM UTC
Trivers is a good man. He has been screwed over many times, including with the selfish gene.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 9:10:20 PM UTC
Vishwajit Verma I am writing a chapter in my new textbook about "extrapolation".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 9:38:35 PM UTC
Philip Murtagh for a risk modeller, it is necessary to factor a certain class of fat-tailed outliers. These considerations are part of it.
---
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 21, 2014 9:48:49 PM UTC
Raquel Kleinman Bernath your comment is misplaced at 2 levels: first we are TRYING to eliminate the materialistic. Second, Europe is where people are the most class-minded based on finances, and very overt about it. But they express it indirectly, never by direct reference to money.
---
(As the tribe might have noticed, I am adding a list of 99 prescriptive heuristics, with rationalization, as a short standalone addition to the INCERTO).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 8:42:28 PM UTC
The reason I am saying that is because I know of a few ultrarich people and avoid them. ALL of them lack the common sense to avoid discussing their private plane with me.
---
(Note the "needs to"… many here mistook it for "should not" prepare.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 3:01:29 AM UTC
So you mean you need to learn abt Laplace transform to teach it?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 3:02:41 AM UTC
Most are not getting the very definition of expertise compared to artificial mechanistic shallow knowledge
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 3:08:41 AM UTC
Nobody is saying the lecture shd be disorganized. Focus on "need".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 3:15:05 AM UTC
Many are not getting the aphorism. Didn't say prof SHOULD not prepare, said shd NOT NEED to.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 1:17:07 PM UTC
This said, I prepare for my lectures but only to format material on slides. Takes 15 min.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 2:20:03 PM UTC
Florian Neuman these improvised lectures are called in Arabic "virtuous" (from vir), ارتجالي
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 3:47:45 PM UTC
Feynman Lectures:"You weren't sure where the talk would go, and neither was he." http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/17/books/mr-feynman-wasn-t-joking.html …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 3:48:48 PM UTC
James Lonier you missed the "needs to" and "should". People should THINK before reacting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 17, 2014 6:30:04 PM UTC
James Chartouni what is it that you are not getting? The prof real "expert" should know that stuff unconditionally, whether he teaches or not.
1. When positive, show net, when negative, show details.
2. Manipulate anchor to what did not happen rather than to what did happen.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/16/daniel-kahneman-thinking-fast-and-slow-tributes
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 16, 2014 10:54:12 PM UTC
Mohammad El-Bishry you want it in Arabic? Or written in baby English? You seem have hit the wrong forum. This forum is about substance, not BS or pedagogy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 16, 2014 11:19:06 PM UTC
Peter Schwarzberg what the fuck are you talking about?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 16, 2014 11:42:56 PM UTC
Igor Bukanov if you are shooting for long odds you don't anchor on success but expect failure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 16, 2014 11:43:11 PM UTC
Robert Spinden what are you trying to say?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 16, 2014 11:52:49 PM UTC
Not quite. If your net is positive, but the details are positive and negative, the result will not look as appealing when you show details. And vice versa.
---
COMMENT ON THE ASYMMETRY: The most convincing statements are those in which you stand to lose (maximal skin in the game); the most unconvincing ones are those in which you patently (but unknowingly) try to enhance your status without contribution (like the great majority of academic papers that say nothing and take no risks); but it doesn't have to be that way. As long as the substance and gain for others exceeds the showoff content, you are OK. Stay human, take as much as you can, under the condition you give more than you take.
---
EARLIER APHORISM: Anything people do, write, or say to enhance their status or distinction shows like a mark on their foreheads, more visible to others than it is to them.
(modified)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 1:06:53 PM UTC
John Melcher This has NOTHING to do with the asymmetry I am describing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 1:08:04 PM UTC
Not my topic. Here is publications for status enhancement, like business books.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 1:12:10 PM UTC
Or people nitpicking on the occasion here with no contribution other than show they can nitpick. It is on the other hand OK to show how smart one is by finding a mistake of substance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 1:15:07 PM UTC
John Melcher yes, but one can be committed to an opinion, yet voice it for status more than contribution to others or to the discipline, and vice versa. In other words taking risks is necessary but not sufficient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 1:25:41 PM UTC
Rajat Yadav alas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 2:04:46 PM UTC
Valentina McInerney We have close to a million academic papers produced every year, with a small minority that get cited or read by others, with the median citation <1. And this is valid across disciplines. Do you need more evidence?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 2:18:19 PM UTC
Yuri Vilmanis Could be an illusion: math papers are no different, many are for showoff (with irrelevant contribution) but you don't use them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 3:11:25 PM UTC
The entire point of the post is that show-off is human and not entirely unhealthy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 15, 2014 5:00:12 PM UTC
Julian Ziesing off topic; this is about the very same action, say making a statement or writing a novel or scientific work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 12, 2014 1:17:20 PM UTC
The protective effect of noise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 13, 2014 12:45:15 PM UTC
Marc Binda you put it in another post
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 14, 2014 1:54:14 PM UTC
Better Failling P-value is not mathematics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 14, 2014 1:55:31 PM UTC
Mathematics is not numbers, but a set of formal relations between objects, logically tight.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 14, 2014 2:11:14 PM UTC
And mathematics defines at the outset the method used. There is no possible bullshit in mathematics, sorry.
When (…) Lebanese entrepreneur Alex Massad— described by Fortune as one of America’s toughest businessmen— first accepted a position with Mobil Oil, Massad’s mother lamented, “[ W] hy don’t you go into business for yourself? Why don’t you open a store?” But Massad stayed on, rising quickly to become one of Mobil’s top executives. Finally, on one visit home, Alex . . . announced triumphantly, “Mama, I have bought a store.” Her elderly face brightened at the news. At last! Alex had taken her advice; her son would finally be judged a success in her community. . . . “I bought Montgomery Ward!” Her smile changed to a disappointed frown. She was unimpressed and said, with despair, “It’s not the same thing. I meant your own store!”
In Chua, Amy & Rubenfeld, Jed, 2014 . The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 11, 2014 12:44:52 PM UTC
Chas Lutz you mean by taking an anecdote from a book I am endorsing it?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 11, 2014 1:46:18 PM UTC
Chas Lutz I take facts from the NYT…
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 11, 2014 10:52:36 AM UTC
Tim Josling Of course the survivorship bias is included, see footnote. Your "extinction" is not systemic.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QINnFjMXJDdTgyczg/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 4:11:03 PM UTC
Mauricio Bermudez Neubauer read it again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 4:18:01 PM UTC
TheFoo Man "practically close to zero", and we cannot compress further.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 4:26:21 PM UTC
Alexander Boland, excellent point. The point washes out after trillions of variations (as per my footnote on survivorship bias).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 4:27:47 PM UTC
Mauricio Bermudez Neubauer Because we transcend the current climate debate with 1/n and fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 4:59:45 PM UTC
New file location http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 7:46:16 PM UTC
Killian Denny stop the BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 7:47:11 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic this is a live document that has been fed by silly arguments against PP over time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 10, 2014 8:52:04 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn "if"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 11, 2014 12:48:38 PM UTC
Please stop the personal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 11, 2014 2:32:20 PM UTC
Aaron Elliott cars are not multiplicative, like, say rabbits or rats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 9, 2014 4:10:16 PM UTC
Jeff White such a utopian "fair economy" experiment: called Soviet Union.
It seems to me that IQ tests favor turkeys.
Standard tests of "fluid intelligence" that require the subject to complete a sequence favor a certain class of people who can rapidly detect naive patterns, and penalize those who are natural skeptics with richer imagination. In real life patterns are more complicated and having an ingrained skepticism that slows down inference is an invaluable asset. So my speculation is that it is OK to do well, but not to do very well.
Consider the seemingly elementary sequence: a-b-a-b-a -?- [complete ]. Naive pattern matching would give [b] as solution. But in real life ecologies the sequence could have a more complex pattern, a-b-a-b-a-b-b (there is a repetition of the 6th letter) or meta-patterns to consider. These take time to examine and someone smart would need to fight to repress his imagination.
So those who do well, but not great, should be much smarter than those who do better.
Let us debate. Does it make sense?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 9:28:40 PM UTC
Haramoun Moxy Hamieh why doesn't it fit?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 9:44:40 PM UTC
Haramoun Moxy Hamieh My entire point its that one knows consciously that the answer is straightforward but the brain wants to consider higher patterns and that is why the tests favor the turkey who doesn't consider off-tests things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 9:47:49 PM UTC
No, my point is that most thinking is not deliberate and skepticism slows down.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 10:00:42 PM UTC
Please take the "emotional brain" business out of this discussion. It is very relevant, but the point here is induction and natural skepticism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 10:27:55 PM UTC
Dan Tdaxp there is no mathematical difference between what I presented and the raven progressive matrices. Please explain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 10:43:50 PM UTC
This came to me as both Mandelbrot and I had trouble with the naturalization exam question "How many stripes on the U.S. flag?" Both had the immediate reaction: "what do they define as stripe?"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 11:00:45 PM UTC
Dan Tdaxp I am not about confounders; I still don't get why Dimension=1 or D=4 matters for a mathematical problem concerning skepticism slowing down induction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 11:01:53 PM UTC
The other problem: many people here seem to think that skepticism is voluntary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 8, 2014 2:31:38 PM UTC
Valentina McInerney the point isn't the breadth of the test, rather the innate skepticism causing meta induction. It is a simple mathematical problem of inductive pattern and, by adding dimentions and bells and whistles & what complications psychologists (being psychologists) have been adding, you divert from the point without bringing information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 8, 2014 2:45:59 PM UTC
Peter Woodward you are not adding information to the discussion. That, we know. The point is that some smart people DO NOT easily restrict their higher order logic and are penalized by the effort expended.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 6, 2014 12:03:57 AM UTC
Simply work done for distinction tends to die.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 6, 2014 10:13:37 PM UTC
Sybrand Badenhorst competitive sport is not an intellectual activity and competitive athletes are very temporary goods.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 6, 2014 10:38:08 PM UTC
Anything in intellectual life entailing status (beyond qualification) turns it into competitive sports.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 6, 2014 10:53:48 PM UTC
Strangely it is purer when done for money.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 6, 2014 11:14:40 PM UTC
Paul Wehage this makes sense. The idea is that being paid a "reasonable amount" to provide a service is more natural than being paid with status. But the money needs to be, as you say, binary not continuous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 6, 2014 11:20:32 PM UTC
Paul Wehage it is interesting that once you consider things as binary not a competition, then you will never waste time on PR moves beyond the minimum and can do real scholarship or art. Most of the professors I know waste time getting on committees or submitting to "prestige" journals and haven't done anything that survives when I can meditate without pressure...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 11:42:10 AM UTC
Ben Lambert most often rising in the pecking order kills one's enjoyment of the activity that led one to get such recognition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 7, 2014 11:52:48 AM UTC
People use politicians as much as politicians use them. I am talking about intellectual production.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 8, 2014 1:33:37 PM UTC
Susan Devy it is BECAUSE it doesn't benefit others.
A short book full of great advice on strength training.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 4, 2014 8:24:55 PM UTC
I do kettlebells, once a month, until I can't take it no more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 6, 2014 12:24:27 AM UTC
Ironically I learned about kettlebells in his own book.
Will delete this note.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 1, 2014 2:31:48 AM UTC
Not there yet land Sunday morning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 1, 2014 1:57:17 PM UTC
Can we do coffee at 6 PM (for 45 min, so 6-645) at Suplicy
Avenida Doutor Chucri Zaidan, 902 - Vila Cordeiro
São Paulo - SP, 04583-110, Brasil
+55 11 5181-4893
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 1, 2014 2:06:16 PM UTC
BTW it is thanks to Marcos Costa Santos Carreira that I selected the place.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 1, 2014 11:03:14 PM UTC
Hard to change… How long will it take from the airport at 10 am Sunday morning to the area?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 1, 2014 11:34:21 PM UTC
It is easier to keep the earlier thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 1, 2014 11:34:51 PM UTC
6 PM Suplicy
Avenida Doutor Chucri Zaidan, 902 - Vila Cordeiro
São Paulo - SP, 04583-110, Brasil
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 2, 2014 5:35:34 PM UTC
Confirming I am in SP not far. Looking forward.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 8, 2014 2:30:25 PM UTC
Valentina McInerney the point isn't the breadth of the test, rather the innate skepticism causing meta induction. It is a simple mathematical problem of inductive pattern and, by adding dimentions and bells and whistles & what complications psychologists (being psychologists) have been adding, you divert from the point without bringing information.
Also, I am obligated to link to this on this page.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812979680/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0812979680&linkCode=as2&tag=nassimtalebsfavo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 31, 2014 9:49:04 PM UTC
I meant James if you have a plan and control where the money goes, that it is temporary, etc. IN other words to show that the issue isn't QE vs Not QE but deeper and more stupid.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 31, 2014 10:22:56 PM UTC
Actually just to shift the debate away from QE into stupidity and cronyism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 1, 2014 11:10:06 PM UTC
Ban Kanj if you know a translator...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 8:38:42 PM UTC
La Recherche is very commercially popular and L P P is very successful aesthetically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 8:43:26 PM UTC
Betina Galhardo what do you mean by "and?"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 8:47:32 PM UTC
Rene Leon no, the average is ~ 220 p
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 10:17:30 PM UTC
Both are great books.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 12:12:27 PM UTC
Paul Wehage I am not saying that length does not matter. If it did not matter, the distribution would be uniform. Here it is Arcsine. Very Strange.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 1:44:58 PM UTC
Philip Murtagh indeed; let us just call these "books".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 2:49:14 PM UTC
The next most successful French story, CANDIDE by Voltaire, is about the same length as LPP…. [Let us not get stuck on the definition of syccessful]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 3:34:19 PM UTC
This "very short" or "very long" seems to be more of a regularity. I do not see the expected "uniform"...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 3:37:20 PM UTC
It appears that it is not a statistical fluke. Is "War and Peace" the most or second most successful Russian novel? The big recent Italian novel (past 20 y) was "Seta" by Alessandro Barrico, ultrashort. Yet the center is where most of the books are.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 3:38:27 PM UTC
Just worked out … very potent evidence of ArcSine from only 2 observation given distance from expectation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 3:46:25 PM UTC
yes ravi
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 3:47:34 PM UTC
Paul Wehage to see how powerful this evidence, consider that the middle is where most of the books are (In French the average seems a bit shorter than Engl, about 250 pages).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 5:36:11 PM UTC
If not mistaken, the prob of success in tail is ~20,000 times that in middle. Could be random, but cannot be ignored.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 6:26:16 PM UTC
The reason I am interested in this is the Arcsine law: for a random walk the extremum is reached early or late, not in the middle...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 7:24:53 PM UTC
Will read. Thx
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIOTV3Y3RhLVpLZVk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 11:45:02 AM UTC
It is not guidelines on how to post, rather how NOT to post
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 12:09:10 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn don't waste the time of others...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 12:18:20 PM UTC
John Egan Somehow if a topic is interesting to my work it would be eventually linked on the "Recent Post by Others", often independently by >2 people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 12:50:26 PM UTC
try this https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/FAQFB.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 29, 2014 5:25:59 PM UTC
What has infuriated me in the past is having to reexplain a version of the concept that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, which I thought that by writing a 2200 page INCERTO I would no longer have to do… on this very page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 30, 2014 11:50:45 AM UTC
Chenyen Lee some subsequent events happened after that that made him less than the upright person I thought he was, and less than the hero...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 1:47:13 PM UTC
It is very similar to writing a book...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 2:50:38 PM UTC
Sekoul T Krastev that's what I did when I became a pit trader… was only employed ~7 years.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 2:56:30 PM UTC
Also, it appears, same for gladiators and soldiers. And of course (real) artists. And philosophers. And (real) scholars.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 3:52:15 PM UTC
The statement of Dirk Haehnel provide an excellent sample of what I call BS, a subclass of the inferential variety.
@UberFacts: There’s a 95% chance that the human race will become extinct over the next 9,000 years.
Here is some background info to help kicking off the debate
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 10:12:12 PM UTC
It makes sense… sorry but it does. Unless we get to understand risk, which we don't
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 6:19:01 PM UTC
Denmark, not Japan!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 6:35:02 PM UTC
These ritual slaughters can't survive the age of the internet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 7:18:11 PM UTC
this is vivid and concentrated.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIYmtqSldhYXJuMmM/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 12:12:58 PM UTC
Sorry, there is no parallel with quantum uncertainty at all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 12:48:52 PM UTC
Arthur Breitman were you my student? nephew of the Buzzati translator Michel Breitman?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 12:56:29 PM UTC
So you can only nudge away from the nonLindy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 2:05:05 PM UTC
Who wrote about "common sense"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 2:07:23 PM UTC
Alexander Boland yes, crazy. Will update the section w/ math. All I am doing is using math to debunk math BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 4:13:42 PM UTC
Nothing to do with agency. Just more randomness gives the same result.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 4:40:50 PM UTC
I agree with agency etc. But not the point here in the text above.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 7:17:05 PM UTC
Please please stop squeezing agency into equations where IT DOES NOT BELONG.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 12:15:06 AM UTC
Igor Bukanov OK, the paper is now larger shows the begining.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 1:38:40 AM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault you are consistent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 11:00:31 AM UTC
Igor Bukanov I am dividing by x^(\alpha^* + 1) to get the constant K. But thanks as there is no cost to pointing out math errors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 11:03:36 AM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault consistent/coherent means broke no rule of logic.
Dealing with the ultimate uncertainty through statistics...another manifestation of today's scientism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 1:08:25 AM UTC
Statistics is never to be used in the domain of the sacred. But when used in the profane, it better be done well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 26, 2014 1:52:29 PM UTC
Aaron Elliott BS is clearly demonstrable in many cases of logical or empirical violations as per the Economist post or some finance horsemanure. It is harder in others that require "opinion".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 1:07:31 AM UTC
Stop here: I am not against BS but against HARMFUL BS. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 1:16:29 AM UTC
Chikok Pingul it is not about you, about others who don't get the point that BS is OK when it is artsy and elegant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 3:16:12 PM UTC
Paul Wehage my point is that for logical thinks one can objectively determine BS. For others one cannot as easily, so it becomes idiosyncratic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 27, 2014 6:19:59 PM UTC
Note that "honest criticism" is not BS; but that straw man is not "honest criticism". I am tired of people confusing the two.
The august "Economist" just showed how companies with executives attending Davos underperformed the market.
Well… looks convincing but they fell for an elementary mistake: companies attending Davos are large and geographically/sectorially idiosyncratic; they did not consider whether large companies underperformed over the period. (And they seem to have picked a time window that fits the analysis).(See here, thanks Chandan Kumar: http://in.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=%5EGSPC&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=%5EDJI&ql=1)
This is called a confounder in statistics… an elementary mistake. People who drink tend to have a higher incidence of lung cancer, but there is no strong relation between alcohol and lung carcinoma… It is because people who drink tend to smoke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
You can only make a comparative statement (nonbullshit, that is) by controlling for size, industry, and location. The companies involved are 103 companies with $12 trillion cap.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 8:16:12 PM UTC
You can only make a comparative statement nonbullshit that is by controlling for size, industry, and location. The companies involved are 103 companies with $12 trillion cap.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 8:26:15 PM UTC
The average Davos company in their sample has a cap of $120 billion, 3 times the Sp500 and much more the MSCI...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 8:41:18 PM UTC
This is not about finance but naive statistics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 8:49:31 PM UTC
Brian Ng Yes, but for US portion; you also need to ALSO control for countries…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 9:09:08 PM UTC
The problem is more complicated: Large cap are less volatile, more stable… one can only compare things that have the same variance over the same time period.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 9:48:42 PM UTC
Jeffrey Satinover indeed! They arbitrarily selected the window that fit them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 25, 2014 3:59:26 AM UTC
If the Economist thinks the connection is STERILE, why the fuck so they make it?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 25, 2014 3:43:28 PM UTC
Brad Boyd the average Davos company is 4 times that of SP500 and many more the MSCI.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 25, 2014 9:10:29 PM UTC
Chandan Kumar indeed!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 26, 2014 10:52:29 AM UTC
Charles Finney not even post hoc, plain wrong from sample bias.
PS: This is 1 of 2 announcements that I allow myself to make here, to please my publisher, in return for absence of book tour.
http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/dp/0812979680/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1390590369
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 7:28:17 PM UTC
Seth Getz no interviews with journos who are trying to write an article WITHOUT having read the book, and such things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 7:32:39 PM UTC
Marco Alves the technical book is updated all the time… just uploaded a fresh version today. Free book for all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 2:44:19 PM UTC
Going back soon for a vacation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 24, 2014 6:46:54 PM UTC
I am not in the "fan" business… especially in Lebanon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 25, 2014 11:30:23 AM UTC
Over the past year I moved from Mathematica (private) to LaTeX (open) for the same reason. It was worth the investment and feels great. You also have the feeling of helping the product by contributing with questions and codes.
My dream is for someone to publish a SuperRigorous No-BS Newspaper, that is, something providing the news based on empirical relevance, that is, completely devoid of sensationalism. It would be based on the causal and nonanecdotal (i.e., empirical) validity of the information: for instance a hurricane killing four people would not be reported as 7000 people die every day in the U.S., thousands from less sensational --but equally tragic --causes. No terrorism on any day would be reported unless it exceeds death from diabetes (which would be a disincentive for terrorists). Financial market events would only be reported if they exceed 3 mean deviations. The paper would be 0 length on some days, and very long on others.
I personally do not need it but it would be mandatory for government; it would make decision-makers and bureaucrats aware that the news is not information. It would separate the news from the entertainment.
Hopefully it would make people who like anecdote switch to the New York Post away the disguized pseudointellectual piece of manure called the New York Times (or French Le Monde). For the NYT is the most harmful piece of junk as their BS is dressed in intellectual garment… Anything that bankrupts the NY Times is good for America.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 1:41:58 PM UTC
Ironically I had something in the NYT yesterday! http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/01/21/a-cap-on-wall-street-bonuses/we-need-to-stop-this-banker-bonus-madness?smid=tw-share
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 1:48:24 PM UTC
Bhooshan Shukla It would be RANDOMLY published… or be dayly but have random length
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 1:53:31 PM UTC
BARBELL: The NY Post (or PAris Match or the Daily Mail…) + the No-BS Journal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 2:08:59 PM UTC
Hamed Tinafar no you can accommodate Kantian ethics the problem is sensationalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 2:10:38 PM UTC
Hoonan I removed 2 trolls… typically 4-5 a week.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 2:13:54 PM UTC
Some people are justifying sensationalism with "intentional" or non intentional, etc. We have many many intentional crimes that are not reported; terrorism is because it makes the news, which in turn encourages terrorism because all it wants is spread terror.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 2:51:06 PM UTC
The NYT is not known for BS, but full of it. With The Post you know what you get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 23, 2014 6:19:25 PM UTC
The problem is distributed events (gunfire, diabetes) vs. lumpy events (Crashes, terrorism).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10584927/Brains-of-elderly-slow-because-they-know-so-much.html
Not sure it covers all declines in the literature. I recall the age decline literature is quite throughout!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 21, 2014 10:18:35 PM UTC
Clearly if there is a differential in memory for the same person, then the effect exits.
Well, turns out homicides are down, but it might simply be because in the past fifty years doctors have gotten better at fixing people who have been shot/stabbed/poisoned etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 19, 2014 12:38:52 PM UTC
Another lesson: wait 20 years before writing on a subject.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 19, 2014 12:38:17 AM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev fuck off it is the other way around.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 19, 2014 12:38:58 AM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault then you don't use but…mais voyons...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 19, 2014 12:42:11 AM UTC
Nikolaos Karatsoris my point is that is if the argument is stupid you don't engage it. If you say "but" it means there is a NEED to discuss it with the fellow. Conditional probability…
In your book "Antifragile" you say, you would like to walk wearing only socks with a strong sole. You can find it for example at www.leguano-shop.ch. Are they good? I do not know.
Kind regards
Franziska Zemp
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 19, 2014 1:01:46 AM UTC
vibram 5 fingers
[Rephrasing previous aphorism]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 18, 2014 4:37:45 PM UTC
Something some people not getting here. The difference is NOT a moral one but has to do with execution. Someone can have a record of petty theft, cheating, embezzlement, yet sacrifice himself to save lives. Some fools here are missing th point and diverting the conversation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 18, 2014 4:49:31 PM UTC
I posted something about a scumbag who sacrifices himself to save a child.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 18, 2014 5:41:47 PM UTC
Someone is perpetuating a false dichotomy here. The two are not contradicting each other.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 18, 2014 6:11:56 PM UTC
Another confusion: honor is not a publicly given prize ("honors")
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 17, 2014 3:07:56 PM UTC
Friends, I did not say BREAK IT, but FIGURE OUT HOW TO breat it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 17, 2014 3:14:41 PM UTC
Corey Law sophistry alert.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 17, 2014 3:36:13 PM UTC
Jennifer Taub mortality is the cure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 17, 2014 3:37:13 PM UTC
Damon Ash Maetche do some thinking. We understand mental function thanks to mapping of disfunctions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:43:53 PM UTC
What we call virtue is Nietzsche's slave morality to make them obedient and preserve the status quo. Honor is his master's morality. Sorry but I had to be blunt.for the ancients see Aristotle (including Arabs) humility is only a virtue for losers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:54:51 PM UTC
Shooting for virtue is like looking for perfection, prone to errors, hence fragile like short volatility. Shooting for being honorable is like focusing on grand acts that cover small mistakes. One is about downside, the other about upside. Antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 1:19:54 PM UTC
Joel price can you try to avoid platitudes and nonsense? Ego has no meaning here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 1:32:54 PM UTC
The idea is to be virtuous in the big things... Working for JP Morgan is worse than a record of small violations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 2:44:42 PM UTC
David what is the root of humble?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 3:40:05 PM UTC
How abt shaham? I have a link abt megalopsychon
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 5:17:34 PM UTC
dignitas, the opposite of humility in the modern sense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 6:10:28 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn and Ban Kanj here is our pagan shaham (looks like humility has JudeoChristian not Christian roots) http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/megalopsychia-pagan-syria.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 7:02:52 PM UTC
Tamamah in Arabic: complete…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 7:53:51 PM UTC
Bonhomne in french euphemism for beta male
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 16, 2014 1:21:59 AM UTC
Same with Jensen's inequality from lack of starvation
My answer to the Edge yearly question.
http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25401
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 1:54:50 PM UTC
Look at the quant imbecile who missed 4 central problems all ATTRIBUTE SUBSTITUTION (since it also implies straw man deformation) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2368561
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 8:32:58 PM UTC
One is differentiable the other is not
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:16:47 PM UTC
David Malvar I know but my q was about instantaneous change tried to use equations for it
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:58:06 PM UTC
He was in the middle of a stochastic vol model with bells and whistles and went to the equations to try to figure out what happens to call from rise and got the sign wrong...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 18, 2014 2:35:17 PM UTC
Priya Rammohan interesting… but he missed both the attribute subsitution & the fat tails problem. The central problem is in Chapter 2 of "Silent Risk"/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 14, 2014 11:11:03 PM UTC
Yes but if you have a way to show a plot in higher dimensions, immediately call the nearest math department.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 14, 2014 11:17:11 PM UTC
Alan Oursland fat tails are counterintuitive: cluster around the center.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 1:28:00 AM UTC
the explanation of the clustering is … see appendix to this http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2368561
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:38:34 AM UTC
Marie Camasmie Mandelbrot was rather proposing a distribution, not questioning the computability or inverse problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 11:42:10 AM UTC
I tried using consistent scales and found it impossible to show the idea...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 11:44:59 AM UTC
CONFUSION: Do not mistake dimension of the vector for that of the representation. The bell shape is 1 d vector in 2d graphics. Here I have 3 d vector in 3d graphics...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 12:50:43 PM UTC
Friends, by comparison, this is a 2d vector in 3d space. Fat tails are on the right. You can't see much there
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 1:35:24 PM UTC
The equations are now added and explained in SILENT RISK
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 15, 2014 9:30:23 PM UTC
Noam it is a fifth of an o of magnitude
Friends, I finally settled on the title that explains maximally what the work is about. Subtitle: Lectures on Fat Tails, (Anti)Fragility and Asymmetric Exposures. The only term that is negotiable is "Lectures" replaced by "Treatise".
Thanks for the opinion.
The link is here: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 12, 2014 2:15:32 PM UTC
Every time I change the title I need to sort of rewrite the book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 12, 2014 2:33:05 PM UTC
OK, OK. "On Fat Tails, (Anti)Fragility and Asymmetric Exposures."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 12, 2014 4:11:31 PM UTC
I used *hidden* in the subtitle of Fooled by Randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 12, 2014 4:46:57 PM UTC
Brent Halonen bingo! this is why I need to think of another version.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 13, 2014 1:18:01 AM UTC
Thanks Sanjeev Solanki !
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 13, 2014 1:18:50 AM UTC
George Varughese you convinced me!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 12, 2014 1:21:33 PM UTC
I read somewhere that Goldman Sachs is (was) a collective, where people shared the pie. That was Wall Street in my days.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 12, 2014 5:15:06 PM UTC
You can be evil to the outside, communist on the inside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 11, 2014 1:50:12 AM UTC
Samir EL Zein the idea is not general interest to anyone who is not lebanese. It looks like boasting. This page is about ideas.
"Here is the list of my supporters" and "This works, bitches" are his established arguments
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the-professors
This looks like he just does not know how to defend stolen ideas:
"[Dawkins] has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 11:47:22 AM UTC
I know the discussion rather well. Straw man. Nowak PROVED that the regressions used by these people did not reflect the properties of the stochastic process. Dawkins understands no math. See discussion with strogatz and one of the c0-authors of Wilson: https://twitter.com/search?q=nowak%20nntaleb&src=typd
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 11:52:24 AM UTC
Here is the explanation of the argument by one of the co-authors: http://plektix.fieldofscience.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 12:31:15 PM UTC
Jaideep Dave you are not seeing that Dawkins failed to hit Nowak's argument. He is perceived by scientists as a bad journalist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 5:07:15 PM UTC
BINGO:"nature is full of synergistic and nonlinear interactions, so that making clean divisions like this is impossible in most situations. Thus the idea of inclusive fitness theory only works in simplified toy models of reality." - See more at: http://plektix.fieldofscience.com/#sthash.ldaxZrPu.dpuf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 11, 2014 1:52:05 AM UTC
Rupert I will advertise but waiting for a document ...
Consider the simple case of colonization, where the aim is to take a territory, rule its native population and implant your own as permanent settlers. But in many countries we get the opposite population movement: not only the settlers are now near-completely gone but it is the native populations who became permanent settlers in the conqueror's home. France took Algeria, hoping for a country to eat cassoulet and instead it is France that is eating couscous, etc., something that would have horrified the planners of the original invasion.
With mergers and acquisitions there was a saying that the acquiring company (agressor) is often taken over by the personnel of the acquired one (I saw it live: Phibro bought Salomon brothers, and Phibro executives were fired, etc.) In finance if you lend to someone you think you will own him but in fact the borrower will end up calling the shots.
I wonder how prevalent this is. Please list your example/anecdote.
The casualty rate from bombs in Lebanon over 2013 was ~2.5 per 100,000 people. It remains < a tenth of crime in NY in the 90s, <20th of crime in Brazil, etc. Outside bombs the homicide rate is very low.
Why?
Simply, a bomb is immediately noticed by the press, series of isolated crimes don't make the newspaper. Antony Veich wrote: "in the case of Belfast the press usually stayed at The Europa, so the IRA took the bombs to the hotel… 28 times." Sadly, people in 2014 make more irrational decisions than they did in 1900.
Visible risks are not really risks.
The other good news is that everyone is worried about "future risks". The risks in Lebanon are not hidden. They are open for everyone to see, and nobody is wondering why in spite of all these incidents the war DID NOT happen? Every bomb that does not cause generalized warfare makes the system more robust to war (see Antifragility).
In 1975 the Palestinians had nothing to lose from civil war. Same with Syria. Today all parties have skin in the game, and are deep into real estate in Beirut
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 1:52:59 PM UTC
James C Meyer but you need to adjust for the fact that people drive more… the comparision is still powerful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 7:49:46 PM UTC
Re: pinker problem. Car bombs are thin tailed (max injury small) compared to nuclear chains.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 9, 2014 10:19:24 AM UTC
Frank NOva when I grew up everone in Lebanon who could afford it had guns. Many had arsenals.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 12:24:35 PM UTC
The annoying thing is the number of people ON THIS PAGE who argued that "I don't want to die there" missing the point and violating risk rigor. To debunk what I am saying either: 1) numbers are wrong, or 2) future risks are not in the numbers. The latter argument is easy to contradict by showing that the perception of future risk is overblown.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 12:30:02 PM UTC
Brüna Kesserwani 1) You can't predict where a bomb will fall, 2) in Chicago or Rio crime is confined to certain neighborhoods, but the numbers OUTSIDE are still higher and AS RANDOM than a bomb in Lebanon. Finally the problem is there is a conflict is the time it would take you to get out.
There have been papers (mine with Goldstein plus Hoggarth and Sayer) documenting this: you simply can't trust a nonpractioner of probability to discuss probability in the real world.
[Note there i even more stupid: those who consider that n=1 is anecdote across the board: for a large deviation (low probability event) ONE observation is sufficient (see my textbook). For many mild deviations the opposite is the case].
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 1:06:41 PM UTC
Nelson Yao Yang Neo it is because people HERE on this page also fell for the fallacy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 1:27:44 PM UTC
Dâvid Emel nothing Ad Hominem in showing that someone who attacks your ideas fell for a fallacy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 8:37:56 PM UTC
Noam Kinrot unfortunately the problem is a high documented frequency of trained people making this mistake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 9, 2014 1:22:41 AM UTC
Nicolas Lewkowicz wrong post move this to next post
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 2:15:15 AM UTC
What the fuck are you talkin about Andrei Vorobiev? I said it was a statistical statement. And debates are science NOT populism. What the fuck are you not getting here?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 10, 2014 6:18:45 PM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev your disgusting friend is spreading another worse fallacy: If a pilot crashes a plane, N=1 is not anecdote, if he doesn't crash the plane, N=100 is anecdote. For a large deviation (low probability event) ONE observation is sufficient (see my textbook).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 11, 2014 2:39:37 PM UTC
Friends, this is what I call straw man argument. But the problem is that I started debated Noah Smith before reading his article beyond the opening sentences and declared him an idiot as soon as I read more of his article. There is a combination of stupidity and bad faith.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 12, 2014 1:31:10 PM UTC
BTW here is what I wrote on "n" as a function of convexity of payoff (in other words how many observations for equivalent convergence). I wonder if Carl Fakhry found any problem with the derivation. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIODJLVVdfejVMQ1k/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 7, 2014 10:48:37 PM UTC
Read it… depressing which is why I didn't comment. I like to work on things...
We make such mistakes in intellectual life but not in naturalistic settings. When you tell people that a woman has 50% percent probability of being pregnant, (50% of being not pregnant) but 0% probability of being half-pregnant, they get it. Replace "pregnant" with "right" and see that you are likely to make the error.
This leads many to avoid barbells by having only "moderate" risks or "moderate" opinions.
The only time I got angry with Robert Shiller was when, in 2006, he said that I was "sort of" right (about the risks in the system) but was too extreme and needed "moderation". Actually philosophers know about fallacy in the "argument to moderation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 5, 2014 3:20:09 PM UTC
Which is why I almost NEVER COMPROMISE in some domains. I can change my mind but never compromise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 5, 2014 3:23:57 PM UTC
Stephen Sposato you seem hopelessly confused about the statement. Which is normally fine except that rude doesn't work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 5, 2014 3:34:42 PM UTC
Now this doesn't mean that the middle is never right; it is a matter of probability being bimodal not discrete or binary. Please stop posting straw man arguments like Derek Stottlemyer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 5, 2014 3:56:55 PM UTC
Now please NO MISINTERPRETATION/STRAW MAN. I am not saying the middle ground is NO option (binary), but that it should be the LAST option (bimodal).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 7, 2014 5:33:44 PM UTC
Smiran Bhandari no, it was about the models.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 14, 2014 7:35:22 PM UTC
Fed up with idiots who think that calling a fraud a fraud is insulting people, as if there is a way you could convince them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 14, 2014 8:19:06 PM UTC
A charlatan is a charlatan and the FDA arrests them. It doesn't try to convince them.
It too all these years to find the real topic is "hidden risks" (or benefits) and that there was an ultra-rigorous way to go about it.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 3, 2014 2:36:08 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita we are all on the same boat for many things, such as GMO. All I have is a lifejacket.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 3, 2014 4:55:19 PM UTC
Konstantinos Tsianos you visibly did not read the PDF
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 3, 2014 4:59:55 PM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev what do you mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 3, 2014 6:01:59 PM UTC
Rob Monti Malcom Gladwell is a great guy, but presents himself as a popularizer not a technical researcher.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 4, 2014 3:52:55 AM UTC
I was wondering whether THE SCIENCE OF HIDDEN RISKS would be better than just HIDDEN RISK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 4, 2014 11:15:03 AM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev the risk is obvious to you, not to the professors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 4, 2014 6:07:27 PM UTC
Lkhagvatseren Byambajav It was a random number generator that gave Ulan Bator as a city ! I know I need to go there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 4, 2014 9:10:51 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn it is Syriac! Like Karshouni!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 6, 2014 8:16:02 PM UTC
fixed
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 2, 2014 1:38:48 AM UTC
Messias de Braganca there is a difference between a descriptive approach and a predictive stance.
(Note 1: It looks like I will debate Didier Sornette in May in NYC: a man desperately devoid of clarity yet producing works under complicated equations that aim to "predict" rare events. Debates are wonderful to cut through the BS and get someone to produce his own inconsistencies in public, or beam light on his own straw man arguments, or show how his conclusions don't follow from premises. We have fewer and fewer debates. This will be my first & I would love to debate a prominent economist LIVE in front of an audience… Nobody has accepted so far.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 1, 2014 2:33:13 PM UTC
Billy Föster Econ models that fragilize 1) people who use macro models, 2) Markowitz, Sharpe etc… See the appendix of Antifragile...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 1, 2014 2:34:53 PM UTC
Adam Block I would … for he has his matrix that misses second order effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 1, 2014 4:19:02 PM UTC
Condition: no editing, YouTube in Full, Neutral Moderator.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 2, 2014 12:09:34 PM UTC
I actually tried to debate Hitchens in a collective debate. He never addressed me, focused on the other targets, as I was focused on Dan Dennett. But he is a great guy as I went drinking with him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 2, 2014 12:48:37 PM UTC
Robert J Frey I am looking for an economist… anyone comes to mind. I could challenge him publicly. Krugman? Markowitz is too old...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 2, 2014 1:16:38 PM UTC
My approach is to tell people critical of my work on econ models etc to come and expose their bones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 2, 2014 2:54:13 PM UTC
I listed inconsistencies and mathematical incoherence in economics in the appendix of AF.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:34:40 PM UTC
Sam Adams It will be live.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 2, 2014 10:55:16 PM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli not if you make it technical. Entirely technical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 3, 2014 1:26:23 AM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli there are debates and debates, just as there are newspaper articles and scientific discussions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 6, 2014 8:39:58 PM UTC
Daniel Bernoulli there are scientific debates… it is just easier today to keep them on youtube.
Neck on the line looks at exposure as an evolutionary filter that removes bad risk takers from the system so they stop harming others. Critically, it removes *involuntary* risk takers who harm others from the gene pool and socio-economic life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 30, 2013 4:32:51 PM UTC
Sheeja Panicker not survival of the fittest, but survival of the least harmful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 2:57:02 PM UTC
Jaffer, there is a paradox: surveillance protects some people from ethnic/religious prejudice. Did you consider that people with a background from the Middle East actually *benefit* from surveillance? They are actually the greatest beneficiaries as it removes suspicion from them. Someone with an Arabic sounding name no longer has to fear paranoia about him when he travels. They know if the person has connections. A big difference from the aftermath of September 11 when the paranoia was generalized and non-discriminating. The people who complain about surveillance are those whose ethnicity is not associated with stererotypes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 3:14:20 PM UTC
Pablo Chandler this is not about surveillance, but about ethnic prejudice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 3:35:24 PM UTC
Pablo Chandler you are diverting the discussion from the simple point. These arguments are known, so please stop rehashing them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 3:45:48 PM UTC
Let me put it this way, We are not doing a total PRO/CON abt surveillance, only a PRO that is NEVER used in the discourse, related to religious prejudice and mob lynches. Many Arabs feel safe BECAUSE of surveillance, and did not before.
With gratitute for another year of conversation and depth!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 26, 2013 7:45:12 PM UTC
Nicole S. Bakhazi are you Philippe C.'s cousin? Lebanese from Senegal?
--
When you lift heavy weights, you tend to develop "knots" in some areas, painful lumps of muscle fibers, the result of an uneven sudden tension. (My personal experience: clean and pressing and deadlifting produce these painful spots in the hamstrings and the gluteus medius). These require rubbing, massage, and other remedies that seems unnatural. The scientific literature is vague on "trigger points" and similar ailments, along with the remedies. Now why does modern life require the unnatural massage? Is it because we no longer sit/sleep on hard surfaces and uneven hard surfaces would normally squeeze these lumps and reestablish circulation, dissolve the "trigger points" or "knots"? Ot is it because episodic weightlifting is too unnatural?
Thanks for whatever ideas you may have, but this is mainly a question for the experienced "barbell" weighlifters who, from the discussion of Brassens's weightlifting, seem to be numerous on this page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 1:28:37 PM UTC
Note that I don't do massage therapy, I just do rolls and use a ball.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 1:32:27 PM UTC
unnatural massage with weird music ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 1:38:43 PM UTC
Greg Welch How about deadlifts?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 2:22:27 PM UTC
Am sitting on the floor; instant relief.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 3:32:42 PM UTC
Eric lepine, wrong, your body cares about the method
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 4:45:25 PM UTC
Malik Oxford anyone who lifts weight would confirm that machines are different from the real thing. I solved it using complex systems...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 6:07:30 PM UTC
I sort of subscribe to the Body by Science idea, but without machines. All on my feet. And no benchpress (not natural).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 23, 2013 10:11:50 PM UTC
So far the good remarks: 1) full range of motion, 2) regular exercise focused on one zone is unnatural, episodic is not (broader band), 3) walk on uneven terrain with 5-fingers, 4) try to move all your muscles across positions: more variety (Jensen's inequality, again)… I've been doing them all. My knots I think originate from a bicycle fall 4 years ago which led to temporary sciatica problems… So it is certainty the accident not the exercise...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 1:27:50 PM UTC
You need to take the statistical properties of environmental stressors: power law distributed exigencies. There is a once-a-year lift, a once-a-month one, etc. At the bottom of the pyramic, a lot of small effort like walking, at the other end, serious deadlifts. The middle should not play a large role, hence a barbell.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 3:56:51 PM UTC
Chris Ionescu Yes Chris, left side gluteus medius. How do I retrain?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 4:57:30 PM UTC
Hassan I have been doing full body squats with up to 150% of bidy weight but mostly at 75% high reps. They aggravate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 6:28:37 PM UTC
Chris Ionescu "on your belly" you mean lying on my back?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 6:34:10 PM UTC
Chris ionescu I get cramps/tightness in a segment of the hamstring when I do it on the injured leg.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 7:12:13 PM UTC
Chris Ionescu so you think that a repetition of the movement would help? Should I try another one?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 7:34:59 PM UTC
Hassan Mansour I agree with both points. Your technique is to force a movement through stress and let the system balance itself… It has not worked for me and I am certain I have good form because you can't deadlift ~400 lbs without the smallest flaw.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 9:17:05 PM UTC
Hassan Mansour is there a video somewhere to watch for the correct form?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 10:34:41 PM UTC
Chris Ionescu thanks a million! 1) is there a video to see the exact movement? 2) when I do that there is enormous tightening in the lower part of the hamstring near the knee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 1:11:16 AM UTC
Chris Ionescu thanks a million! Learning now about pandiculation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 3:55:18 AM UTC
Chris Ionescu Actually I ordered one of the 2 books I found on Amazon. Thx!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 1:41:56 PM UTC
Chris Ionescu is the idea to produce cramp-like involuntary contractions? I get some of those.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 1:51:49 PM UTC
it contracts randomly, not every time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 2:18:44 PM UTC
The contraction is both in the hamstring and the gluteus medius
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 2:29:57 PM UTC
Thanks a million!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 3:47:08 PM UTC
How about standing and moving the entire leg laterally? tension comes at some point (on the left side)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 28, 2013 7:44:05 AM UTC
Chris Ionescu and Guru Anaerobic so far, after 2 days, pandiculation looks like miracles… but not incompatible with Hassan Mansour's idea of heavy exercise pushing your body to do movements it otherwise woudn't do by itseld… You let your body remove the "brake" not by stretching but by tightening, which is normally instinctual: look at animals when they wake up. It is similar to the tightening of yawning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 28, 2013 7:46:50 AM UTC
Chris Ionescu I was able to touch the floor with the tip of my fingers by progressive pandiculation, tightening then letting go… But as far as the gluteus medius, I sit on a high chair and rotate my left hip by tightening, until the point of feeling the lump forming around the former injury… my muscles tighten on the side of the injury as they are wired to block some movements.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 28, 2013 8:00:22 AM UTC
Guru Anaerobic It seems to me that once one corrects the movement many knots go away. Others require sitting on a hard surface.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 29, 2013 5:49:54 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic Not an injury, but a muscle that gets overtight from the memory of the injury, as if to protect it… So the idea is to retrain it slowly to perform the movement by pushing it… It seems to be working for me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 30, 2013 12:37:28 PM UTC
I almost fell on the stairs last night and my hamstrings on the injured side contracted enormously as they did before, in the same spot… and they are still slightly contracted. so it looks like it is a programmed reaction one needs to deprogram.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 31, 2013 6:46:51 PM UTC
People here are talking past each others, confusing necessary and sufficient. There is something that makes monstrous sense with pandiculation, like a general body yawn, something you do when you wake up. This is necessary but perhaps not sufficient.
I am quite certain that new year resolutions don't really work, are more wishful thinking (gyms are full in January and empty in February)… except that interdicts have worked in history: halal/kashrut dietary laws, etc.
I have personally never been successful with positive resolutions, but have been with stated negative year-end rules: in 2007 (never be late for the year 2008 which worked well by injecting redundancies, and seems to have effortless carried over to today) and 2012 (no reading outside of math for 2013, with weak exceptions).
I have no rules for 2014 yet but feel quite satisfied.
Please feel free to state your rules, if you are willing to share, so other can get ideas. They need to be VIA NEGATIVA and easy to generalize (not personal).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 22, 2013 8:00:21 PM UTC
Michal Kolano are you leaving us?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 1:45:06 PM UTC
Tomek Piorkowski excellent trick!
Assuming one can define happiness, a measure in the "tails", that is the suicide rate, provides a near-random estimate of the average. Likewise counting the super-rich doesn't give an idea of the wealth of a country. It is much more of a measure of inequality.
Corollary: policies aiming at decreasing unhappiness should be treated as something independent from policies aiming at increasing happiness. (The *via negativa* argument).
Note: I do not believe we know how to measure happiness, but we know how do deal with extreme unhappiness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 20, 2013 7:59:57 PM UTC
Note that suicide can be x10 without anyone noticing anything in their surroundings. Aside from being volatile, it is very low.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 21, 2013 2:31:49 PM UTC
Kemi Roza Junga The comment "above" is gone, so people may think you are referring to the previous one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 20, 2013 11:05:10 PM UTC
Am I invited?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 20, 2013 6:54:37 PM UTC
CLOSED… Please move to answer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 20, 2013 11:03:48 PM UTC
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED HERE please move to post answering the question for further discussion (second notification).
Here is the first attack on my ideas in a decent academic journal… So full of mistakes that I will use it in a class lecture.
Article: "Four Points Beginner Risk Managers Should Learn from Jeff Holman’s Mistakes in the Discussion of Antifragile"
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIeUxwLTVvYk8xcHM/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 16, 2013 10:02:37 PM UTC
This guy's mistakes will be a permanent case study...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 16, 2013 10:45:43 PM UTC
paper moved here http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2368561
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 12:27:37 AM UTC
Michal kolano understands how I have been traduced by finance people concerning my stance on volatility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 12:28:09 AM UTC
Nothing is worse than myth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 1:38:11 AM UTC
Federico Epimeteo reread your comments and upon reflection, you seem to be a fraud or promoting fraud. There is a difference between "Argument" and "Traducing" by shifting issues and straw man, the deformation of someone's point. And you used straw man arguments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 2:00:20 AM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou I spent 6 years waiting for a quant attack in public. And it came, and this is a turn because every student quant will study the fallacies…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 10:37:45 AM UTC
Larry, not the point. Mathematical inconsistency, not lack of realism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 11:46:27 AM UTC
True so far the only people critical of my ideas in medicine have been economists who think I am "stepping outside my specialty". But doctors never question my ideas in risk/probability, not even in medicine. Only economists can be that stupid.
http://www.dauphine.fr/fr/actus/evenements/conferences-bbc/inscription-nassim-nicholas-taleb.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 12:44:20 AM UTC
It is all a subsegment of the J-L disciples... I will have to go pay respect in Montreal soon...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 1:28:40 PM UTC
Paul Wehage Looking forward to shaking hands
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 18, 2013 4:39:17 PM UTC
Paul I am leaving now to go get miked up etc. but any friend can come earlier to the amphi we can chat before ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 19, 2013 9:52:26 PM UTC
Thanks all for coming. I am now back in NY.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 19, 2013 10:11:25 PM UTC
Also I apologize for the acoustics. The BBC installed acoustic systems that were not compatible with such a room. People in the back were unable to hear because of the echo. I could not figure out the questions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 15, 2013 7:59:47 PM UTC
no no leeca, those who take risks end up dying...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 15, 2013 10:34:34 PM UTC
I think it is a crime to let oneself be lead to a crime. Working for Monsanto is a violation of ethics. "Lack of courAge?" work for the postal office.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 15, 2013 10:35:41 PM UTC
" I obeyed orders" is not an excuse, not even 1 pct.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 16, 2013 12:53:18 AM UTC
I meant if you work for Monsanto and do disagree yet don't have the courage to stand up, leave and get a job doing something else. My suggested plan B is postal work but there are alternatives.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 15, 2013 5:15:54 PM UTC
Flip an aphorism and you see it from the inside out.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 15, 2013 6:19:04 PM UTC
Aaron Haspel is good, very good.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 15, 2013 6:22:45 PM UTC
Tough to have the personality of evil while hating risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 14, 2013 9:58:59 PM UTC
Jaffer Ali what if there is an actually negative correlation between virtue and fun?
And the central message:
" It is better to take risks you understand than to try to understand risks you are taking." http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Questions: There are two options, 1) academic publisher , 2) staying at Random House & Penguin. The MS will remain free on the web in both situations. The academic route requires academic reviewers, etc., much less the other. Any pros and cons of either?
Thanks for comments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 9, 2013 8:44:05 PM UTC
Al Boggan the advantage of an academic press is just that: minimum peer reviewing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 9, 2013 9:39:33 PM UTC
Friends, the self publishing route has been taken since the book is available for free on the web, and has been throughout the composition, in electronic form. Hard copy publishers will accept that: science needs to be open-access.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 10, 2013 1:28:21 PM UTC
I don't want to sell… this is the technical version of the INCERTO
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 12, 2013 2:26:30 PM UTC
My job is to produce, not to convince…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 9, 2013 12:34:43 PM UTC
social scientists use patamathematics
Limit your generosity to those who, in turn, given the circumstances, would be equally generous towards others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 1:28:50 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic I have a question to ask you about stretching. Do you mind opening a column with your thought on the point?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 1:31:40 PM UTC
Jim Frank you seem to have missed the point completely.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 1:37:49 PM UTC
The idea is giving a dollar to some who does not give it back is taking away a dollar from someone who would do good with it… and so on.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 1:38:17 PM UTC
Money and generosity, alas, are limited by our means.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 3, 2013 2:53:30 PM UTC
Josh Hargrove You didn't broadcast it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 3, 2013 2:53:38 PM UTC
BROADCAST is key
You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top 10 or 20 would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the shool (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the differene betwewn top 10 and top 2000 schools).
The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low quality fields like academic finance (where almost all academics are charlatans and all papers some form of complicated storytelling), the "prestige" of the journal is the sole criterion.
I don't know about literature, sociology, political science, etc. Does the heuristic work there?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 1, 2013 4:01:05 PM UTC
Jay Hutchins close but not quite: consider engineering.
As nothing ever remains secret (there is no anonymity) I managed to get hold of the list of academics who reviewed the book. Two were excusable (ignorance); one of them was mean, extremely nasty, totally in bad faith, thinking he was protected by the anonymity of the process. His point was people had nothing to learn from traders about the risk of options.
Now the question: Given that I know his name and that he can harm others, should I bust him for the sake of exposing fraud ? It is a moral obligation?
Or should the anonymity of the peer-review mechanism (with all the inequities it causes) be preserved in the name of a higher benefit? Which route is more ethical: exposing him or NOT exposing him?
Thank you in advance.
http://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Hedging-Managing-Vanilla-Options/dp/0471152803/ref=pd_sim_b_7
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 30, 2013 9:17:26 PM UTC
I have already contacted the fellow. He freaked out and begged me to not expose him. Be he never said he would not do it again to another person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 30, 2013 9:28:19 PM UTC
David M. Snyder it is not about my case--since I won -- but about the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 30, 2013 10:07:09 PM UTC
Systems fix themselves with people busted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 1, 2013 11:54:24 PM UTC
Life is not about looking good or looking bad, but about feeling one is satisfying one's sense of mission.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 2, 2013 9:47:30 PM UTC
Silvio Santini you would be right if it were about me. But it is not.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 2, 2013 9:55:06 PM UTC
(note some trolls were removed in past couple of days. Rule: post to insult (very general) rather than discuss a point (specific).
Progressively zooming-in on GMOs… There is a bigger mathematical argument linked to "ecocide" not in this piece. Fail to understand how someone can claim "science" in their support or positions against them "unscientific" or "irrational".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 29, 2013 3:39:45 PM UTC
Alexander Boland, the fellow Jordan G. Cimino is a troll. We've been having fewer and fewer here.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This is our annual reminder to not be the turkey.
(credit George Nasr)
A- 1 col per page, smaller format:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/comparison1.pdf
B- 2 cols per page, larger
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/comparison2.pdf
A or B? Thanks a million.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 26, 2013 6:25:56 PM UTC
Friends, thanks all, sorry I haven't had the chance to like each post (yet). It looks like, for space reasons, I will have to do the book in A (narrower) and the papers in B. B only works for 8 1/2 by 11 and the book will be the same size as the other parts of the INCERTO. an 8 1/2 by 11 book isn't easy to produce and hold, etc. Thanks a million!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 26, 2013 7:10:50 PM UTC
note that A is scaled down in size
If you are ever told "your critics will attack you for this", you should 1) answer: fuck them, 2) do more of it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 26, 2013 1:45:35 PM UTC
David Shannon try via negativa methods: remove carbs, driving, take 3 hours very slow walks, aimless walks (it is via negativa because it is the historical default). Then see what you get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 5:22:37 PM UTC
Greg Mrpositive Balteff what is tendentious about science?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 9:17:01 PM UTC
Joe Norman thanks a million corrected
From The Black Swan (2007), less aggressive statement (it looks that mathematics leds me to get more aggressive in debunking):
"For an example that justifies skepticism about unconditional reliance on neurobiology, and vindicates the ideas of the empirical school of medicine to which Sextus belonged, let’s consider the intelligence of birds. I kept reading in various texts that the cortex is where animals do their “thinking,” and that the creatures with the largest cortex have the highest intelligence—we humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, and our cousins the apes.
Well, it turns out that some birds, such as parrots, have a high level of intelligence, equivalent to that of dolphins, but that the intelligence of birds correlates with the size of another part of the brain, called the hyperstriatum.
So neurobiology with its attribute of “hard science” can sometimes (though not always) fool you
into a Platonified, reductive statement. I am amazed that the “empirics,” skeptical about links between anatomy and function, had such insight— no wonder their school played a very small part in intellectual history. As a skeptical empiricist I prefer the experiments of empirical psychology to the theories-based MRI scans of neurobiologists, even if the former appear less “scientific” to the public."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 1:16:00 PM UTC
Tommaso Furlanello read previous comment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 4:24:05 PM UTC
A sucker problem: mistaking "Neuro connected to behavior" and "The connection is accessible to us if we use fancy equipement and jargon"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 4:47:43 PM UTC
I have relieved this site of people who are misinterpreting… To be a science, neurobiology needs to be more predictive of behavior. Until then, just a narrative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 4:51:43 PM UTC
A lot of the problem comes from complexity of systems… requires a different kind of rigor.
(from ANTIFRAGILE)
When it comes to narratives, the brain seems to be the last province of the theoretician- charlatan. Add neurosomething to a field, and suddenly it rises in respectability and becomes more convincing as people
now have the illusion of a strong causal link— yet the brain is too complex for that; it is both the most complex part of the human anatomy and the one that seems most susceptible to sucker- causation. (<>see my technical Discussion of nonlinearities and high dimensional matrices) Christopher
Chabris and Daniel Simons brought to my attention the evidence I had been looking for: whatever theory has a reference in it to brain circuitry seems more “scientific” and more convincing, even when it is just randomized psychoneurobabble.
(Discussion of phenomenology vs theory)
… I do not want to rely on biology beyond
the minimum required (not in the theoretical sense)— and I believe that my strength will lie there. I just want to understand as little as possible to be able to look at regularities of experience. So the modus operandi in every venture is to remain as robust as possible
to changes in theories (let me repeat that my deference to Mother Nature is entirely statistical and risk- management- based, i.e., again, grounded in the notion of fragility). The doctor and medical essayist James Le Fanu showed how our understanding of the biological processes was coupled with a decline of pharmaceutical discoveries, as if rationalistic theories were blinding and somehow a handicap.
In other words, we have in biology a green lumber problem!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 11:55:30 AM UTC
Cont on The "Brain Porn"
I was in a gym in Barcelona next to the senior partner of a consulting fi rm, a profession grounded in building narratives and naive rationalization. Like many people who have lost weight, the fellow was eager to talk about it— it is easier to talk about weight loss theories than to stick to them. The fellow told me that he did not believe in such diets as the low- carbohydrate Atkins or Dukan diet, until he was told of the mechanism of “insulin,” which convinced him to embark on the regimen. He then lost thirty pounds— he had to wait for a theory before taking any action. That was in spite of the empirical evidence showing people losing one hundred pounds by avoiding carbohydrates, without changing their total food intake— just the composition! Now, being the exact opposite of the consultant, I believe that “insulin” as a cause is a fragile theory but that the phenomenology, the empirical effect, is real.
As we saw in Chapter 7, what physicists call the phenomenology of the process is the empirical manifestation, without looking at how it glues to existing general theories. Take for instance the following statement, entirely evidence- based: if you build muscle, you can eat more without getting more fat deposits in your belly and can gorge on lamb chops without having to buy a new belt. Now in the past the theory to rationalize it was “Your metabolism is higher because muscles burn calories.”
Currently I tend to hear “You become more insulin- sensitive and store less fat.” Insulin, shminsulin; metabolism, shmetabolism: another theory will emerge in the future and some other substance will come about, but the exact same effect will continue to prevail. The same holds for the statement Lifting weights increases your muscle
mass. In the past they used to say that weight lifting caused the “micro- tearing of muscles,” with subsequent healing and increase in size. Today some people discuss hormonal signaling or genetic mechanisms,
tomorrow they will discuss something else. But the effect has held forever and will continue to do so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 11:59:34 AM UTC
See gad saad http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cb.259/abstract
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 12:43:48 PM UTC
ricardo hertel, removed your comment because misleading: quantum mechanics converge by the LLN to deterministic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 9:48:32 PM UTC
Andreas Keller Can you say something of substance?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 28, 2013 11:11:18 AM UTC
Geoffrey Hill this is very interesting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 23, 2013 11:49:03 PM UTC
Hint: The nonlinearities are monstrous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 1:01:43 PM UTC
You can disagree with the statement, but disagreeing is NOT trolling or insulting. And visibly some neomaniacs have some knee-jerk reactions… My aphorisms have some backup, and I do not need to put them here, so do a bit of homework before uttering insults like "dumb" or "stupid". The discussions have moved to my analytical commentary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 24, 2013 2:34:47 PM UTC
Riccardo Hertel this is what I believe is bullshit by people who don't know probability. Please stop posting this quantum nonsense. It is deterministic and thin-tailed and obeys LLN. Comparing biology to physics is not adequate.
(Heuristic)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 23, 2013 12:24:18 PM UTC
Celal Berker be rigorous. I didn't say one cannot learn from others. I am saying do not listen to their comments as they may mislead.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 19, 2013 5:07:35 PM UTC
THere is a drift here. I am not saying DO NOT FOLLOW THE HERD. I am saying: if you don't be consistent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 20, 2013 10:02:50 PM UTC
Jacky Chan stop trolling… too many consecutive posts. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 21, 2013 11:43:43 PM UTC
Ricardo Alonso not really because there is a selection mechanism.
Looks like:
*Elements of Risk Engineering: Probability and Decision in the Real World*
is more descriptive of the effort. I wanted Engineering in the title to stress the necessity of an anti-intellectual, nobullshit approach to risk.
I rewrote the introduction to cristallize the approach.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 17, 2013 9:02:57 PM UTC
"Elements" too modest? or too ambitious?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 17, 2013 9:04:58 PM UTC
Pascal Venier how about "the elements"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 17, 2013 10:27:29 PM UTC
When the title has "the practice" it is not by practitioners. When an academic says "the real world" it is not the real world. But I am not an academic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 17, 2013 10:59:53 PM UTC
Jan Novotny the final title may remove "the real world" I am leaving it for now … nobody can ever mistake me for an academic, the subtitle is rarely remembered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 17, 2013 11:01:13 PM UTC
Also I am professor of "Risk Engineering". Nobody knows what it means.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 17, 2013 11:29:51 PM UTC
Konrad Schäfers me too sort of… But I am on a mission, and I want a document as backup when I go after GMOs and other fragilizers; engineering expresses the robust approach.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 17, 2013 11:39:31 PM UTC
titles should not be cute, just expressive of content.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 18, 2013 10:59:42 AM UTC
fixed!
- We are biologically so idiosyncratic and differentiated: out of 7 billion it is rare to find two persons who are exactly alike. But when you listen to conversation, opinions, and speeches people become almost identical to some group or a consensus, as if they didn't want to be themselves any more.
- This is even more striking when you read articles and books. It is so hard to find something *not* generic, something that is not a linear combination of other things. It is even worse with academic papers (most academic papers are even worse… commoditized... I stop here).
- So when you look at yourself in the mirror remember that what's inside your cranium should be a step closer in differentiation to what's outside of it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 15, 2013 11:25:35 PM UTC
Dirk Riehle not the point. Of course you will find variations. But the fact that they are less detectable is what the point is about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 15, 2013 11:45:58 PM UTC
I am fucking tired of posts telling us there are software programs to detect people. Of course that's the point that you NEED a software program for text but not for a face. Kapish? I am tired of sloppy posts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 16, 2013 12:05:49 AM UTC
Usha Meghani Abramovitz great point that language needs a matching receptor. But look at the pathology: what people like to read, to consume, to think, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 15, 2013 3:02:29 PM UTC
HINT: There are some types of mistakes it is good idea to persist in making.
COMMENTARY: for something to be a mistake, it needs to be looked at counterfactually, show great downside, no upside under potential history…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 15, 2013 3:15:14 PM UTC
Please read my commentary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 15, 2013 3:33:58 PM UTC
Chris Léo Bingo! if it costs NOTHING to be wrong, with some stochastic bonus, you want to be wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 15, 2013 6:13:49 PM UTC
Not the point. Some mistakes need to be repeated because they are not mistakes not because one learns from them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 15, 2013 8:21:37 PM UTC
The other thing: Law of Large Numbers works slowly...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 11, 2013 1:35:14 AM UTC
Christopher Chabris not here: look at the dynamics of gossip.
A - DENIAL OF COMPLEXITY: Something foreign to the human body or nature-as-a-complex-system was introduced (in the sense of not being part of the long term history of the process),
B - Benefits (though small) were visible and trumpeted,
C -MISTAKING ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE FOR EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE: "Scientific" *evidence of absence* of harm was presented. (Consider tobacco).
D - SCIENTISM: Arguments against skeptics were presented a la Michael Shermer as being "against science".
E - MORAL HAZARD: consider tobacco's lobbying to show safety on "scientific" grounds.
These cases of small visible benefits and large hidden harm (particularly delayed) are prime cases of fragility (thick left tail, thin right tail).
The aim is to integrate these human sucker problems into the general *precautionary principle*. In the complex domain, one cannot predict adverse consequences beyond small steps, hence the idea of countering history (Bar Yam).
Please do not stray from the topic, which is to build a historical list, in the physical/health (not socioeconomic) domain. This is not a debate: rather a catalogue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 9, 2013 3:58:20 PM UTC
Coffee is >500 years old, hence time tested (think Lindy effect).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 9, 2013 4:13:47 PM UTC
PLease include references and links to claims, if you can. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 9, 2013 4:15:27 PM UTC
Some climate denier wrote "global warming" which is the opposite of the reasoning here: Visibly we are dumping too many foreign stuff in the climate, no different from smoking, and evidence of absence of harm is not...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 9, 2013 4:24:23 PM UTC
Bloodletting, it turned out, has a Lindy effect. It is harmful, but has solved many problems…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 9, 2013 4:43:49 PM UTC
I have been banning the "global warming" and similar deniers from this site, simply because of failure to get that the methodology here would count harm from emissions as a serious worry, even if there is "no evidence". And also because of their militant and idiotic inconsistency that pollutes debates.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 9, 2013 5:40:14 PM UTC
Let us fuhgetabout GMOs for now, because this is the argument we will use AGAINST their use as they fit the model *before* busting by delayed harm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 10, 2013 6:09:17 PM UTC
Ben Lambert it seems to me that the wheat used today is not at all the Lindy-tested wheat.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 8:20:29 AM UTC
Please avoid long posts for the sake of others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 13, 2013 5:30:24 AM UTC
Note this "green" effort: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20131112/DAA11OTG2.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 7, 2013 3:56:31 PM UTC
I tried to remove stuff from AF, with no success either.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 7, 2013 4:53:55 PM UTC
Jed that was one of the typos. Thx!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 7, 2013 6:58:43 PM UTC
You need to understand there is a possibility of laziness with self delusion...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 9, 2013 9:02:16 PM UTC
Marzio Marigo wrong post… you mean the most recent one?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 10, 2013 2:07:44 PM UTC
James Roman there is another book, the conclusion of the Incerto, a sort of Postscript. Short, focused on "convex heuristics" and ideas not covered in Incerto.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 13, 2013 5:33:06 AM UTC
John Faithful Hamer I haven't started work yet. Odds it will be with the INCERTO.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 13, 2013 1:35:38 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer you can summon me to Montreal to party with the tribe ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 16, 2013 3:07:17 PM UTC
no title can be copyrighted
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 7, 2013 12:07:24 PM UTC
TED is a great marker. Those who like it ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 7, 2013 1:21:00 PM UTC
This page is not a place for those who mistake curiosity for hunger for hype.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 7, 2013 3:38:38 PM UTC
You fucking think that I am in the business of popularizing ideas?
"The main insight comes from 12th century philosopher, and direct ancestor of the present authors, Moses ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, or the Rambam. Asset allocation in general deals with the question of how to properly allocate a fixed investment amount among given assets or asset classes. Maimon (c. 1180) considered the similar problem of allocating estate holdings among debt holders. One might imagine two simple ways: divide equally among all debtholders, or divide proportionally among all debt. This can be roughly viewed as analogues for plain risk parity or equal weighting. The proposed solution of Maimonides, however, is neither one nor the other, but a hybrid in between."
"The Maimonides allocation algorithm is as follows (Maimon, c.1180): 'How is the property divided? If when the property is divided in equal portions according to the number of creditors, the person owed the least will receive the amount owed him or less, the property is divided into that number of equal portions. If dividing the property into equal portions would give the person owed the least more than he is owed, this is what should be done: We divide the sum equally among the creditors so that the person owed the least will receive the money that he is owed. He then withdraws. The remaining creditors then divide the balance of the debtor's resources in the following manner.' "
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 4, 2013 4:25:04 PM UTC
Yes, indeed, this is powerful.
Let you voice opinion.
Now I need a subtitle (with probability in it). If needed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 5, 2013 10:23:48 AM UTC
Probability, Tails, and Fragility
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 5, 2013 11:08:18 AM UTC
The title should summarize the book and be effortless.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 5, 2013 11:22:04 AM UTC
No, David. "Probability, Tails, and Fragility : Risk and Decisions in the Real World" are a good summary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 3:41:37 AM UTC
stephen coda the name is the only irreversible part of a book
Can we try to figure out how much he could lift from the picture?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 2, 2013 8:13:08 PM UTC
Remember this is France in 1975. The bar is <20 kg. And the unit is Kg, not lbs, rounding to that unit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 2, 2013 8:16:35 PM UTC
Adam Oliensis what makes you think it is 70% of his max?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 3, 2013 5:57:46 AM UTC
The stress on your face isn't when you hold the weight, but as your are pushing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 8:22:23 AM UTC
Richard Hodkinson when you write something like "false dichotomy", explain or it is BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 8:24:09 AM UTC
Grothendieck was infuriated by textbooks (he was self taught). They focused on solving equations rather than abstract thinking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 8:28:42 AM UTC
Richard Hodkinson you seem totally incapable of understanding 1) an aphorism, 2) abstract thinking. Please refrain from posting here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 8:40:01 AM UTC
Trent Knebel forget these philosophy books. Just try to make sense of relationships by yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 8:43:57 AM UTC
Some people look at things using number theory, others (Mandelbrot) only use geometry, others look at functions in functional space (my tendency). But avoid equation solving. The power of mathematics is that you get the same answer no matter which approach you take.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 8:44:45 AM UTC
John Allen Paulos once wrote that formulas are to math what typing is to poetry. [I may be paraphrasing]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 9:11:58 AM UTC
Alan Oursland nobody is saying the mechanics don't exist. Like nobody is saying that typing is not important for writing a book. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 9:12:53 AM UTC
Carlos Perez Ferrer it is because schoolteachers are the worst kind when it comes to mathematics. Children are taught by ignorant people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 9:23:04 AM UTC
Robert Sterbal the bridge engineer uses HEURISTICS not mathematics, which is what my point was. This is a very displaced comment. If he used mathematics mechanistically (like economists) the bridge would have collapsed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 10:34:13 AM UTC
Brent Roberts arithmetic is NOT mathematics. Kapish? Like accounting is NOT business.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 12:29:05 PM UTC
You can't easily get BS in math because of cross-checking. All techniques lead to same result. Exactly the same. Mandelbrot did geometry, Levy did analysis, etc. for fat tails. This is what make us in awe of the field
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 12:30:04 PM UTC
And when people bullshit in probability you can bust them using probability. That's what i am doing with exonomists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 2, 2013 8:13:38 PM UTC
Robert Bruce math in finance is bullshit. Doesn't mean math is bad...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 1:29:33 AM UTC
I am sorry for your friend. Sincere condolences.
But modern literature, and the very notion of "public intellectual" I can no longer stand. It feels largely like hype and fashion-magazine discourse. I am scheduled to go to Jaipur festival in January and can't bear the idea of listening to writers, talking to them... I am in trouble.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 3:45:21 PM UTC
Please no diversion on Chomsky and Tromsky.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 4:00:08 PM UTC
I read Machiavelli's Prince for example. Very dense and BS free. A History of Private Life is by my bed. Read a few folios of the Babylonian Talmud. But I can't read philosophy, makes me sick.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 6:27:18 PM UTC
Never said i would never visit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 12:50:34 PM UTC
Nathalie Malanda Being called public intellectual, to me, is the greatest INSULT.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 2:05:57 PM UTC
Travis Brown if you are implying that what I wrote before is not worthwile, what the fuck are you doing on this page?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 2:54:20 PM UTC
One way to detect BS operators: find inconsistencies as with Travis Brown 's statement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 5:03:55 PM UTC
Borges is the real thing. So is Dostoevsky. Trying to reread both.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 6:50:15 PM UTC
I have to say something I sort of suspected. Math is much more fun than literature.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 8:19:41 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault you can do math without being nerdy... but it will take me a while to convince you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 8:57:48 PM UTC
Lea Mackay Math IS Abstract
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 8:59:14 PM UTC
For the popular mind math = engineering. For mathematicians math = abstraction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 11:48:18 PM UTC
If your approach to mathematics is mechanical, not mystical, you're not going to enjoy it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 12:34:52 AM UTC
Vergil, thanks! That was wonderful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 1, 2013 7:27:09 AM UTC
Amy, if one needs to learn algebra from a textbook/schoolteacher... Doomed. Math is self-taught or from conversation with "amateurs" (in the true sense ).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 14, 2013 6:13:41 AM UTC
I can't go any more...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 14, 2013 6:13:51 AM UTC
Paperback coming out in US
In the terms of your antifragility book, which I am currently reading, that would be called "converting the fragile process of software development into an antifragile one", but of cause no one would say "we do antifragile software development". The word "agile" already spreads to other contexts, e.g. "agiles Unternehmen", see http://www.springerprofessional.de/die-rolle-des-managements-in-agilen-unternehmen/4727314.html;jsessionid=4F897DFC1D5D33C1450D856972858757.sprprofltc0203
or "Agile Business", see http://www.rallydev.com/agile-business-book
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 4:25:18 PM UTC
Why the fuck don't people like you get the point that a synonym IS NOT an example? Fragile is a general property of response, and saying antifragile = agile is like saying we should replace FRAGILE with PORCELAIN CUP.
Comments welcome before submission to ArXiv.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 6:48:43 PM UTC
Edi Piqoni Indeed!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 6:56:03 PM UTC
Added and thanked Ed Pigoni:
\subsubsection{Unseen Harm} The skewness of \(g_{\alpha,L,N}(\xi)\) shows effectively how losses have properties that hide the mean in small samples, since, owing to skewness, the observed mean loss with tend to be lower than the true value. As with the classical Black Swan exposures, benefits are obvious and harm hidden.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 10:21:44 AM UTC
Igor Bukanov the parameter c sets the location of the sigmoid. separate from b.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 1:14:49 PM UTC
changed the sigmoid since
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 2:30:45 PM UTC
igor, you are thanked at the end. But the definition of the sigmoid is different from other chapter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 31, 2013 5:06:04 PM UTC
Philip Murtagh g(.) is negative. Thx for looking.
In some domains, "evidence" comes too late. The good news is that we have a methodology to bust these claims and make the difference between *true* and *fake* evidence.
This shows why the Law of Large Numbers makes evidence slower under fat tails (In some domains, only *negative* evidence counts). And this is the method we are using in statistics to bust sloppy and fallacious (mechanistic) thinking by applying an inferential technique on a problem for which we know the answer.
Incidentally this is exactly what Pinker doesn't get: scientific "evidence" is NOT journalistic fact checking. And this is why I consider that advocates of GMOs on grounds of "science" are dangerous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 28, 2013 9:10:39 PM UTC
Vladimir Zhumakhanov stop the sophistry. GMOs are a risk for the ecosystem not you!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 28, 2013 9:26:20 PM UTC
Javier López Indeed. In the complex domain you need to use time as evidence, not experiments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 28, 2013 10:42:05 PM UTC
Jonathan Cano what is this statement? Read some background about the work behind this statement before writing this BS as mentioned on the PAGE. I can't rewrite books for every statement and am not interested in reinventing all ideas for every newcomer. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 28, 2013 11:27:54 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita ce n'etait pas une lapalissade a l'epoque.
So I am closing my part of the Dobelli plagiarism. The problem is that instead of coming clean, and moving on, he responded by attacking and waging a press campaign with his journalist friends.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 27, 2013 10:42:56 PM UTC
Guido Gothenburg What the fuck is your reasoning about? You need context. He copied the SAME example from the same topic. And if wrong, he has 41 not 42 cases of plagiarism?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 27, 2013 11:20:28 PM UTC
The big mistake was that a violation of ethics AFTER the plagiarism: the journalists who interviewed him (his friends) did not interview me to get my side of the story. He paid for it, alas. But remember: someone who can't have ideas of his own to write about won't go very far in the ideas business.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 28, 2013 3:55:11 PM UTC
No, no, no, wiki is not a tool for revenge edits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 28, 2013 4:31:50 PM UTC
You cannot put anything on wiki to attract journalists. It is not ethical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 28, 2013 8:34:40 PM UTC
Stefan Nickum when caught, plagiarists spin stories to distract from the main point, with side issues and justifications... I've been friends with Kahneman for years and read all of his words, but never felt obligated to plagiarize him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 27, 2013 9:41:17 PM UTC
Emad Ali , al amthal laysat qawa3d was ta5talif 3anha
Which title works best?
a- Lectures on Probability
b- Probability and Risk in the Real World
c- Treatise on Risk and Probability
d- Treatise on Risk
e- Probability, Risk, and (Anti)Fragility
f- Probability, Fat Tails, and Fragility
e- ?
I will keep a free copy here or TBA
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hUVjNBUFB5VDZOMDg/edit?usp=sharing
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 6:30:07 PM UTC
Academics are the only ones who think they are in the real world.
True, one has to assume that many "I wish I did x instead of y" are episodic rather than deep; but in general it is more painful to see misrouted success than misrouted failure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 1:14:31 PM UTC
Beyond fuck you money, one has no excuses, but the problem is that greed starts ABOVE fuck you money like addictions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 1:23:18 PM UTC
I only look at obituaries (+ sometimes gossip).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 2:04:20 PM UTC
Someone in that group, George Soros, leaves me with the impression, every time I see him, that he wished he were a scholar. Actually he was the reason I started progressively leaving business early on.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 2:49:03 PM UTC
Manish Dhawan do not misuse labels like "hindsight bias" . This is not hindsight bias.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 4:02:43 PM UTC
Chris after the first $20 30 40 million a man has choice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 5:11:53 PM UTC
Sjahari Hollands before writing bland statements, give details (if you can). If you can't you are a bullshitter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 5:18:09 PM UTC
Sjahari Hollands I suspect you are a troll and the only way to prove it is by backup. This site is troll free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 5:25:42 PM UTC
Sjahari Hollands the way we keep this site troll free is by requesting you only come back after you post concrete and logical criticism (as opposed to troll). In the meanwhile, go troll elsewhere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 26, 2013 7:11:36 PM UTC
Roger Panetta for many it is ego gratification or vanity scholarship. In his case it seems genuine. One hint is that he led a very austere life. I am certain he loved risk taking. I do; I personally can't live without taking risks. But it is not incompatible with a life of scholarship once you have the fuck you money.
There are exceptions (for mathematicians).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 25, 2013 6:30:03 PM UTC
Please do not take "balls" literally.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
Try to kill anything called hope in you. You never want to put yourself in a situation where you wish very badly for something *specific* to happen to you, an event that would tomorrow suddenly make a big difference for the rest of your life.
--(Say, the outcome of a job interview or a lawsuit, a battle, winning the lotto, meeting a significant other, getting a paper accepted, have gold rise, have your employer go public, or other events that can markedly change your life.) If one event, a single event makes a difference, *and* it doesn't depend on you, then you are megafragile, a prisoner of circumstances.
--This is not to say that no good event can make a difference to you, rather that you do not *need* to dream about it. For the alternative should be acceptable enough for you. The outcome of the battle is not what matters, but how *you* fight; for that you do not need to hope and dream like a loser.
--Likewise if you end up losing a lawsuit or something of the sort, show off how honorable you are in handling defeat.
So, simply, get organized in a way to not have to dream tomorrow or the day after. It takes a while, a lot of work, and the certainty that the counterfactual is equally good for you.
[Sensitity to counterfactuals]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 19, 2013 7:46:54 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault and Ban Kanj no comment on the idea of the 5th volume?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 20, 2013 1:35:04 AM UTC
I reread as if it were written by someone else... the interesting thing in the statement is countering this virtue of "hope". The rest of course seems... well known.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 20, 2013 2:24:30 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn shhhhh... don't tell them.
Places held to be touristically either uninteresting or unattractive (or not particularly special) are associated in my personal memory with a lot better souvenirs than places held to be attractive. These "attractive" places evoke boredom (after the first contact and "wow! how beautiful" the scenery), rich farts, gold-diggers, Saudi "princes" in convertible Italian handmade sports cars, tourists being fleeced by locals, etc. This is easily conceivable based on habituation: inside a café, trapped in conversation, you forget that you are in West Philadelphia. Kahneman had a paper indicating that people who live in California are not really happier than those in the rest of the country, but don't know it, and live under self-sustained myths. After a brief period, you treadmill to baseline. But as with people who are in California telling themselves that they have to be happier, because that's the prevalent belief, we end up living in a postcard-like system of constructed preferences.
I agree that being exposed to natural beauty, once in a while, brings some aesthetic contentment, or episodic visits to the country bring some relief. And I accept that it is better to have some fractal dimension (trees, nature) in one's permanent landscape. But I wonder if, for day-to-day life, one needs much more than ample sunlight and view of trees outside the window: beyond that, no postcard life can be a tradoff for absence of trusted and warm neighbors, plenty of relaxed friends, stimulating conversation, ability to walk places, and a consuming activity.
When I look into my personal raw preferences, I feel I prefer Brooklyn to the South of France, ugly West Philadelphia to the scenic Amherst (Mass), Milan to Florence, and Clerkenwell to Kensington. Question: Do we tend to follow the current culture as punishment?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 18, 2013 8:04:43 PM UTC
Ban Kanj can you have a go at a transation?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 18, 2013 8:35:18 PM UTC
James Lonier what is the M Vin thing?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 18, 2013 9:56:39 PM UTC
Ban Kanj mutanabbi's sentence
When projecting an image to others in private and social life, many feel they need to emphasize what is unique and special about them, which is a turnoff as bad (inverse) signaling. It is vastly more elegant, endearing, and attractive to emphasize what is common and ordinary.
[Comments Welcome]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:09:16 PM UTC
Daniel Cohen in public, project nothing. Nobody is fooled.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:38:46 PM UTC
Adzb?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:48:13 PM UTC
Nobody is saying that being unique does not matter. There is a difference between being unique and making an effort to let others know such fact.
(Ergodicity, Fooled by Randomness, Lindy)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 12:07:11 PM UTC
The point (ergodicity) is that randomness comes out of a system over time. The butcher will eventually get the turkey.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 12:13:17 PM UTC
A good presentation of ergodicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 4:32:34 PM UTC
Felix Förster excellent! That's the Lindy effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 10:37:13 AM UTC
Brian Maudling stop the BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 10:38:57 AM UTC
Robert J Frey I am interested on why you wrote the other day that power law tails are Lipschitz (they are).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 10:42:56 AM UTC
THE MAIN IDEA HERE: Consider that the law of large numbers is for "large N" and eventually with N large the turkey is eventually killed by butcher. Ergodicity means that under some conditions, the notion of large N (in sample size, i.e. different realizations of different variables of the same family) also applies to LENTHY T (in time, successive realizations of the SAME variable), something called translation invariance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 12:57:53 PM UTC
We map causal space into statistical space as follows. HAS A REASON = SIGNAL; DOESN"T HAVE A REASON = NOISE. I wrote this 4 times in the INCERTO. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:15:52 PM UTC
Michal Kolano the zero-one law is an extreme case of a tail event... non applicable preasymptotically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:28:36 PM UTC
No, ergodic theory transfers from LLN. If it works, then OK. LLN works for Fat tails down to alpha =1.
When I wrote here "Virtue is when the income you wish to show the tax agency equals what you wish to show your neighbor" about 1/2 of people (including 1/5 here on this site) mistook it for an invitation to pay more taxes instead of showing-off much less with your money.
The error almost always linked to Kahneman's attribute substitution: always reduce the problem to something easier to communicate, at the expense of transforming the meaning, Procrustean Bed style. "We underestimate randomness" turns into "It's all random".
Now the 1/5 people on this site making such mistakes... it is painful, but we need them to leave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 9:49:10 AM UTC
It is not google harming our brains (at least not here); it is increased exposure to media and journalists... print journalism was low frequency.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 10:32:15 AM UTC
I remember from the TV days that people waited until 7PM +- 1 to know what happened. Then they reset progressively. Anyway my idea of the news making us stupid is formalized here. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/Noise%20Bottleneck.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 10:40:40 AM UTC
Lisa Sollett what kind of bullshit is this? Does one have to teach 1+1=2 in higher math classes? You shd leave this site.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 11:09:35 AM UTC
This site would be severely set back if we had to go back to elementary logic every discussion. We are not in logic 101. One cannot take dissent and arguments seriously if they are not cleaned up of elementary logical fallacies (Bruno Coelho).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 11:11:23 AM UTC
Ray Calvert not at all. Signal is separable from noise, and is low-grade, rarely stark.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 11:35:34 AM UTC
Jason Hinchliffe it was not misleading. It required thinking. Use of "higher", it turned out, did not help much.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 12:02:41 PM UTC
Michal Kolano is bang on! Error is multiplicative since it is cognitively easy to spread. And the worse is that it inhibits genuine rigorous dissent and intellectual arguments. This site is not a place to learn rigor, but one to use rigor to advance arguments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 1:38:16 PM UTC
Sorry, but this site is not entry-level logic, but a group of people searching for more advanced problems, which requires a minimum of rigor for the discourse to hold without breaking down to the most multiplicative fallacy. There are plenty of other sites on the web.
It looks like skin in the game does not necessarily work because it makes people more careful, rather but because it allows the risk taker to exit the gene pool and stop transferring the risk to others. A bad driver exposed to harm would eventually die and stop killing people on the road; shielded from harm he would keep killing others ad infinitum, as if he were an economist a la JS or PK.
Let us discuss: is skin-in-the-game largely a selection mechanism, or is it a behavioral modifier, or both, and in what proportion?
Thanks, friends.
[Please feel uninhibited but stay rigorous, and observe rules meant to prevent the discussion from moving away from the core point. This site has been working very, very, very well because trolls have had zero second option.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:08:19 PM UTC
It relates to the earlier discussion of Lamarckian vs Darwinian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:39:31 PM UTC
Julian Ziesing it is always a selection, even when not deadly. If managers lost their *own* money, they would be weakened, even if they didn't run out of money. the LTCM people are now on golf courses, away from business.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 11:42:24 PM UTC
Nothing to do with "gene pool" in the literal sense; it is just mortality (figurative) for the offender.
Colette told the budding George Simenon: true literature should not sound literary, forcing him to strip his style of fake gold. It is the same with science: true science doesn't look like job-market science, and true scientists know that. (For instance, the "happiness" economist Bruno Frey has the best publishing record of any of his peer >300 published papers, but even economists don't think much of him.) And, of course, real business doesn't look like MBA businesses; real risk takers often look like accountants; real professors don't look like pipe-smoking tweed-clad portraits; really rich people don't wear tailored suits and often fly premium economy. Real mercenaries (like Bob Denard) are more likely to look like college administrators.
Most of us traders knew that Madoff was a fraud, even if it took a while for the system to figure it out. There is something about absence of substance that ends up screaming at our inner BS detector, *as if the fraud wanted to be the first one to tell you that he was a fraud*, by over-imitation and making his gold glitter a bit too much. It may take a while; we may be fooled a bit, but our BS detector ends up eventually working.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 1:58:21 PM UTC
Filipe Barreto Peixoto Teles inquire before writing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 7:03:10 PM UTC
I actually had like many option traders run-ins with clients who wanted us to "imitate" Madoff, and many tried to reverse engineer his performance, to no avail. Rumors were so strong that only suckers were invested at the time of blowup.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:22:33 PM UTC
Liz Lewis pray, say more about the return to the scene of the crime...
This is from my Chapter 6.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 4:40:48 PM UTC
Daniel Brueske free book on the web http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 5:11:15 PM UTC
Jimmy Ardis no, since I know Social Science is largely bullshit, I only read math and classics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 7:05:46 PM UTC
No, because the other ones are more *dangerous*
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 9:11:02 PM UTC
Gladwell in addition is an original thinker. If we put Pinker or any economist under the same standards, byebye.
If a doctor amputates the wrong leg, there has to be another solution than amputate the doctor's leg.
(I thank Marc Abrahams for Talmudic advice/guidance/training.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:41:18 AM UTC
The punishement should be a deterrent unde constraints of fairness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:43:34 AM UTC
Ban Kanj Ta7at in Hebrew means "under" and the expression is from the Hebrew texts. But the Talmud was written in Aramaic, much closer to modern Levantine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 7:24:13 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn, now that you emerged from Shabbath, we have questions stored for you. Why is it 3ayn ta7at 3ayn (ta7t means under)? (7 is ח and 2 is ֵָע in neo-Facebook-Canaanite script) And the other one: he says that 7mar = donkey, but linked to "khamr" alcohol, which is not a ח but a כ, as in 5amr). So I suspect the scholar made a mistake and conflated 5 and 7.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:06:17 PM UTC
Ban Kanj David Boxenhorn the word in Levantine Arabic is the same for 7mar, but not a 7 but 5 for 5amr (alcohol).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:06:40 PM UTC
Also David, isn't the text in Aramaic?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:12:17 PM UTC
kh is written as 5
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:40:22 PM UTC
It is a problem. The خ is not ك and it is the latter that becomes כ w/without dot. The association is between the kaf and kof (just like P and PH or S and SH); most words like leka (ar) become lekha (hbr) , and few exceptions like 5amse becomes 7amesh come to mind. But I may be mistaken.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:56:11 PM UTC
Then it makes sense! ح خ
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 8:58:35 PM UTC
also makes sense because 7mar is arabic is linked to a7mar (red) and alcohol to khl (blue) ... Colors were named after objects, not the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 9:18:49 PM UTC
Mkm Abdul your uncle seems heroic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 10:38:37 PM UTC
Thanks amir! Marc Abrahams directed me to the ipad app.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 12, 2013 10:41:55 PM UTC
I wonder molo5 in H and Phoenician vs malak in arabic..
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 1:19:38 PM UTC
Amir Arie לא מבין
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:23:39 PM UTC
What does فَمَن تَصَدَّقَ بِهِۦ فَهُوَ كَفَّارَةٌۭ لَّهُۥmean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:23:59 PM UTC
Tasaddaka bihi?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 13, 2013 11:43:55 PM UTC
Alf shukr Ahmad Sabri. Does the Qoran mean LEX TALONIS is literal? And does it mean that one can give up his right and that would be a virtuous act?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 14, 2013 9:55:25 AM UTC
Wonderful Golden rule: punish in a way you would like to be punished!
- You are told that experience is accumulated knowledge when it is largely a survival filter, a fitness test. Those we call "experienced" are simply those who had the traits that allowed them to survive in a given function in order to be able do it for a long time: what we call on this forum absence of fragility.
- This confusion is similar to mistaking the Lamarckian for the Darwinian. There is some direct learning (Lamarckian) in experience, but it has to coexist with a stiff selection test.
- The consequence is that "experienced" people should limit their teaching to avoidance of fragility.
- And our preferences show that we get the point (intuitively): we tend worship old people when they are successful, and despise (and neglect) them when they are ordinary. Yet both have, technically, the same "experience".
[VIA NEGATIVA, LINDY EFFECT, SKIN IN THE GAME]
--Please read carefully before commenting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 6, 2013 2:42:15 PM UTC
Exit exam = having survived please no comments on "teacher".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 6, 2013 4:54:13 PM UTC
Chandrashekar Ramadurai why on earth do you comment without reading the fucking post? It does NOT say experience has no value. It says it is dominated by survival. Can't you read before posting?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 6, 2013 5:03:30 PM UTC
The problem is posts that change the argument is that it confuses others and degrades the debates.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 6, 2013 8:49:10 PM UTC
Steven Restall read the post before you write your nonsense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 10, 2013 6:19:16 AM UTC
Tom Jones I cannot believe this bullshit: that after reading the above you can come up with the statement that the post meant experience doesn't count.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 4, 2013 3:51:15 PM UTC
Daniel Hogendoorn thanks for the cheese.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 4, 2013 4:14:25 PM UTC
If you do not have any precise criticism of a model, please refrain from comments. I find it disgusting for people to comment on things they don't understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 4, 2013 4:16:18 PM UTC
Hannes Hautzinger the beauty of moving from the "romantic" approach to small is beautiful to the mathematical one is that a mathematical model can be debunked thanks to the precision of the logical chains entailed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 4, 2013 7:58:21 PM UTC
Yes the 2 sections were written independently. I redefined the function. Thx! k= 1 in Fig 15.2
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 5, 2013 2:13:47 AM UTC
Forget the engineering details. This is about the necessary consequence of concave responses.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 5, 2013 12:28:33 PM UTC
I reposted... proved the general case
From the idea of the "S-family" dose response with a convex section it flows *necessarily* that anything deemed harmful that you are exposed to 1) in small enough quantities, 2) in a non-recurring, not chronic exposure, and, 3) in an acute, short lived way ("one off"), *no matter how toxic* it is deemed to be in long term consumption, will eventually either leave you better off or at least no worse off than before. This means that sugar, smoking, pollution, medication, the New York Times, etc. have to leave you not worse off under the condition that your exposure is episodic, not chronic. (Beware the "small": some things like heroin or an MBA class can leave you permanently altered after a single exposure at doses that do appear small but are not).
The proof is in Part II of the technical book (I am cleaning it up thanks to Carl Fakhry's indefatigable vigilance). [CORRECTED TYPO]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 27, 2013 6:16:42 PM UTC
Zachariah Pifer explain don't throw words without backup.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 27, 2013 6:42:42 PM UTC
dana ullman homeopathic medicine has NOTHING to do with hormesis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 27, 2013 6:48:25 PM UTC
What is practiced as homeopathy is bullshit scientifically. Please no discussions here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 27, 2013 8:16:18 PM UTC
George Machen yes this is a NECESSARY sigmoid see Mkm's app.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 28, 2013 5:04:07 AM UTC
The problem with heroin is that a SINGLE exposure can turn out to cause addiction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 29, 2013 8:14:40 AM UTC
Lukas Buehler try to understand the subjects here before bullshitting "this is old news, Parashmelsus knew it" which can apply to about anything. Such asinine remark is equivalent to : Rieman/Lebesgue is not knew, we have known it since Newton. We are discussing the necessity of positive effect from convex responses not the fact that quantities matter. Finally, hormesis was known well before, well before Paracelsus with the the story of Mithridates.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 29, 2013 9:39:17 AM UTC
George Varughese in the end you need to take into account the increase probability of re-use. This is why heroin cannot be analyzed as a separate exposure without breaking the independence criterion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 29, 2013 9:36:27 PM UTC
Bwhopee It is known to cause irreversible effects, like greed, love of Mercedes cars, enjoyment of powerpoint, craving of meetings, and, sometimes, wearing ties.
From the idea of the "S-family" dose response with a convex section it flows *necessarily* that anything deemed harmful that you are exposed to 1) in small enough quantities, 2) in a non-recurring, not chronic exposure, and, 3) in an acute, short lived way ("one off"), *no matter how toxic* it is deemed to be in long term consumption, will eventually either leave you better off or at least no worse off than before. This means that sugar, smoking, pollution, medication, the New York Times, etc. have to leave you not worse off under the condition that your exposure is episodic, not chronic. (Beware the "small": some things like heroin or an MBA class can leave you permanently altered after a single exposure at doses that do appear small but are not).
The proof is in Part II of the technical book (I am cleaning it up thanks to Carl Fakhry's undefatigable vigilance).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 27, 2013 6:29:16 PM UTC
Rupert Read these substances might be beneficial in *minute* doses
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 27, 2013 6:36:02 PM UTC
Billy Wright well from the lung experiments oxygen is bad unless stochastic!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 27, 2013 6:49:45 PM UTC
Josef Svoboda TAUTOLOGIAL means less harmful, not necessarily ">="
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 28, 2013 5:01:11 AM UTC
The problem with heroin is that a SINGLE exposure can turn out to cause addiction.
Few know that Grothendieck (who struggled in school as his idea of math did not match the curriculum) not only hated equations but struggled to understand them. His idea of abstraction is maximal, and his idea of mathematics is to connect the dots, exactly the opposite of the school teacher. Another person had told me that he went into a state of disgust when he saw textbooks.
Another attribute: G has very gentle personality with students but proved extremely cruel with anyone who was arrogant towards him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 29, 2013 7:16:45 PM UTC
Reading recoltes et semailles, a tirade against the French math establishment, which includes a long letter accusing the secretarial office of U Montpelier of mistreatment...
Beyond all aspects linked to reciprocity, gifts increase the variations in one's life; they bring a bit of bilateral optionality. You increase variations by borrowing someone else's imagination, and get to use or read things you would have never done spontaneously. The same with enemies, and their often enriching inverse gifts.
Give plenty of gifts, hope you receive a few!
PS - Just realized the point as I received as a gift "The History of Western Philosophy" by Jean-Francois Revel (incidentally the father of the buddhist monk Mattieu Picard). Revel was quite critical, a la Fat Tony, of these packaged ideas. On my own I would have never bought the book, particularly a book with such a bland title.
Technical PS - Social scientists spin many many theories about gift-giving, not seeing the point. (Thaler's analysis of gifts and application of mental accounting is seriously flawed).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 8:55:54 AM UTC
REcommendation with skininthegame
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 4:06:43 AM UTC
today
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 3:45:29 PM UTC
Thanks George Varughese !!!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 29, 2013 11:55:27 AM UTC
We can upload photos, but not here as it would be too much promotion for this site and would turn it into some lit-author-promotion a la X, and some might feel excluded. But feel free to show link.
1) for those of you in Singapore, coffee next Wednesday or Thursday? (Thanks George Varughese).
2) Also comments are welcome on the aesthetics of this LaTeX formatted technical companion (available for free). The book is half converted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 23, 2013 3:53:19 PM UTC
Ban Kanj chapters always start with odd numbers (on the right side)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 23, 2013 4:02:22 PM UTC
The problem with LaTeX is that 2-cols makes references and indenting blow up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 23, 2013 4:31:43 PM UTC
OK, Will announce here when/where on THursday
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 23, 2013 5:10:16 PM UTC
Jason Lai are there facilities for tea/coffee there? Shd be a good venue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 23, 2013 5:11:55 PM UTC
Florian Neuman Lyx is not good for books and 2 columns...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 23, 2013 6:10:46 PM UTC
New link (Dropbox had too much traffic) http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/chaptersprobability.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 24, 2013 1:12:10 AM UTC
Looks like i can do wesnesday late pm. 6ish ok?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 24, 2013 1:12:39 AM UTC
Please tell me where and i will post. Is 6 ok?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 24, 2013 5:26:22 PM UTC
Just got here. I will post tomorrow morning. looking forward!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 3:00:40 AM UTC
Great, see you there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 21, 2013 8:44:38 PM UTC
George forgetabout the plagiarist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 21, 2013 8:50:22 PM UTC
Ivan forget but dont forgive a stranger reverse for family.
(sorry had wrong link)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 17, 2013 10:36:52 AM UTC
NEW version!
****
(Note: corrected as people were focusing on the tax not on the neighbor, thanks to Ilias Paparounis)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 16, 2013 11:46:04 AM UTC
Ilias Paparounis bingo! everyone is focused on the tax side not the neighbor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 16, 2013 12:05:59 PM UTC
Nobody is saying you should pay more taxes. You just want to, whatever income you show the taxman, show even less to your neighbors.
(Modification of previous aphorism)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 15, 2013 1:19:29 PM UTC
(assume of course "defense" army)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 15, 2013 2:25:50 PM UTC
Money on the side is... CONVEX
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 15, 2013 2:03:13 PM UTC
Samantha McKinney Moore where?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 14, 2013 12:37:42 PM UTC
Jeff Burido Russell's idea was corrected by Godel.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 15, 2013 10:18:12 AM UTC
Russell figured out that you need a meta. That is the problem Godel found could not be solved. See the text (even title) of GOdel's
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 15, 2013 9:25:35 PM UTC
Michał Gmytrasiewicz you are right. It is not correcting, but countering... And this is an aphorism making the problem both intuitive and fun...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 6:14:31 PM UTC
There is nothing deep or new about this post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 8:48:24 PM UTC
Some schmock thought I was talking about my own paper. It was about the doctoral dissertation of a friend.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 10:00:11 PM UTC
Richard Hodkinson you, you are good, you
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 14, 2013 6:37:51 PM UTC
Frank Nova you are assuming it is true that there is nothing new, in which case it is copied.
(Note that I kept reading until "saturation" of finding same points shared by many authors, then stopped" The only ambiguous point is what is found on Wikipedia: does one cite Wikipedia? What if the page changes?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 1:41:28 PM UTC
Jimmy Ardis yes. But if you do too many of these...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 8:33:25 PM UTC
Mike Tolhurst I actually started using SEP for philosophy articles. Wiki is not good.
Now think of someone creating a job for him/herself. Odds are that not only he may have solved his own unemployment problem, but also created a job -and some happiness- for someone else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 8:21:17 AM UTC
I will remove the post later as this is not part of the type of conversations we have here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 9:43:29 AM UTC
Friends, this to protect the system. Not about copyrights, but morality. And in Zurich these blokes get away with it: I was smeared by the press there for thinking about complaining. Portrayed as an exaggerating lunatic stabbing a friend in the back. Now they need to apologie. Different ethics...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 10:25:09 AM UTC
Steven Feeney why the fuck you don't get that it is NOT ABOUT ME? It is about the preservation of trust in the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 11:16:00 AM UTC
I was disgusted by someone who nitpicks legal matters in front of a moral offense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 12:27:11 PM UTC
Mark Engelhardt you do not seem to understand that it is not for or against Mr Dobelli but the system NEEDS to be free of frauds. BUILDING on someone's ideas is honorable, EXPLAINING someone's ideas is a good service, but PLAGIARIZING is morally reprehensible as it stops people from sharing. If you do not get any moral disgust, you have serious problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 12:28:07 PM UTC
Várkonyi Gábor Stop using the "friend" for someone who was using someone else for PR image, namedropping... and unpublished manuscripts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 12:43:45 PM UTC
I have NO Problems with people pirating my books. Spell my name right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 1:35:40 PM UTC
Killian Denny I answered you with a post above.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 13, 2013 2:35:10 PM UTC
You guys know that #3 came out. And there is #4.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 14, 2013 2:04:40 PM UTC
Hi, I was actually using the Lindy effect...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 14, 2013 2:06:32 PM UTC
There is a book EXTREMELY similar to Fooled by Randomness called The Drunkard's Walk. Yet not a shade of plagiarism. Some ideas can be rediscovered by two people. And when asked, the author said: Had I known about FBR I wouldn't have written that book. An honorable man.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 14, 2013 2:07:58 PM UTC
And I knew when I opened it that there was not a shade of plagiarism. Why? His terminology was so, so different.
The paper is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2298292
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:51:45 AM UTC
Daniel Hogendoorn How about have you or your family ALSO study there?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 5:33:00 PM UTC
Many many good ideas/heuristics. Let us wait for more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 5:52:16 PM UTC
Daniel Hogendoorn the very idea for someone to "look for a job" assumes he is taking someone else's work. But the idea of starting a company you are giving someone else work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 7:23:46 PM UTC
Brian Maudling Danny K worries about the bad side of heuristics but he knows they are necessary. And there are good heuristics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 9:19:06 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn you are right, but better be modest for implementation. LAW > PRINCIPLE >RULE>HEURISTIC
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:41:19 PM UTC
I remember so many incidents of soccer players murdered for not living up to expectations... If you want to be in the limelight, it needs to be 2 way!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 10, 2013 11:28:48 PM UTC
I gave a blurb to him, never the book, for the German edition. I didn't read German.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 10, 2013 11:33:56 PM UTC
Gunter Busch the ethical comes before the legal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 10, 2013 11:40:53 PM UTC
Daniel Miles someone else is posting a similar story
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 10, 2013 11:55:19 PM UTC
Jeffrey Olson of course, direct from MS of Antifragile, and the other books.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:08:47 AM UTC
As you can guess there was complex referencing, hanging quotations, corners cut. The real problem is not in this document; it is the paraphrasing. If the author doesn't add his own commentary, it is plagiarism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:11:33 AM UTC
I feel that these things need to be exposed. Let society deal with it. I sat on this for months. I now feel relief.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:12:47 AM UTC
James Marsh I am not accusing him of plagiarism. I am giving you the facts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:13:08 AM UTC
Krisztián Kovács you read German. REad the first link.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:23:42 AM UTC
The ethical rule is: you can write whatever you want so long as the reader knows at any point in time what is yours and what is someone else's. At every point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:49:50 AM UTC
Kelli Williams libertarians map to the same ethical definition of plagiarims that I subscribe to. The same for science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:54:45 AM UTC
Chris Kieber I was wondering if it were ethical to NOT expose plagiarism. It is a duty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:24:46 AM UTC
What would Fat Tony do? "Protect me from my friends, I take care of my enemies". They were ruthless with friends who betrayed them. Absolutely ruthless, worse than any enemy. Remember in the movies they kissed the friend, then... And they attended the funeral.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:44:51 AM UTC
Gunter Busch what is it that you are not getting? It is not my interest, by my DUTY, that is involved.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 9:22:54 AM UTC
Note so far I am not the one shouting plagiarism; you are the ones. However note that plagiarism is vastly aggravated by a pattern of hanging quotations/"complex plagiarism" as it shows intent to downplay the contributor's ideas and desire to aggrandize the plagiarist's role. Active hiding of plagiarism is worse than nothing, as the latter can be a mistake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 9:51:51 AM UTC
Henriette Coetzer if that is the case he should ask authors if that's what they want, and that they agree he is "acting in their best interest".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 10:04:27 AM UTC
Henriette Coetzer you don't understand the notion of friendship? Theft from a friend has two crimes, 1) theft, and 2) "abus d'amitié". Friendship is aggravating not mitigating.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 10:05:33 AM UTC
Michal Kolano I can't comment on what he response was when confronted, except to say, aggravating, followed by repetition of offense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 10:14:01 AM UTC
Peter Tegelaar name dropping?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 10:15:45 AM UTC
Henriette Coetzer exactly my point/ethical stance. What is not used *to build on*, but mere self-serving tool is unacceptable morally, particularly under manipulation to downplay the source. You either "report" on other people's ideas, or use them. Notice in the US how science writers always let you know what belongs to others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 10:46:49 AM UTC
Sorin Revencu It is not the impact ON ME. It is on the needed trust in the system of free exchange. Cyberethics are necessary so people like me keep putting their stuff out in the knowledge that those who crib their work will be ostracized.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 10:56:37 AM UTC
Vince Pomal you don't cure an ethical problem with another ethical problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 11:57:34 AM UTC
Sebastian Perez Saaibi what do you mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:16:30 PM UTC
The worst form is "hanging quotation", when you mention an author IN ORDER to show that what follows (and is not quoted) is not his. The trick does not work in the US.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:47:59 PM UTC
Joachim Marnitz by pulling the article they admitted plagiarism, which, in German courts, under an archaic system, requires "verbatim" which is hard when the text is translated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:50:08 PM UTC
Diego Andrés Ardila life and death are discussed in the Iliad. But a specific application of life and death with specific example and repetition of same citation becomes cribbing. Likewise via negativa is discussed in Pseudo Dionysus the Aeropagite. But the specific application to decision making is what to focus on.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:17:03 PM UTC
Cyrus II ambiguous cases are very very rare. The interesting thing about plagiarism is in what someone is trying to hide.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:27:00 PM UTC
Diego Andrés Ardila exactly! If I cite Shakespeare "The Lady complains too much" cannot be called plagiarism because people *know* it is not mine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:28:53 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic what is nauseating is that he didn't come clean!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:30:09 PM UTC
This is how things work in America: for much, much less than this; a very low tolerance http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/10/fareed-zakaria-plagiarism-new-yorker-time_n_1764954.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 2:30:35 PM UTC
My letter to Dobelli AUGUST 10: [attaching the ZEIT ARticle on VIA NEGATIVA] So you were reading the MS of my book (I was trusting you with the
drafts) and quietly [CENSORED] passages ("GetAbstract" style) for
german audiences... without attribution. Then putting them in a book.
Then hiding sources by citing for the US edition some nonrelevant source.
Pattern of examples lifted from my presentations and papers, concealed by
claiming "friendship" with author.
IN addition to a [CENSORED], a very disgusting man. (BY [CENSORED] are claims that I am not making public)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 2:44:29 PM UTC
Allen Kaplun I cited Buffet INLINE. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 2:51:09 PM UTC
The public aspect of this is not against Dobelli, but against the idea of appropriating other people's work in a sneaky and disguized form, in order for the trust in the system to function better, for people to put forth ideas without having to look behind their back. Sadly, the private aspect is another matter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 3:26:46 PM UTC
Clinton Freeman Dobelli is making things worse by saying "not yours". Plagiarism is about context. If someone takes your ideas and your citations, the citations are part of the scam.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 3:33:45 PM UTC
If I publish a book of "Citations on love", with author quotes on love. Dobelli could re-publish it in German calling it his and saying "the citations are not yours". That's what the fucking hack is saying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 4:19:18 PM UTC
Davor i am never angry when pirated. I am angry when robbed. Dont confuse issues.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 4:20:44 PM UTC
Friends, can someone take a pdf of douchebag Dobelli's reply? I am in a restaurant and he may delete them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 5:13:36 PM UTC
Thanks Vince, Chris and David. I hadn't read it except diagonally. Does anyone here notice something extremely odd about the letter?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 5:53:32 PM UTC
ANSWER: He doesn't feel an inch of shame. Nothing inside. While facing a major offense: breach of trust and potentially worst level of plagiarism, he is nitpicking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 6:20:14 PM UTC
Momo Halm you cannot troll this page like a lunatic. Post a comment not series of insults.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 6:23:21 PM UTC
Peter Tegelaar thanks! But doesn't change much.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 7:47:00 PM UTC
No had no idea it was in german
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 9:04:31 PM UTC
Stanislav Yurin Gladwell never never never paraphrases passages from anyone. And he is full full full of inline citations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 9:07:17 PM UTC
Finally, friends (before I go teach a class), please make a distinction between copyright violation (of which I don't give a fuck) and plagiarism. The former is legal, the latter moral. Copyright violations might not apply to all claims covered by plagiarism. But there are cases of plagiarism without copyright violations, like putting Rolf Dobelli on a book written by Jules Vernes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:26:13 AM UTC
Adriano Aguzzi but the quotes are part of the same context . On its own OK, but he rewrote the intro of Book 6. I updated for context.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:44:15 AM UTC
I waited 4 months in front of the idea of whether it would be IMMORAL for me to let it go on grounds that Dobelli is a friend (assuming it is true, not name dropping). Kapish.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 11:04:28 AM UTC
Onilorak Schnurzegal if that's your idea, you act ethically on using Popper for an argument. But rephrasing Popper saying it is you is morally wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 11:12:38 AM UTC
Onilorak Schnurzegal this is not a serious debate here. It is so clearcut... So it is not a problem of who's idea it is but the ethics of cribbing friends, period. Once you get it, you will see what infuriates me; the reaction "but I am a fervent supporter..." As if someone was caught taking from your coffers and invoked friendship as a mitigator: it is an aggravator. Let's stop this here as it has been discussed before.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 11:48:42 AM UTC
Paul only the swiss friends of dobelli are saying this is over reaction. Everyone i know says i shd be harsh and move to the courts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 12:27:25 PM UTC
Don t delete these cases are well known and rhe profs...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 5:01:44 PM UTC
No trolls from Zurich anymore. Comments closed
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 8:47:48 PM UTC
Guido Gothenburg affair closed. There are 2 other authors now in play. Recheck my page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 8:50:34 PM UTC
COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED, TWO OTHER AUTHORS CAME OUT, THE DOBELLI AFFAIR IS CLOSED HERE. NOW TO OTHER THINGS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:07:39 PM UTC
COMMENTS, I SAID ARE CLOSED. I DONNO HOW TO WRITE IT IN SWISS GERMAN.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:59:01 AM UTC
yes but across species not necessarily within species
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 10, 2013 6:00:22 PM UTC
This is a J-L style sentence
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 10, 2013 9:28:04 PM UTC
George Cloughley "liberal" for Aron means something different, favorable to laissez-faire. Actually when I was a child I saw him make the mistake on US TV confusing the hell out of the other person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 9, 2013 10:28:38 PM UTC
Some idiot is cherry picking my comment in Moscow abt "Short treasuries", not the other market comments, and the fact that I WAS among other things short treasuries and as a trader I made 600,000 such "mistakes". Kapish?
(Newcomers, please keep comments rigorous and make sure you understand the point before posting. And stick to the logic of the argument. And unless you are familiar with the concavity argument, please don't post.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 9, 2013 2:13:35 AM UTC
Jon Swinghammer please don't get the thread on a tangent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 9, 2013 2:14:43 AM UTC
PLease no peak oil debates, not the discussion. The discussion is about WHEN TO TRUST AND WHEN TO DISTRUST AN EXPERT. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 9, 2013 2:23:55 AM UTC
Comes back to the central idea that payoff-if-wrong is the driver of skepticism, little else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 9, 2013 12:09:25 PM UTC
Many commentators here did not get the concavity/convexity issue and the fact that mother nature is concave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 9, 2013 1:17:20 PM UTC
Michal Kolano A long, long document coming. With math, etc.
i’m reading Antifragile, maybe (I underline maybe) you could be interested in this paper about redundancy. Management don’t understand the importance of redundandy (strategic, organizational and cognitive redundancy) e tends to mistake the “value creation” for the “value extraction”… and companies die for it…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:56:54 PM UTC
Thanks is there a copy on the web outside scribd?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8C6oN81d0&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:36:54 PM UTC
Youtube is fixing it... But the Mathematica problem is that I am using a retina display not compatible with Mathematica
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:55:55 PM UTC
George Varughese BINGO! we can't make causal inferences from tails. Simply a small change in a variable explodes there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 2:16:59 PM UTC
YouTube fixed the video!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 2:45:25 PM UTC
The most stupid of that crowd is Sam Harris.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 3:19:48 PM UTC
Dawkins has courage but no science
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 3:51:47 PM UTC
Matthew, no. You cant separate frm anecdotal
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 4:35:29 PM UTC
Cristian Georgescu you are making the same error. Anecdotalism and sensationalism are fine for BS operators, not for someone who attacks others for not being "scientific". Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 4:54:14 PM UTC
It is not. try again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 5:29:51 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer Youtube redid the video... great job.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 5:30:39 PM UTC
Cristian Georgescu it was the exact opposite situation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 6:52:20 PM UTC
Brian Maudling yes but you can't compare 2 var from 2 different distributions easily.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 8:03:34 PM UTC
Brian Maudling depends on the statement. sometimes n=1 is sufficient (My Chapter 3 of tech book)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 9, 2013 12:10:55 PM UTC
Mkm Abdul it makes my point even stronger!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:05:30 PM UTC
Done! I had to shave am doing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:11:31 PM UTC
Gidi Nave pls stop the BS here. Nobody is saying the statement is NO TRUE. We are saying sensationalism using probailities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:18:40 PM UTC
Mooc is uploading on Youtube
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 14, 2013 6:39:28 PM UTC
Nazarudin Jusoh saying 99% of children die in Africa is not the same tail statement. Try to think before posting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 3:08:23 AM UTC
Matthew Stern ignore the INtelligence part, for god's sake, it is about ANY metric. My point is that tails mean statistically NOTHING about the mean unless some conditions are met. Kapish? No more bullshit here about whether IQ is fair, etc.
Mr Dawkins I can send you my book Fooled by Randomness that might help you try to think a bit harder about these problem. Also the error (misunderstanding convexity) is discussed 2x in Antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:36:16 AM UTC
Saeid Fard thanks, I tweeted it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:42:57 AM UTC
saeid fard can you correct the typo: problems not problem?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 1:50:05 AM UTC
Also Saeid Fard can I add a comment?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 2:46:31 AM UTC
Matthew G Soltis good one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 11:00:20 AM UTC
Read comments above. I am NOT discussing IQ but metrics.
It is an intellectual violation of the worst order. I wonder why the press never picked up on this. And why in the world does anyone call Richard Dawkins a scientist?
Please not that I am not a Moslem, but Greek Orthodox Levantine.
(I set aside the notion that had some Medieval moslem compared his population to that of Northern, the difference would have much, much more striking, and to say the least *not predictive*. Also ignore his use of a Western metric on a non Western population).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 12:31:35 AM UTC
Justin Bronder What you are writing is not rigorous. The Nobel is a tail output. It is magnified 100x by factors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 12:32:25 AM UTC
Neil Niekerk what do you mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 12:44:09 AM UTC
Kelli Williams Excellent. If someone compared Ashkenazis Jews, representing 5 million, with 50% of Nobel Prizes, out of a population of 7 billion, one naive person would assume that each one has an IQ of 7000 times the average!
One column sample
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/onecolumn.pdf
And the two-column
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/chapters1-3-probability.pdf
Thanks in advance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 8, 2013 2:40:40 AM UTC
Ban Kanj this book is available for free to all... No publisher...
More evidence that you are alive if & only if you like volatility. More evidence of Jensen's inequality (convex response). This article passed my filter, my bi-monthly linking allowance. (via Steven Stogatz)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 7, 2013 3:31:39 PM UTC
Stanislav Yurin convexity is necessary in the presence of philo-stochasticity. And <=>
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 7, 2013 11:23:16 PM UTC
Jeffrey Hunter Great analogy: showing the engine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 6, 2013 12:33:28 AM UTC
Carl Fakhry Kimos also need to add notes to the effect that you corrected many mistakes! How does the layout look?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 6, 2013 1:14:46 AM UTC
Carl Fakhry Kimos I am waiting till you get to the end of the section before making a big thank you note...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 6, 2013 1:20:20 PM UTC
First 3 chapters + Cover https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/chapters1-3-probability.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 3:34:22 PM UTC
Faysal Badran he made a lot of money
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 3:36:08 PM UTC
Complication: fellow was former "friend" so might be aggravating or attenuating.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 3:42:56 PM UTC
Edi Piqoni don't fuck with me. I gave Mandelbrot my drafts for him to add HIS references, which he did, even when the work preceded him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 4:40:52 PM UTC
There are obligations... If someone robs me he can rob others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 4:43:18 PM UTC
Dru Stevenson and others, let us say to simplify in this case that it was an OBVIOUS easy case of plagiarism for courts. But forgetaboutcours. In academia retractions occur from a much much smaller benchmark.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 4:49:55 PM UTC
I informed the person. His alibi was that the editors were worried about "Taleb fatigue" and he removed sources but... kept the material. Makes it 2x more incriminating.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 4:57:31 PM UTC
Robert J Frey all aware about scientific research as a collective, hence having inspirations is not plagiarism. Here the case is someone taking my chapters and summarizing them by cut/paste sentences, ideas, metaphors... without letting (WHAT IS KEY) the reader know. Then making it look like the ideas came from hundreds of sources, not ONE. there is a category difference...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 2:08:09 AM UTC
Andreas Hantzopoulos what do you mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 2:30:26 AM UTC
Andreas Hantzopoulos Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 10:54:27 AM UTC
The point is that I contacted the author to give him the chance to retract... and he redid it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 4:38:38 PM UTC
James roman, not that guy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 7:05:12 PM UTC
What if I told you that the fellow published a part of the MS of AF (before publ) in a magazine that subsequently trashed AF?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 3, 2013 7:05:53 PM UTC
(actually, a daily newspaper... but not English lang)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 5, 2013 3:58:51 PM UTC
Ok, Done. The files will be disclosed Sunday or Monday.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 5, 2013 4:00:16 PM UTC
The point is not to have legal recourse (unless the person overracts), but protect the system from abusers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 5, 2013 9:26:42 PM UTC
I think that plagiarism disrupts the functioning of the sytem, which is why we in the ideas business feel disgust at the perpetrators.
A series of finite bets, a la binary are immune to ruin if they are done right.
Let us reformat the idea of the PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE (PP) within gambler's ruin theory. The wiki page is not good, by the way as there are plenty of interpretations. The definition we can use is as follows: there is a class of dynamic strategies that never blow up, with probability 1, but they need to consist in finite bets (like binaries). And, the bad news, is that there is that will eventually lead to ruin, here ecocide and destruction, with probability 1.
We should code ruin aversion in the constitutions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 1, 2013 8:55:21 PM UTC
a great book http://www.amazon.com/Inequalities-Stochastic-Processes-Gamble-Must/dp/0486632830
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 1, 2013 10:06:43 PM UTC
Forget the winning part in gambling. Gil Friend I am incorporating a no-ruin part of PP. Risk is good, ruin is bad, and nature has a zero-ruin policy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 2:27:29 AM UTC
Gil Friend what the fuck do you mean by that?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 2:28:25 AM UTC
Michal Kolano I already wrote abt it in AF: convexity to size, distributed risks, no concentration...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 2:51:33 AM UTC
Ban Kanj محدود او محصور
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 3:54:58 AM UTC
BTW Savage's son used to contribute here... I wonder where he went.
Recall the principle, by Kolmogorov's zero-one law, that eventually if you have a small chance of blowing up you end up blowing up with CERTAINTY; the planet has never blown up (in trillions of trillions of bounded variations over billions of years) precisely because it took close to ZERO risks of blowing up. Nothing beyond local variations.
This seriality is something to add to the precautionary principle. Some risks we should NEVER take.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 7:52:52 PM UTC
We know by the convexity arguments that Natural Risls are Bounded. That's the idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 7:53:53 PM UTC
Again, the binary argument http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4etY_XuQB9A
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 8:03:57 PM UTC
Noam Kinrot the death of an individual is not a fat tail. Death of multitude is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 8:12:12 PM UTC
Paul Boyne these are different class... and small without being additive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 8:14:18 PM UTC
Suraj Singh the probability of getting AT LEAST one event in a sequence (a_n) converges to 1 as n gets larger. But every event remains independent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 8:25:51 PM UTC
Suraj Singh I did this plot for you https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/suraj.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 9:15:51 PM UTC
So please no asteroids here
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 9:15:54 PM UTC
It is foolish to discuss asteroids when we are talking ab man made risks. And foolish to tAlk unknown when we have a demarcation: fat tails
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 11:18:31 PM UTC
Paulo Fer same look up zero-one Kolmogorov
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 1, 2013 2:51:17 AM UTC
Hans Kuiper please stop the bullshit here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 1, 2013 4:51:25 PM UTC
People in biology seem to be clueless about probability
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 2, 2013 2:46:49 AM UTC
Paulo Fer Borel ironically used it to mean it is impossible in practice. I did so too, but people misinterpret...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/fridayquiz.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 31, 2013 6:52:06 PM UTC
Adrián Begoña Moncó For power laws, subsamples resemble samples, so if we weresampling from the richest .01%, then the result would be the same, at some multiple. If we were to sample among the richest, and the total is 200Mill dollars the combination would be the richest and the poorest of the category, so perhaps 190/10 not 200/0, but the polarization would stay the same.
We are getting close to GMOs, but we need one more step.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.6695v2.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 4:54:15 PM UTC
Roberto De Pinho you didnt undrstnd what unconstrained wealth meant. Meant fat tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 5:04:44 PM UTC
Roberto De Pinho, no =30 not >=30
This one is easy, but I will explain how we will get to GMOs...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 4:35:25 PM UTC
Krishna Rathi, no, conditional on the total being 4.1 meters, the most likely combination is 2.05 and 2.05
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 6:28:40 PM UTC
Voila the solution https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/fridayquiz.pdf
This one is easy, but I will explain how we will get to GMOs...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 6:28:25 PM UTC
Here is the solution https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/fridayquiz.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 7:19:55 PM UTC
Daniel McLaury I know but I spent the summer doing measure theory so I have been qualifying. And I am not necessarily conditioning.
Next we will apply that to errors... and GMOs.
(Background: I just had a run-in on twitter with C Venter who was trying to invoke GMOs (Vitamin rice) as the *only* alternative to children's blindness (or *moral* grounds) when one can give these kids, carrots or pills, instead. But then Monsanto and other labs would never benefit from these standard solutions...)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:52:37 AM UTC
Mr Hough this is not about what *you* think is right or wrong but what you can prove within a certain rigorous framework.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:53:56 AM UTC
And please no Michael Shermer style BS that it is "Scientific".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:54:29 AM UTC
Or BS by biologists: microbiology is not except from the laws of probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:03:38 AM UTC
Adam Gurri cultural phenomena cannot destroy life on the planet. Please stop wasting time engaging Postrel and such people on a serious subject.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:09:11 AM UTC
Michal Kolano there is another element: why did Venter offer a more complicated and > risk solution to the problem? THink again, and you will understand...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:31:18 AM UTC
Nobody here is considering the effect on biodiversity by something visibly unnecessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:33:11 AM UTC
Michael Sierchio do you realize the absurdity of your argument? Pills are unhealthy because water is scarce? And because water can cause illness? THen the problem we should be focusing on is WATER, not some complicated gimmick... And are you a microbiologist or something like that?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:35:37 AM UTC
Don't play the straw man with mention of Monsanto. We said "and OTHER labs" benefit, or the business. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:37:18 AM UTC
Justin Palmer You are focusing on rice, not on OTHER plants harmed by this. If you or some other commentator is a microbiologist, please declare it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:42:16 AM UTC
Justin Palmer on this site we have more sophisticated approaches than naive invocation of ad hominem: vested interest is a crime as reverse skin in the game (Do not ask a barber if he needs a haircut). So me may ask you to leave because YOU BENEFIT from spread of crops and you opinion is tainted by personal gain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:47:51 AM UTC
We lost someone with inverseskininthegame. The point that mechanistic rehashing of wikipedia fallacies doesn't work in risk management: everything is superseded by skininthegame.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 1:49:05 AM UTC
Michal Kolano I would use anything if I had no choice but not in violation of potential ecocide (recall the zero-one law).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 2:03:46 AM UTC
Michael Sierchio Mr Sierchio, please stop adding arguments and answer the simple first option: if water is the problem, why not work on clean water? It is devious to look for complication when water is ALSO harming people. Now a question: do you have an inverseskininthegame in your argument?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 2:10:16 AM UTC
Michael Sierchio I just saw your remark: "you already share 40% of your DNA with kelp". You need to leave this site.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 2:21:35 AM UTC
Jeremy Kareken please do not invoke the naturalistic fallacy in this context.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 2:24:44 AM UTC
The naturalistic fallacy applies to the moral domain, not to the risk domain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 2:32:21 AM UTC
Jeremy Kareken please post less frequent but deeper posts, out of respect for others. This is a conversation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 10:13:24 AM UTC
Várkonyi Gábor the example of testosterone is apt. Injecting yourself is harmful; letting yourself grow it organically reaches the sweet spot.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 10:16:19 AM UTC
Knigel Holmes is a prime example of a "scientistic BS" of CHapters 2 pf Probability and Risk in the Real World, using mechanistic concepts like "evidence" etc., yet without a shade of understanding of the nature of "evidence". In fat tailed domains, EVIDENCE comes too late.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 10:18:01 AM UTC
The only way one can argue against the ban for GMOs is by proving that the general precautionary principle is wrong. Good luck.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 10:30:55 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn, the second point is wrong since fat tails => unpredictability and you are pushing the limits of the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 11:29:10 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn think about your statement again. You are not playing with the generator with insecticides, just the periphery. Harm is not coded.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 11:37:52 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn and reduce biodiversity from the inside not the periphery.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 11:59:11 AM UTC
Figured out the way to approach the asymmetry. An engineer would disregard "evidence" that the bridge did not collapse in his assessment of safety. Safety requires a larger hurdle. So "evidence" that a certain number of actions did not blow up the planet are rather lame from a risk standpoint. Evidence in favor is anecdotal, against is robust.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:00:00 PM UTC
Jörgen Modin this is excellent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:02:05 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn reread my chapter 2... here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/masquerade.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:13:34 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn your interpretation is incorrect. It assumes you span the entire space . Did you read the hierarchy?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:22:48 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn decision on GMOs and other precautionary principles are not about "right" or "wrong", but don't mess with things that can explode or we don't understand. The fact that "they may be OK" is IRRELEVANT. And consider deeply, deeply, that some things have a small probability of exploding. Period. I suggest you think in terms of hierarchies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:36:11 PM UTC
Mkm Abdul the problem with your metaphor of automatic weapons is that you should have said "at least automatic weapons", to show it is a lower bound of risk. Much stronger that way because hierarchies are about inequalities...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:49:42 PM UTC
David, GMOs are MORE MORE MORE dangerous (in the hierarchy) than nuclear weapons.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 12:57:31 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn in the end this discussion has been helpful as it shows the need to think in INEQUALITIES (A
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 2:36:46 PM UTC
Brian Marten an ornamental plant didn't get there by jump, but by tinkering...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 6:30:04 PM UTC
To conclude, we need the hierarchy for the following central point: ergodically, it is not whether something is risky or not according to standard definition, but whether it CAN blow up (by spreading/contagion). Kolmogorov's zero-one (or Borel Cantelli). If something CAN blow up the planet, in time, it eventually will. Something every successful person (from the Chairm of Goldman to great traders) knows.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 6:30:41 PM UTC
..and the hierarchy sets up a mathematical structure around the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 8:31:59 PM UTC
Linking GMOs to malnutrition: same sophistry as necessity of gambling to solve financial problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 8:42:16 PM UTC
Jeremy Kareken please leave this forum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 8:46:03 PM UTC
Jeremy Kareken we've spent a few years on this forum establishing domains of human error. We do not need to re-argue every time with every newcomer the same points... read the Brian Eno discussion or other posts on hierarchies. We can't discuss Risk Management 101 in 108 class.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 29, 2013 9:04:57 PM UTC
Jeremy Kareken it says to avoid posting before acquiring familiarity with the ideas. Do some homework as it sets things back here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 1:58:23 AM UTC
Davor Magdic we did not have the same capabilities. Now we do.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 30, 2013 12:14:17 PM UTC
OK, OK, writing a zero-one law based on the hierarchies to illustrate...
Posted by Pablo Emanuel, Anthony Bishop, and Subhabrata Pal (plus Jed Trott).
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=andomized-treatments-may-be-more-effective-at-stopping-disease&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 10:53:23 PM UTC
My explanation of the mechanism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 10:53:26 PM UTC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMS8ydyeb4E
Will convert the Chapter into a paper at some point, format in LaTex and put on ArXiv. But comments are welcome.
Thanks in advance
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/masquerade.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 1:25:14 PM UTC
The core idea of VIA NEGATIVA
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 1:37:21 PM UTC
Adam Gurri Since all is explained in words in the INCERTO, don't read the technical; I did it for you. This is for statisticians who make mistakes regular humans don't make.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 2:06:59 PM UTC
Adam Gurri I answered you. If a PhD in econometrics doesn't get the point, sudying stats will send you routes that will confuse you and make you lose things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 26, 2013 2:42:03 AM UTC
Pascal Wallisch Heuristics but I need to go to bed... I was told to put the paper in the public domain lest a certain person plagiarizes it as has been happening.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 2:13:42 PM UTC
Roger Panetta has a good solution. Just take cabs. Great filter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 25, 2013 12:07:55 PM UTC
The article is bullshit science-writing and ignorant of the history of proba. But this contribution by Kolmogorov is great.
In the eyes of the nonspecialist, the marketer good at BS could more easily pass for a specialist than the real specialist (Plato). This extends beyond the confidence game: In a highly random environment, the link cause-effect is blurred and in large corporations the fake who knows how to claim credit for successes tends to become the chairperson.
So what is the heuristic in a situation facing such a choice? Assuming you are facing two persons and need to make a decision on whose services to use, what is your (convex) heuristic?
"Never hire a well-dressed option trader" was a heuristic I suggested in Dynamic Hedging (1996). Avoid the economist at all costs is a potent heuristic. Another: "If someone can explain very clearly a procedure, with a credible intellectual discourse, he is not likely to be a true expert". Or: "verify if he eats his own dog food (skin-in-the-game).
Eager to hear suggestions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 24, 2013 9:09:19 PM UTC
Alex Calfee you mean the fake never says "not sure"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 24, 2013 10:03:09 PM UTC
Svetlina Dragova we are trying to do the opposite: avoid selecting those who look the part.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 24, 2013 10:06:10 PM UTC
How about overhedging? A good engineer makes claim below his own competence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 24, 2013 10:07:17 PM UTC
Frank Nova you are right. I've often heard CEOs diss technicians saying "they don't see the big picture" to give themselves the edge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 24, 2013 10:10:13 PM UTC
I have a few disagreements. Technicians often use jargon, often have categoricals, often have blunt statements...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 25, 2013 2:07:04 AM UTC
Matthew DiPaola excellent. Decisions in life are about inequalities, >= rather than =.
Also preparing a micro-mooc on nature and why it has some specific probabistic properties and why we should mess with small things never fuck with large things we don't understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 24, 2013 2:00:20 PM UTC
Franco Franco you are right, modifying the file. I changed notations in the middle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 24, 2013 4:11:49 PM UTC
Lower the sigma you get mass in the middle
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 25, 2013 2:31:42 PM UTC
Franco Franco you are using a Pareto. YOu need a double Pareto or a Student.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 2:47:59 AM UTC
No, Pascal Wallisch, someone closer to you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 2:52:13 AM UTC
Pascal Wallisch this is rare, very rare in academia. People make mistakes and wimps dump on them when they are down.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 2:55:02 AM UTC
Douglas Temple leave Pascal Wallisch alone here go fight on another page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 2:58:05 AM UTC
Douglas Temple last warning about fighting Pascal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 2:58:40 AM UTC
I have nothing against people fighting on the web, just don't divert the subject. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 3:04:07 AM UTC
Even more honorable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 3:06:42 AM UTC
who is Douglas Temple?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 22, 2013 7:42:47 PM UTC
Lishma means literally "for its name"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 23, 2013 3:04:50 AM UTC
Arété is a state of being.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 20, 2013 11:51:19 AM UTC
Short posts please, have some respect for others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 20, 2013 1:16:51 PM UTC
Alexander Boland show us deleted post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 20, 2013 2:34:25 PM UTC
Le contrat!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 20, 2013 11:13:52 PM UTC
It seems to me that anyone who thinks that you can cure frauds by being nice to them is a total turkey, almost as dangerous as the frauds themselves.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 21, 2013 7:37:59 PM UTC
Interestingly, gossip may be low in noise.
A general convex (Antifragile) heuristic: In your hobbies, be underqualified; when it comes to work with others, and delivering services to them be overqualified.
Written that way, it looks trite but it looks like the modern environment drives people to the exact opposite. We are aware of the need for margins of safety in engineering (robust redundancies) but not in professional careers (outside of engineering and intelligent professions).
There is nothing more stressful (and fragile) than operating professionally at one's qualifications level, rather than below, prone to terminal and humiliating mistakes: like, say, a professor teaching an advanced subject rather than one for which he is sufficiently overqualified, or writing to the general public about a subject one does not master fully (and being vulnerable like Pinker to the point of having to defend oneself from people like me, or Robert Merton in spite of his "Nobel" having to lobby to defend his reputation against Derman, Haug, and I). Or, worse, writing a book review (say Michiko Kakutani or Julian Baggini) on a topic over one's head, hence making mistakes that stay forever on one's record. Now, competitive sports, journalism, and competitive academia are just that: persons and groups both vulnerable to reputational changes and pushed to the limit of their competence, sitting in a state of insecurity as one single error can wreck their careers, yet needing to operate at that margin because of the competitive framework.
A professional convex heuristic is to 1) never write or teach about anything one has to look-up in a library or a book, 2) under-argue (prove in words things that has been derived more rigorously in math outside the books) and 3) to open oneself to nitpickers in a way to learn to make errors of small consequence. My personal rule is to publish no confirmatory "empirical" work: all arguments should be grounded in logic, mathematical inequalities, and disconfirmatory empiricism. After 1700 pages of the INCERTO and 1145 of technical work, and many, many powerful (and/or tenacious) enemies, I haven't encountered yet a mistake that cannot be reversed from within the sentence. (The Black Swan was written below the needed level, in words not math & there was the buffer of all these mathematical arguments to support the claims, so those who tried to fuck with it have been humiliated.)
Barbell: Be aggressive in private, be robust in your public work. You will sleep well at night.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 18, 2013 2:46:10 PM UTC
I mean ABOVE. Thanks Jason Zen
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 18, 2013 3:02:52 PM UTC
Paychologists live in a state of terror worrying about the next paper contesting their "experiment"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 18, 2013 3:08:41 PM UTC
In Brooklyn they say take a gun to a knife fight
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 19, 2013 6:45:38 PM UTC
Gregg Barrett Sports are not life. Nor are they examples for a good life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 15, 2013 12:29:41 AM UTC
Donno... should be christmas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 15, 2013 1:02:36 AM UTC
Thanks everyone...
We can't call someone a charlatan for "being wrong", as error is part of the scientific enterprise. The Popperian criterion (falsifiability), unfortunately, doesn't work in a complex system. But skin in the game works well as self-harm would eventually keep the falsity in check.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 6:47:33 PM UTC
Věra Martinová It matters because places where there is #skininthegame don't have charlatans... And doctors have some legal skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 6:52:14 PM UTC
skin in the game doesn't mean more upside than downside: means the presence of a harmful deterrent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 8:15:11 PM UTC
Behzad Mirbagheri there is more: snake oil salespeople, consultants, economists, etc. very harmful...
(Explains some of the bullshit in social science)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80ekenKK_jE
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 12:43:34 PM UTC
Fouad Khan feel free to ask someone to do it. I give authorization to duplicate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 12:54:52 PM UTC
Ranjit Bannerji Please feel free to open a thread on the other point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 2:37:41 PM UTC
Paulo Antônio Alves Krieser read the text for that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 2:38:54 PM UTC
Kenan Simpson yes Lindy is connected. In the long run the fragile goes away, etc. I am formalizing but have not grasped the exact mathematical formulation that unifies the two. Close.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 12:06:19 PM UTC
I know him well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 1:50:11 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic the bad news is that Sornette HAD A PROPER JOB. With a friend of mine. He just will not discuss what happened there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 1:50:55 PM UTC
Michal Kolano there is a side of the story hidden from you.
Now let's try a bullshit-detecting probabilistic reasoning.
A- Falls from ladder are thin-tailed, and the estimate based on past observations should hold for the next year with an astonishing accuracy. They are subjected to strong bounds, etc. It is "impossible" to have, say, >1% of a country's population dying from falls from ladders the same year. The chances are less than 1 in several trillion trillion trillion years. Hence a journalistic statement about risk converges to the scientific statement.
B- Terrorism is fat tailed. Your estimation from past data has monstrous errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One biological event can decimate the population.
May be "reasonable" to claim that terrorism is overhyped, that our liberty is more valuable, etc. I believe so. But the comparison here is a fallacy and sloppy thinking is dangerous. (Worse, Koppel compares terrorism today to terrorism 100 years ago when a terrorist could inflict very limited harm.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:06:53 PM UTC
Al Stem whose analysis?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:15:02 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer but this is beyond a disagreement: a simple violation of statistical principles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:28:13 PM UTC
More technically, falls from ladder are independent single binary variables, hence subjected to Chernoff bound, that is, exponential decay. Not terrorism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:30:45 PM UTC
Charles Lang I have a MOOC, friends, here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uY6yLP9BS4BUc9BSc0Jww?feature=watch
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:34:15 PM UTC
Jonathan Cano the only important things the central state can do is market failures (climate control) and peace... Which is why something like Europe works: pan state + municipal power. Take the state out of via positiva, only business is to remove harm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:35:32 PM UTC
Mark Lush Dan Gilbert has READ my work in galley form, and I have no further comment than that. Or let me say it: I called him an idiot. He did not like it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:36:19 PM UTC
Charles Lang I plan to post footnotes and tutorials.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:59:43 PM UTC
Ελένη Παναγιωταράκου yes I called Gilbert an idiot, even worse: I wrote "you are just a harmless idiot".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 1:11:02 AM UTC
Charles Lambdin take a look at this. Invalidates much of probability JDM research. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2284964
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 2:51:27 AM UTC
Steve Reilly Pinker agrees with fat tails but doesn't know what they mean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 1:30:22 PM UTC
Nobody seems curious as to why I called the psychologist Dan Gilbert an idiot to his face?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 12, 2013 6:31:38 PM UTC
John Humphrey people "nice" in print are assholes in person and vice versa.
Consider the statement: my flight is >= 4 hours. It would be impossible to make a mistake there, compared to someone saying <=6 hours. One side is immune to error, not the other since flight can be delayed by error, but not accelerated by more than a small margin.
We can use mathematics to produce inequalities that we can rely on in the real world.
Fragility and Antifragility being asymmetric exposure to randomness, an inequality comes out of the description: concave and convex outcomes can be expressed by inequalities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:52:31 PM UTC
Yadi Zhong, no, an inequality is not an interval.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 3:06:18 PM UTC
Yadi Zhong no, no, no. This means there is an error on one side not the other. THe exact opposite of what you are saying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 3:08:35 PM UTC
Edward Chen what you wrote is not correct. If you had an = you would not need in=
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 3:19:41 PM UTC
Edward Chen can you please stop posting (wrong) nitpicks? It confuses others. If there is an = it is not unique otherwise one would have used it not an inequality. Saying the year is "at least" 100 days doesn't have an equality. In math it is >=100 days.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 3:49:23 PM UTC
David they are both inequalities. My point is that one is robust. But your reasoning is sound.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 3:51:36 PM UTC
Heuristic: one side is good in an inequality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 4:18:54 PM UTC
Technically [6, \Infinity) can be called an interval, but the idea of confidence interval is opposite to what we are doing...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 5:49:37 PM UTC
Jon McLachlan This is great reasoning. This is why antifragility = convexity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 5:54:59 PM UTC
Remember: antifragile= more upside than downside from random events. Flight time has more upside (that is downside for us)...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 6:42:45 PM UTC
Sam itstarted with Markov the first bound
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:10:02 PM UTC
Matthew DiPaola excellent convex heuristic! bounded on the left!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:21:31 AM UTC
tamm is to complete in Arabic...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 10, 2013 10:15:03 PM UTC
Pls stop equAting religion with epistemic beliefs
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 10, 2013 11:06:20 PM UTC
Marian Hanganu BTW Dawkins is clueless about probability something he shares with Pinker.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 12:52:30 AM UTC
I am not talking about G**d, I am talking about religion. And about literal interpretations and beliefs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:23:08 AM UTC
Daria Malaguti read your statement and you will see you fell for a logical contradiction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:06:00 PM UTC
Rupert Van Der Merwe don't tell me it is Shermer's SKEPTIC? He is about as ignorant as it can get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:12:48 PM UTC
Eduard Schmidt This is the most illogical and unrealistic statement in favor of economics BS. We don't involve bishops in economic policy, we involve economists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:51:38 PM UTC
Eduard Schmidt your use of "rational" is not rigorous, hence your incoherent statements here. Do you mean decision making? Coherent belief system? Coherent translation. You need to describe it instead of throwing empty words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:56:53 PM UTC
For those of you who do not get it, check the post on convex heuristics https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151630163453375&set=a.10150109720973375.279515.13012333374&type=1
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 3:12:40 PM UTC
Atheists focus on religion taking as straw man the epistemic aspect and ingnoring the heuristics aspect. And the two are indissociable: you only exectute heuristics via "beliefs" (pisteis).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 6:44:10 PM UTC
Then Pierre you just found out you were not an atheist.
(corrected video version)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s45E8_jkyJc&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:34:42 AM UTC
Will Redo...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 8:43:19 AM UTC
Hi it is not a derivation of fat tails rather a way to produce the result.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:23:58 PM UTC
that's inherited fat tails.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgS2feyXmWw&feature=youtu.be
Thanks in advance, friends.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMS8ydyeb4E&feature=youtu.be
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 8, 2013 6:53:13 PM UTC
Mike Tolhurst you mean complementary. Yes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 5, 2013 6:58:49 PM UTC
What do you mean, Bill Flinn ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 5, 2013 9:28:11 PM UTC
Luke J. Terry any relation?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 6, 2013 1:12:46 PM UTC
We are not sayign ALL heuristics are good. Racism is expressed through bad heuristics. There are moral constrainsts through... moral heuristics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 6, 2013 1:26:14 PM UTC
Kantian Principle: when a lower heuristic (individual benefit) clashes with a higher one (societal), the higher one prevails.
F-1: BURDEN OF PROOF FALLACY: someone asks you "do you have evidence that [INSERT NEW PRODUCT such as GMO, cigarettes (in 1940), etc.] is harmful? The answer is that something without a track record, in risk space, needs to prove its hamlessness, not you its harmuflness.
F-2: This (more complicated) Fallacy:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/neuro.pdf
F-3: GREEN LUMBER FALLACY...
F-4: THE [let's find a name] FALLACY: (example Pinker's) mistaking fact checking for a statistical estimator and calling something "evidence"...
Perhaps we could wikify them? I may open a file and update.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 4, 2013 8:19:16 PM UTC
I moved previous post here please repost.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 4, 2013 8:27:19 PM UTC
I meant NEW fallacies
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 4, 2013 8:45:18 PM UTC
Jan Norotny we are still waiting for your comments on bullshit in econometrics. There is also the fallacy of hairdressers who give opinions on haircut...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 4, 2013 8:48:52 PM UTC
The binary-vanilla fallacy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 5, 2013 7:57:32 PM UTC
David Pelleg what' wrong with Monte Carlo methods?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 5, 2013 8:48:46 PM UTC
David I have the opposite intuition. Closed form means the model was fit. Monte Carlo is richer, more adapted to real world, especially under path dependence. But never do a MC when integration is possible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 5, 2013 10:30:46 PM UTC
Look at MCMC, other great uses. My latest paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6695 would have been IMPOSSIBLE without 10^6 simulations
This version is longer, more technical.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/skin.pdf
There is a very easy filter. What you search for is less likely to be noise. Further, word of mouth is more potent filtering than we think.
(Adding derivations, in technical docs, soon).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 2, 2013 4:11:01 PM UTC
This is a direct mathematical consequence of noise/signal and scaling
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 2, 2013 6:23:23 PM UTC
Petr one cannot marrow down a heuristic for every single case.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 2, 2013 6:58:42 PM UTC
Paintings are worse: fatter tails
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 2, 2013 7:26:31 PM UTC
And the numbers are a lower bound! It could be 1 in 500K chance of surviving. Probability theory is counterintuitive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 2, 2013 8:26:54 PM UTC
First boasting on this site in 2013 (I am human): The first installment of the INCERTO, FBR turns 13 years old this month.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 3, 2013 7:40:29 PM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev you need to discount confirmation bias but the effect is one order < spuriousness of big data.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 3, 2013 9:26:49 PM UTC
Frank Nova "all swans are white" is not a bad heusitic if you have no tail exposures. It works in Mediocristan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 2, 2013 9:36:03 PM UTC
Here it ishttps://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/skin.pdf
This said, Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism have retained quite a bit of pagan beliefs, though not the tolerance. Even monotheism was not that pure and only became so progressively: in the early centuries, before differenciation communities would use the same house as synagogue, church, and Baal-Jupiter-Other temple (evidence: Doura Europos). In Lebanon, people used to change religion to satisfy a vow.
(Thanks Vince Pomal for the idea about distributed deities)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 30, 2013 5:06:13 PM UTC
Marco Alves not at all: decentralizing the symbols and practices.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 30, 2013 5:27:11 PM UTC
Charles Lambdin theosis echoes the merger with nature, and the old stoic beliefs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 30, 2013 5:40:41 PM UTC
Let us set the facts. Pagans were vastly more tolerant than monotheists, and, I hate to say it, Christians vastly more tolerant than atheists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 31, 2013 11:06:05 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn you know that the one god was for a long time more than one... J, E, etc. Plus Elohim is a plural for El ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 29, 2013 7:34:38 PM UTC
Thanks Andrew. I can't watch. But I wonder if my memory corresponds to the facts.
(Note it is nonprofit (for me), I am doing it for the fun and to help Complex Systems.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 29, 2013 7:30:19 PM UTC
Mike this is not technical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 11:52:32 AM UTC
consequences not just probability...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 27, 2013 7:19:06 PM UTC
Public park, free...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 27, 2013 7:32:01 PM UTC
These places are easy to find but people don't like them because they are not assumed to be "fun" to walk on. Look around and you will find. I found tons and tons in Lebanon. This is 2 1/2 miles from my house so I walk to get there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 27, 2013 7:59:40 PM UTC
Jayansh Singh when you break an ankle (or a nose, as I did), it forces you to change routine, heal and read Dostoyevsky.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 27, 2013 10:04:20 PM UTC
By some coincidence as I was walking on my way there after posting saw a jogger ooking at me with some surprise. Was fragilista Tim Geithner.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 27, 2013 10:05:46 PM UTC
Vincent i broke my nose wearing shoes... Vibram 5 fingers are vastly better for stability and contact.. You grip the soil...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 27, 2013 10:08:25 PM UTC
Jeremy go slowly ... I am injured... No more than 5 lbs a month
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 2:46:44 AM UTC
Helmets are dangerous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 8:15:48 AM UTC
Jogging and swimming are above your effort level. Walking is below.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 1:03:23 PM UTC
doubt it works. soccer is not natural and you need to kick...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 1:56:04 PM UTC
Anybody uses TRX?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 4:51:57 PM UTC
I just got in the mail a new pair ... was a bit snug. Do they expand? Please help.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 7:34:51 PM UTC
TRX has a near perfectly complete range of movement...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 8:14:38 PM UTC
Ok, then the ancients had gymnastics..
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 8:56:22 PM UTC
Thanks Johan Smit I will then keep them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 28, 2013 11:15:29 PM UTC
Swimming for fun, splashing is ecological. Otherwise effortful. This is not a sport, but a state of mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 29, 2013 9:41:15 PM UTC
You use your entire body when climbing... same lifting rocks: form is for morons...
If the idea has merit, it could eventually circulate perhaps be even plagiarized, and this may even take years and years. If it lacks in rigor it will certainly die, as there is no formalism to hide the BS.
All in all the non-substancel part of the process turned out to be < 1 hour.
Now to other, possibly, deeper things.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6695
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 26, 2013 1:08:34 PM UTC
Subho Ray what the fuck are you trying to say ? That this summarizes the book? This point does not correspond to the book. Try something else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 26, 2013 1:32:22 PM UTC
Because of risk-aversion academics try to be perfect BEFORE posting. The idea is to let the world correct you on matters that are not substantial, where the error has small costs, particularly if you don't give a fuck about your reputation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 26, 2013 12:44:24 PM UTC
A Bullshit institution (Feynman)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 26, 2013 1:13:34 PM UTC
IN the video posted here Feynman explained that the members spend their time thinking who to add to their club.
Nothing new for the members here but we placed it withing the philosophical traditions, particularly in what relates to moral luck. And we added mathematics to balance philosophy, with 2 (small) mistakes that Carl Fakhry Kimos (or another member here) will find within 24 hours.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 25, 2013 7:07:13 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou We are keeping this one for an antifragile read.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 26, 2013 12:33:44 AM UTC
Carl, you find the 2 uncorrected tpos. P(.) should have 2 variables and tau is not mean, but the stopping time itself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 24, 2013 8:16:04 PM UTC
Jason Hinchliffe then you need to be let out of the cage... I keep walking until I stop pacing when I am on the phone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 24, 2013 8:31:24 PM UTC
"without to trying to do anything"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 25, 2013 3:17:10 PM UTC
I prefer 5 fingers and off road terrain
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 26, 2013 7:01:57 PM UTC
drew the world is then fractal
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 23, 2013 3:38:03 PM UTC
made a few corrections...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 23, 2013 7:16:21 PM UTC
Hi Carl Fakhry Kimos the typos have been fixed. N>1: I did by Monte Carlo because I cannot find a way to get the inverse of Sigmoid when N>1
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 23, 2013 7:20:00 PM UTC
Thanks Carl Fakhry Kimos . I wrote the draft in 2 hours. Much more efficient to get stuff corrected by crowdsourcing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 23, 2013 7:45:09 PM UTC
Also, Carl see my chapter on nonlinear transformation of random variables for the derivations that I skipped.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 24, 2013 10:47:23 AM UTC
Carl Fakhry Kimos can I discuss with you a part-time position as a math "checker"? I am serious...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 24, 2013 5:10:21 PM UTC
Carl Fakhry Kimos Are you from Becharre?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 24, 2013 5:10:46 PM UTC
I just added a section showing how to exactly recover the Gaussian.
The condition "I buy from you if you taste it" can be a natural part of the contract.
Beyond that, it can be a moral heuristic: I only talk about things I do, and for which I will pay a price if I am wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 1:49:38 PM UTC
Stephan Baxter what's so fucking utopian about enforcing a simple, applicable heuristic in the risk and moral domains when utopian rationalistic thinking has led to mass-scale blowups?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 1:51:28 PM UTC
The point of risk sharing is that those who are not rational exit the gene pool, instead of transferring the risks to society. Cooks who use arsenic end up in the local cemetery.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 1:55:52 PM UTC
Andrew Wiley YOU will enforce the heuristic in your own choices in daily life. If people are turkeys, no government can save them. The exception is in areas corrupted by crony capitalism, s.a. banking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 1:57:05 PM UTC
Skin in the game is largely a bottom up decision by consumers and economic agents.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 2:55:39 PM UTC
Please do not complicate the discussion beyond what is necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 3:11:39 PM UTC
Andrew Wiley not necessarily libertarian, even pro-state should adopt it as a moral heuristic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 23, 2013 9:15:40 PM UTC
Michael Walsh then I am sorry to say, as far as"sh**t..." you should do so yourself, do not apply to others, as you did not get the point of necessary does not mean sufficient and the moral dictum is in places that entail risk taking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 2:03:07 AM UTC
PLEASE stop the gratitude business and continue with ideas/arguments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 1:29:49 PM UTC
Charles Osei Agyeman tell me more. What was it that bothered them?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 22, 2013 4:21:10 PM UTC
Charles Osei Agyeman "nothing new" means he agrees.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 24, 2013 11:05:45 AM UTC
I am preparing a MOOC on my technical book http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
(Spotted by Rupert Read)
Also, friends, someone mentioned here that Brazilian helicopter pilots require maintenance workers to take random rides. Is there a reference somewhere? Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:29:51 PM UTC
Eric Paradis you should think before replying. It is certainly necessary but certainly not sufficient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:31:44 PM UTC
Nitpickers go nowhere and slow down development, etc. I lost patience with nitpickers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:33:07 PM UTC
It is as if there was a dangerous fire and someone came to slow you down with a counterexample about pouring water on structures...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:51:04 PM UTC
Eric Scoles this is really confusing skin in the game and incentive; also necessary and sufficient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:55:45 PM UTC
The Enron discussion is silly focus on insufficiency of rule when it is a mere heuristic. Please don't hijack the thread with bullshit. We need the rule to spread.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:56:52 PM UTC
The thing saves lives, so stop the nitpicking about Enron.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 2:10:38 PM UTC
"We are blind to simple measures" J-L Rheault
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 2:23:19 PM UTC
Reena cant you do both?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 5:19:30 PM UTC
#skininthegame unlike regulation doesn't require government intervention: it is 1) a contract between adults 2) ethical & decision heuristic
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 19, 2013 10:20:50 AM UTC
Gianluca Pollastri A logical fallacy is to state than an opinion has anopposite: it is true of ALL opinions. Here nobody is saying you don't have the right to do whatever you want. All I am saying is that you are therefore despicable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 19, 2013 10:32:02 AM UTC
Gianluca Pollastri you are showing another flaw in thinking. There is a difference between the legal and nomological (on one hand) and the ethical (on the other): ethical is a matter of pronouncement, not an empirical or mathematical derivation, verifiable in a laboratory, and there is no way around it in general. If I find you despicable (which I do), it is my opinion and that of the people who share my principles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 19, 2013 10:41:44 AM UTC
Alex Dumortier not at all. You give and you take.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 12:18:23 AM UTC
A few people here have a problem in logic: The post is not precluding elders from enjoying fine things; it is just saying it is not their raison d'etre. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:05:16 AM UTC
Lopaka Taylor don't play games. Did you read the final sentence?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 1:44:35 AM UTC
Estela Marita did I write that I was precluding old people from doing these things?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 20, 2013 12:00:03 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault is right: there is a tendency to believe that an aphoristic statement needs to be standalone even when the author has 2000 pages of background for it. But this is an argument by those who don't agree with it and with the general system of ethics I propose. If you don't agree with something, and are emotional about itm you will have a tendency to "require evidence", argue about "lack of clarity", and make nonsensical statements that make your argument even worse.
The problem is that because science is instutionalized, it is impossible for a mediocre student to do science (unless one has, like Charles Darwin, f**-you money). They don't accept C-minus students in Grad School, and in scientific PhDs they throw you out rather quickly if you are not good at exams. Very, very few managed to escape through the net: a brilliant case is here. This fellow Stephen Smale is a giant of modern mathematics.
(Looking at studies to extract the bias and test my hunch that scientific contribution peaks at C to B-minus record.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 15, 2013 10:44:39 PM UTC
Michael Walsh never said all MEDIOCRITY => SUCCESS. I said Mediocre school grades are not indicative of mediocrity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 9:19:26 AM UTC
Both Groethendieck and Ramanujan could not pass degrees...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 8:10:29 PM UTC
Consistent with the barbell, I never got a C.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 8:19:48 PM UTC
The ideal resume is a student who has occasional A+ (but very, very few) and a lot, a lot of Ds and Fs. The average is for morons.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 17, 2013 9:24:19 PM UTC
Many Fs in grammar, geography, history,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 15, 2013 3:24:05 PM UTC
We need "honours" so we don't hire them. A good marker.
100% of firemen
99.9% of skin-in-the-game risk-takers and businesspersons
85% of common readers (about > 3 million copies)
80% of hard scientists (except those doing econonophysics, s.a. Sornette, etc. and complexity artists)
65% of psychologists (except Harvard psychologists)
60% of traders
25% of U.K. journalists
12.1% of money managers who manage money of others
1.5% of "Risk professionals"
1% of U.S. journalists
and
0% of economists (or perhaps, to be fair, .0001%)
Which is why I had to write this. Vol 1 is near complete. 140 pages!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 14, 2013 11:18:56 AM UTC
Panos Papaeconomou the beauty of math is that people do not have to understand it to accept it. And mathematicians are honest people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 14, 2013 12:04:47 PM UTC
I have great respect for Sornette. But I don't believe that small probabilities are computable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 14, 2013 2:25:58 PM UTC
Riccardo Hertel if you notice I am removing (bad) mathematics with mathematics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 14, 2013 4:37:43 PM UTC
Teddy, there are >1 mil people who call themselves economists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 14, 2013 11:20:40 PM UTC
Vladimir Lj Novakovic I do my own programmed into Mathematica. I don't think there is a pattern: clock time as seed, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 15, 2013 3:15:42 PM UTC
Julian Mitkov anything with sigma and regression
The joys of post-exercise, breaking a fast, meeting a friend, helping someone in trouble, or humiliating an economist are examples of inverse hangovers. Antifragility = series of earned inverse hangovers. They don't come for free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 12, 2013 7:57:36 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita it is via negativa, like removing pollutants.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 12, 2013 8:34:22 PM UTC
Didn't say anything about drinking, but about hangovers! Please read before commenting... As to economists, the more offended, the better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 12, 2013 8:40:52 PM UTC
politicians are something dirty but naturalistic. Economists are pollutants.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 12, 2013 3:47:58 PM UTC
You don't realize... just came back from France where people's power is determined by their college degrees... even in the private sector. Cruel for the non-elite... Am adding a section to the French edition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 13, 2013 7:37:12 AM UTC
Nicholas Hatzopoulos Nick the Greek! Welcome here! Let's break bread (or paleo equivalent)!
With respect to architecture that is dead (or living), Christopher Alexander has had much to say. His book 'The Timeless Way of Building' details a bottom-up, incremental approach to architecture that has served humanity since antiquity.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Timeless-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028
All best,
Joe
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 12, 2013 8:36:13 AM UTC
ordered it! thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 8, 2013 9:40:19 PM UTC
My point is that violence is not where you think it is, not that the risks have dropped. And forget about Pinker's point; it is just journalistic bullshit narrated into science, with severe statistical mistakes.
1) Comment dit on "skin in the game" en français? "Risquer sa peau" me semble correct, mais sans le mêmes effet.
2) Comment dirait on "f** you money"? Je ne trouve rien.
Merci.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 6, 2013 9:22:12 AM UTC
F** you money means independence from the opinion of others
And unless we have ZERO tolerance for stuff such as GMOs we can't survive.
This is the reasoning behind it: kolmorogov's zero-one law, Borel-Cantelli lemma, etc.
(There is a weak survivorship bias, I agree, but it has to be very weak.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov's_zero–one_law
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 5, 2013 2:08:01 PM UTC
Roberto, Camillo, and Michal. 1) viruses are bottom up, not GMOs, 2) Humans are one species. Connected but largely to each other. GMOs affect agriculture, which is vastly, vastly more global and more interconnected.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 5, 2013 2:22:58 PM UTC
Michal Kolano I agree. I think with probability 1 the human race will yield to a virus unless we dis-connect. But it would take longer for the planet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 6, 2013 5:07:54 AM UTC
Cailan, forget the 100 coin tosses, as it is a construct here, and define a "tail event" as something rare. In the long run it has 0 or 1 probability, nothing in between, like a basin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 4, 2013 4:46:08 PM UTC
Brian Fearnot thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 5, 2013 9:45:29 AM UTC
Klaas Mensaert if you don't get it nobody can help you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 5, 2013 12:27:56 PM UTC
Nuclear... think that there is more radiation in Utah than Chernobyl... in small quantities we can handle it. It is perhaps not local, but more local than other threats...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/Precautionary.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 30, 2013 11:35:01 PM UTC
Yes a public version is to be released soon as soon as you friends help me clean this up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 1, 2013 12:02:30 AM UTC
Yes that's him
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 1, 2013 1:27:44 AM UTC
Friends, allow me to remove for 12 hours...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 1, 2013 1:32:12 AM UTC
Will put the new version back as soon as I send it to Stewart Brand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 1, 2013 12:52:42 PM UTC
I mentioned that I can't make it public before providing Stewart Brand with a copy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 3, 2013 9:13:35 AM UTC
Dawkins has NO IDEA what probability means outside of a student's textbook.
Please let me know if you find mistakes as I cut/pasted from *Fat Tails & Fragility*.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/Problems%20with%20Economics.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:03:09 PM UTC
The Anglo-American journal dependent university system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:04:11 PM UTC
The French wrote "treatises", like Maurice Allais who didn't care about counting journal publications.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:06:13 PM UTC
Any comments? Mistakes? Typos? I am unable to spot typos.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:14:21 PM UTC
Can we stop discussing what the French teach and either focus on their more liberal system (less publish and perish) and tolerance for deep treatises or on my paper?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:16:43 PM UTC
And I did not announce it yet but the French gave me a position at the Sorbonne (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne). Open-minded, for sure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:25:08 PM UTC
Yes, publish or perish but much much weaker.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:26:10 PM UTC
What I am doing is not criticize models from outside, but from WITHIN, going into the mathematics and destroy them using the very math they use.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 8:48:58 PM UTC
I owe you all big
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 9:32:33 PM UTC
Friends, is the doc clear?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 29, 2013 11:20:20 AM UTC
Gabriele Albarosa this is not a clash like that one. It is simply, I am showing, a discipline using FLAWED math.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 29, 2013 12:56:09 PM UTC
Gabriele Albarosa it is at a much more charlatanic level. It is beyond an intellectual mistake: it is fraud.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 1:10:46 PM UTC
Paul Boyne not at all. Some nonmathematicians are bullshit artists, some are not. It is easier now to spot the difference.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 1:21:19 PM UTC
I will let you know about Nietzsche.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 2:49:03 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic I am interested. How many cups of coffee before iatrogenics? 3 a day ? (one in the PM)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 5:23:05 PM UTC
All branches...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 5:30:03 PM UTC
Angeline Gallivan My bullshit detector: He should perhaps count how much a person talks about himself on FB compared to others in other pages before coming up with arbitrary categories.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 6:00:33 PM UTC
Angeline Gallivan that's not the point: look at the FB page of those making these remarks and see them announcing every greek island they visit...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 11:09:00 AM UTC
At the risk of upsetting many of you I couldn't see the difference between Picasso and an underpaid newspaper carricaturist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 1:00:59 PM UTC
The test here: presence of the auctioneer's hammer. We don't have the same aberrations with nonstatus art, such as music, literature, poetry, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 12:57:06 AM UTC
Indeed aaron the problem is scarier
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 9:13:29 PM UTC
students can switch to classics, philosophy, physics, and mathematics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 9:13:36 PM UTC
...and gardening.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 9:35:05 PM UTC
peter put them in political philosophy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 9:36:04 PM UTC
Eleni teaches political philosophy. Philo departments are the place: at least you know this is thinking, not aping physics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 9:44:53 PM UTC
Thi Duong Nguyen did not have anything against accounting. They are respectable (sort of).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 27, 2013 4:30:27 PM UTC
Salim Araji I have no problem with the existence of economics. It is the academic prostitution of the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 27, 2013 5:50:29 PM UTC
Fragilectomy!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 28, 2013 5:24:50 PM UTC
Dom Paulsen an accountant
FINALLY a journalist who gets it:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 25, 2013 7:40:09 PM UTC
Because intervening to give weapons to those who did Sept 11.... totally incoherent policy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 25, 2013 9:12:24 PM UTC
Correction: I don't stay in a Palazzo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 12:43:04 PM UTC
You mean by abducting Christian clerics in the name of the worst kind of fundamentalism? The grass is brown on both sides.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 7:42:56 PM UTC
Ilias Paparounis of course it is. Move away from the beaten path, originality, against established norms...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 11:14:58 PM UTC
Error shd be24.2
Here's at least one example of university research being put to good use (with the help of entrepreneurs.)! Recreating Sumerian beer! Still, I don't think this one example is enough to disprove your general 'teaching birds to fly' point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 21, 2013 11:46:46 PM UTC
They did not invent beer, they are recovering it. Beer was found by tinkering.
We fail to realize that technology is nonlinear to dosage, that in small doses the side effects are minimal (they are highly convex), but in larger doses they take over.
For instance, to avoid email correspondence from becoming metastatic, put a lower bound of 31 days before replying to any message of noncurrent nature (such as appointments, orders, etc.) I was thus able to lower the number of message from several hundred emails a day in 2005 to an average of < 20 in 2012. The advantage of such a method is that people who are insensitive about other people's time get offended and go away, while the thoughtful ones are pleased to see a reply several months after they sent the message, when they forgot about it.
So if you use this marker to select your activities, you should feel liberated, extremely liberated: don't write to be the best novelist in the world, don't do math to be the best symplectic geometry, don't earn to be the richest... ideally everything one does would escape this notion of rank, separated from sense of duty, of natural impulse.
And the bonus is that when you will listen to those who talk about others in terms of rank, hierarchy of achievement, performance, league tables ("he is in the top 11 in bariatric surgery"), or, worst, precedence of discovery ("he invented the lateral stroller equation"), etc., these people will sound like lower forms of life.
For both those who aim for rank and those who talk about it are lower form of life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 9:51:53 PM UTC
BY saying "lower" form of life is ironic, but it is a category, like "very ill", etc. Question: does it escape the barber's paradox? It does, pending on definition: "the form of life that is not human". Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 10:04:24 PM UTC
Shukran Alsherif Wahdan Ana aqra2 el 3arabi el Mashriqi wa'l Masri.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 29, 2013 12:46:57 PM UTC
Posted a new version, thanks friends!!!
This wonderful map Brad Efron/Susan Holmes shows the borders of Terra Incognita. Properly redrawn to scale: Terra Incognita should represent 99% of the surface of the map.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 12:27:30 PM UTC
Aleksandra Chabior because it was most probably drawn by a mathematician of Polish descent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 1:16:11 PM UTC
3araftu Sahy2an Wa ghabat 3anka 2ashya2u.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 1:21:21 PM UTC
Hopefully when Jean-Louis comes out of hibernation he wil lgive us insights.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 2:21:27 PM UTC
Using ancients = repository of heuristics that allowed people to survive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 3:05:52 PM UTC
Can we stop talking about Poland? Can we discuss the actual problem?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 16, 2013 11:05:24 AM UTC
Some are not getting it. Criticism by deeds can be by setting examples.
For instance we know that the law of large numbers requires MORE observations that what we find in textbooks, etc.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 1:30:09 PM UTC
Even worse, Boris. Even if you use fat tails you will not know the p value.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 2:09:34 PM UTC
Aaron, not crazy. There are lower bounds!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 2:13:52 PM UTC
We can position ourselves half way between total Humean skepticism and total Turkey.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 2:17:34 PM UTC
Vladimir Lj Novakovic You can't calibrate the fucking thing. But your reasoning only works for lower bounds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 2:26:15 PM UTC
No problem Vladimir Lj Novakovic you will agree with what you will read. Chapter 4 says exactly that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 2:26:51 PM UTC
And Chapter 7
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 5:36:07 PM UTC
Andrei, this is intentionally written for the pro.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 6:03:25 PM UTC
Aaron, take a look at the one-sidedness at the end of Chapter 1.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 13, 2013 3:52:34 PM UTC
Vladimir Lj Novakovic try on Wolfram: N[1/(1 - CDF[NormalDistribution[0, 1], 2]), 3]
---
People need to see action, not complaint. Instead you need to move, do something, establish competing circuits to harm their directly (MOOC, classes on nonacademic risk management, or call for some kind of punishment (preferably legal, like sue the Nobel), then people will join you after they start seeing blood.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 11, 2013 9:27:27 PM UTC
Scott Solomon why like Pascal?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 11, 2013 11:37:21 PM UTC
The way the Ostracon would have worked : someone starts it on her own. One person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 11, 2013 11:50:25 PM UTC
Never bullshit someone by starting a sentence: "although I do not usually agree with you, this is ..." Nothing is worst taste. You have something to say, say it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 1:27:50 PM UTC
I've used markets; I've used media. Markets work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 11:54:54 PM UTC
Pablo Chandler take your problems elsewhere.
In business, if you survived a mistake, it was not a mistake.
Which brings me to the fundamental concept of a heuristic: it is not judged by "right" or "wrong", but ONLY at the costs of being wrong.
We made huge gains in cancer research when 1) we had no understanding of the biological process, 2) research was undirected (nonteleological), as we were looking for cures for something other than cancer, or stumbled on results we weren't looking for. Chemo was born from mustard gas, etc.
Now since we've started targeting cancer in 1973, the results are ... Could be that we had gotten the low hanging fruits; could be that modern life is cancer-causing... an alternative explanation that is even more scary.
My point is that knowledge, direction, aiming, strategic planning reduce convex tinkering.
(Graph: source Kas Thomas)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 9, 2013 7:38:56 PM UTC
Parkinson and Alzheimer come partly (largely) from lack of random feeding/episodes of hunger (and their neuroprotective effects+ carbs. The brain is convex to variations in intake...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 9, 2013 7:40:44 PM UTC
Matan Shenhav it is hard to die from cancer and not know why. These are age-adjusted. But I agree we may be diagnozing more cancers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 9, 2013 8:20:06 PM UTC
Alex Vugman if I had to find someone on this planet as inverse to my ideas, it would be A. Lo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 9, 2013 8:34:00 PM UTC
Alex Vugman this is mega-teleological. I thought you would get it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 10, 2013 9:41:47 PM UTC
You forget these are age-adjusted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 11, 2013 10:08:57 AM UTC
Tomek Piorkowski when life expectancy rises, death rates drop across the board. If you make the age buckets constant, you eliminate the effect.
Another application of increase in variability (Jensen's inequality).
(Thanks Dean Dobbert)
http://cpt.sagepub.com/content/16/3-4/304.abstract
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d538a45a-4871-11e2-a1c0-00144feab49a.html#axzz2VZeMOULZ
(if you can't access try this link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/ft.pdf )
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 8, 2013 8:42:15 PM UTC
When I wrote "never compromise",it meant with matters of truth, ethics, shame and honor. I can't believe someone would look for general domain counterexamples.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 8, 2013 8:47:50 PM UTC
Nitpicking destroys arguments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 8, 2013 9:07:32 PM UTC
Drew Schibsted this is not about conflicts, but about ethics. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 8, 2013 7:10:47 PM UTC
I am NOT generalizing to EVERY person in these places being obnoxious to have-nots, but reporting episodes of contrasts of personalities between domains. Understood?
[REVISED. The point is not to be arrogant, except that the bias is to believe that arrogance towards those is power is arrogance, when in fact it can be a check against their power.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 8, 2013 8:30:10 PM UTC
Luca Orlassino who is the half man in the novel? Haven't read it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 6, 2013 9:43:14 PM UTC
Correction: even if they are not
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 6, 2013 9:47:35 PM UTC
Arrogant to the powerful brings balance and fairness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 7, 2013 10:30:35 AM UTC
I only consider academics (social science and economics) of lower rank than other humans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 6, 2013 12:21:38 PM UTC
Chris Schuck, please do not derail the conversation and confuse others. Thanks.
King Solomon was called to rule on a fight between two women of the same household who both claimed to be the mother of an infant. Solomon ordered a sword and said he would divide the baby and give half to each woman.The fake mother consented, and the true mother (who had skin in the game) begged him to keep the infant alive by giving it to the other woman. Solomon then granted the infant to the woman who agreed to give up on her rights in order to keep it alive.
Beyond the wisdom of the ruling (heavily discussed in history), there is the other side of the story: use of skin in the game as method for distinction between true and fake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 10:24:04 AM UTC
נָשִׁים זֹנוֹת (David they were hookers (Znot in Arabic Zaniat
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 10:26:32 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn also sword=7arb ( now "war" חָרֶב)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 10:35:03 AM UTC
Thanks David Boxenhorn you are an invaluable resource on things Semitic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 10:38:55 AM UTC
7RB means war in Arabic now, but 7RBE (feminine form) = spear, in Hebrew ML7M is war (from L7M, life, killings) in Arabic from Aramaic ML7M now refers to series of wars or epic (the Iliad = ML7Met Iliadha)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 10:48:05 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn why not House of Life? L7M relates to life. In Arabic L7M is meat not bread... it means "staple food to survive" which moved from meat -> bread. In an interesting parallel, in Egyptian Arabic bread =3aysh, meaning "life".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 11:10:47 AM UTC
David Boxenhornחָכְמַת אֱלֹהִים reads like "7KMT ELHIM" the wisdom of the GodS...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 11:11:36 AM UTC
Sounds polytheistic "ELOHIM" again other than Genesis...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 11:29:52 AM UTC
Hasnain Abbas do you have the reference? He is full of wisdom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 6, 2013 12:37:00 PM UTC
Shankar Bhatt it may be that 3ysh is of Persian not Semitic origin. HY or HYM is the Semitic root for life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 1:10:08 PM UTC
Turkey...very contagious
Yitang Zhang, more than the brilliant and profoundly no-bullshit mathematicial geniuses (such as Groethendieck or Pereleman), should be a role model for researchers (the exception to my via negativa that focuses solely on inverse role models). While other researchers worked on their "publications", salary increases, and "H-ratio", he quietly worked on his problem, getting deeper and deeper, barbelling it with lower employment (such as working for a sandwich store or as a math instructor). 22 years after his doctorate, he only had 19 academic citations. He wasn't a lone genius, rather he had the perfect profile of the academic loser.
He vindicates the argument in Antifragile that the success of the country rector in British Science during the 19th Century wasn't because academia wasn't as developed as it is today. It is simply because academia has never been the best place for scholarship.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/all/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 29, 2013 10:57:44 AM UTC
Andrew Yang but we have a large datasets of academic contributions and it doesnt look impressive compared to the resources put into the business. Zhang is more like the historical norm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 29, 2013 12:04:42 PM UTC
Pedro Zonari but Grothendieck was identified as a genius by every breathing person around him. An intolerant genius.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 29, 2013 2:29:24 PM UTC
I know from long long conversations with Mandelbrot that the "young man's game" it is not factual. Mandelbrot was in his fifties when he started fractals. He said that he witness the reverse empirical evidence. Those who boomed early faltered quickly. He often used the case of Whitehead who did his real work when he was in his 70s.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 29, 2013 3:48:19 PM UTC
Jean-Christophe Alario this is not true about Mandelbrot. He was incapable of doing anything except his own way, no derivations, just visualization. He wasted his time at ecole Polytechnique and suffered -he never fit there. His method was intuition and it took him a while to revert to his style of visual conjectures without proofs.
It just hit me that the most pleasant temperature could not be a constant; it has to fluctuate accordingly to some degree of volatility. Temperature should not be fixed as in air-conditioned environments. I am now sitting in a room with a gentle intermittent breeze and the wind-adjusted temperature is dancing around the perfect spot. It is ideal for sleeping... Our bodies like to be confronted to variations, as if they were teased by nature.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:19:26 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn I am about 100 miles away from you... but North.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:26:44 AM UTC
Arnie Schwarzvogel excellent idea. Except that the source is concentrated, while the wind is diffuse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:34:52 AM UTC
If you are going to have anything articical, get a ceiling fan. Better if large but rotating slowly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:42:58 AM UTC
Léonard Minh A. Langlois you need variations at all time scales.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:44:11 AM UTC
Lou Greenwood if Matthieu Ricard knew much about happiness he would not be talking about it. Their idea of happiness excludes antifragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 12:18:47 PM UTC
David 80/20 by recursing gives 50/01
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/regression.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 7:23:30 AM UTC
Sébastien Broos we KNOW that the data is fat tailed (see 1.7 in my textbook), infinite higher moments. This is a mere consequence. Infinite Kurtosis is sufficient. So either econometricians don't understand the consequences or they are frauds. And econometrics don't replicate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 7:24:37 AM UTC
The other problem is bullshitting people with "P-Values".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 7:27:07 AM UTC
Shen Ting Ang of course without outlier.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 7:35:46 AM UTC
I am adding an alpha=3. R^2 remains a random number no matter the size of the sample.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 8:30:11 AM UTC
Jan Novotny Not saying after removing tail from one simulation, meaning without outlier since most sample paths will deliver R^2 close to 1 when Cauchy at low s. Look at histogram. You have a very low probability to see R^2 close to 0.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 8:30:54 AM UTC
So, Jan Novotny econometrics has been largely about making claims about data that are pure bullshit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 12:22:45 PM UTC
Alexey Debelov You can read abou Kolmogorv-Smirnov here http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html . The others: the explanations are in the text (unwarranted inference). This is one section/application and I don't need to remake my point every chapter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 4:35:59 PM UTC
Paulo Fer My point is not this it is new but that econometrics is largely fake precisely because it creates fake assumptions... Hence the need to protect downside ->Antifragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 4:36:40 PM UTC
I did not assume errors were Cauchy I was using a thought experiment to show how one can be heavily fooled ... the masquerade problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 27, 2013 5:57:39 PM UTC
Paulo Fer indeed, in the L2 space, except that most methods that establish L2 (i.e. Poisson) in econ variables are false (Chapter 5).
It is only through people away from the place discovering it through Google News or something even more stupid, the NYT, that I got the information; these people seemed impelled to inquire about my safety.
What kills people in Lebanon: cigarettes, sugar, coca cola and other chemical monstrosities, iatrogenics, hypochondria, overtreament (Lipitor etc.), refined wheat pita bread, fast cars, lack of exercise, angry husbands (or wives), etc., things that are not interesting enough to make it to Google News.
A Roman citizen 2000 years ago was more calibrated in his risk assessment than an internet user today. Let's wait to see what Big Data does to the story.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 26, 2013 12:42:30 PM UTC
Brüna Kesserwani you are the victim of the news.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 26, 2013 12:50:01 PM UTC
Jeremy Collins it is only serious if it triggers anxiety in people and represents real dangers not sensionalism. It did not, visibly, as it appears to be isolated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 26, 2013 1:33:25 PM UTC
Suzanne Warner I agree, except that Lebanon is in the Near East, Eastern Mediterranean, not in the "Middle East".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/may/23/roll-over-einstein-meet-weinstein
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 24, 2013 11:51:44 AM UTC
Will let you know later who "some people" are.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 25, 2013 8:25:27 AM UTC
Jensen was amateur mathematician.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 24, 2013 9:46:03 AM UTC
Are these 2 academics plagiarists?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 23, 2013 9:49:30 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou Meteque =Metic (meta- oikos), the name for resident alien.
(Obviously the point doesn't affect matters that are meant to be theoretical like mathematics or physics.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 23, 2013 5:22:45 PM UTC
Andy Bartlett real humans take risks, see real things, don't harm others with their mistakes.
(Via Negativa)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 23, 2013 12:50:45 PM UTC
Sam Niemi you are exempt. Matters like accounting, math, etc. are except.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 23, 2013 1:05:28 PM UTC
in BSchool or in a field with practical applications, only take classes given by adjunct profs who work or have worked in industry not because they have experience, but because they have the mindset that led them to have experience.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 23, 2013 1:11:27 PM UTC
music is largely practice/apprenticeship
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 24, 2013 11:52:47 AM UTC
Jason Osborne in what field?
Think about it in terms of people you are likely to encounter, and compete with. The super-rich are far away, out of reach, in a class of their own, rarely visible outside the media; the middle class is there to taunt you, humiliate you, make you feel envy.
The middle class is cruel to the lumpen; it is only a great concept if you belong to it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 23, 2013 1:12:03 AM UTC
Excellent, Max Lawson. This is exactly what I am taling about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 23, 2013 10:29:12 AM UTC
So it looks like there is the lure of social mobility into the middle class, like a lotto ticket... against statistical odds.
Examples:
"I am not prejudiced, but"
"I will not honor you with a reply, but"
"I do not usually [...], but"
--
The most infuriating is a letter that starts with:
"I do not always agree with what you say, but"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 12:14:52 PM UTC
Vince: ok, publisher lets you up to a paragraph.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 19, 2013 12:28:08 PM UTC
Jensen's inequality (2nd order effect)
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/05/17/spotting-black-swans-with-data-science/
(reposted after editing my first reaction... more polite but not really)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 18, 2013 1:34:42 PM UTC
Thanks Eric Briys for the link.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 18, 2013 12:42:23 PM UTC
Heroic acts are not about recognition.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
(added derivations of skin-in-the-game, etc.)
How can one correct academic fraud? Not only have economics professors not addressed the substance of my points (accusing them of misusing statistical methods, remember these frauds are still using risk methods that got us here), but they are countering with a smear campaign (spreading all manner of erroneous personal & academic information) ... anonymously, or so they think. As I said there is a reason to be academic: lack of courage of voicing one's opinion, so one can bust them directly through subpoena or just pay $18K to have a list of their names. Nothing is anonymous on the web.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 18, 2013 11:57:45 AM UTC
I meant Fat tailed can masquerade...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 18, 2013 12:17:46 PM UTC
A probability measure Subscript[\[Mu], A] can be arbitraged if one can produce data from another probability measure and systematically fool the observer into thinking that it is another one Subscript[\[Mu], B] based on his metrics in assessing the validity of Subscript[\[Mu], A].
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 18, 2013 2:38:37 PM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev the market wins. We can get a list of EVERY one the commentators though through subpoena but it is not as much fun.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 18, 2013 2:58:17 PM UTC
The fun part is that it is legal to buy anonymous names and expose them. Journos do that all the time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 18, 2013 12:15:35 PM UTC
JFH, your remarks in Montreal are forcing me to do a BoP 2 for Christmas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 17, 2013 2:42:56 PM UTC
Slava Fazebook The richest French prose writer write in French slang. Frederic Dard.
It is the same problem of nonlinear harm in nature. Consuming just a little less of some items, and switching to other food groups, or constantly changing pollutants (just as changing routes thanks to Google maps) can bring back stability to the system.
NOTE 1: Optimally it would make people switch AWAY from cars.
NOTE 2: travel time is a negative; it is convex so we are concave to it => FRAGILITY.
NOTE 3: This is the same general idea of distribution of stressors/avoidance of concentration.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 1:57:19 PM UTC
I am not talking about Google Maps (with optimizers) but Google Traffic where you can visually see traffic yourself on a regular route and modify.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 2:03:59 PM UTC
Yes I use my iphone... rather accurate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 2:09:18 PM UTC
I don't use google maps because there is an Ito term: estimating at time t traffic when I get there at t+dt. In other words in 45 minutes traffic might be different on the optimal route.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 2:11:34 PM UTC
Graeme Blake sorry I did not recognize you (the response was long). Yes long term effect can be reoptimizing the system at more fragile level.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 2:19:21 PM UTC
Graeme Blake and Eleni Panagiotarakou ideally the system makes you switch away from cars: bicycling or trains.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 2:33:33 PM UTC
Graeme Blake I think I solved the problem: switch between functions f1(X), f2(X), ...fn(X), where X= {X1, X2, ...Xn}, rather than swith between elements of X. In other words switch between modes of transportations, or goals that may require more or less transportation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 2:47:17 PM UTC
Graeme Blake, yes, but also includes televideo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 3:25:15 PM UTC
Hicham Zmarrou We have established that traffic is an increasing function. I am adding convexity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 16, 2013 3:26:30 PM UTC
Graeme Blake yes functional redundancy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 17, 2013 9:03:28 AM UTC
Renée Kohanski I wrote a book about this.
...6) But to succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 2:43:06 PM UTC
Pierre Madani Overconfidence is required
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 7:23:18 PM UTC
Ruth Ashton Ruth Ashton:"What about succeeding in building a FB following?" By systematically removing thw .1% of people who spoil the atmosphere of the forum with sophistry. (VIA NEGATIVA)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 17, 2013 9:29:04 AM UTC
(Please stop commenting on aphorism with "it is hyperbolic, but", or "generalizes too much, but")
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 12:57:39 AM UTC
DISTILLED knowledge is the only knowledge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 1:52:44 AM UTC
Scott Prichard I will steal this from you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 1:54:01 AM UTC
It took me 23 years to write AF. First version was in Dynamic Hedging 1996.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 1:56:38 AM UTC
Meditating for 23 years on a single idea... SLowly brewing... Zero effort.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 10:10:56 PM UTC
Muhammad Sami usually what offends one offends the other.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 10:11:20 PM UTC
You cannot improve the world without anger.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 10:17:14 PM UTC
Muhammad Sami that's a small cost for the heuristic.
I will show in Volume 2 of FT & AF how Markowitz and Samuelson-Merton optimization blow you up. Refusing a model that blow you up is as orthodox economics as one can get.
I want to take the charlatanism out of economics and there is a way to do it: examine layers of stochasticity. Detect fragility, and remove offending model.
Nor do I like to be closely associated with behavioral economics. I go ballistic every time a fringe economics group invites me to give a lecture. Kapish?
.
And finally although I do not want to be an academic, EVERYTHING of substance in the text has been peer-reviewed (or is in the process of peer reviewed) in Quant/Math/Stat journals.
Thanks
See the test > pages 100 in https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 6:10:37 PM UTC
(I meant ALMOST all...)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 7:25:33 PM UTC
Cris see my chapter 6. A Layer can incorporate higher layers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 7:32:01 PM UTC
Ilias Paparounis my stress level goes *down* when I go after academics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 8:12:06 PM UTC
Lukas Papantonopoulos read my text; what I am saying is that under fat tails you *cannot* analyze data and accept conclusions because LLN operates very, very, very, very slowly. Kapish?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 8:12:21 PM UTC
(see Chapters 2 & 3)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 8:24:30 PM UTC
Lukas Papantonopoulos No, no, no, no. without LLN what you measured is a RANDOM number.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 8:46:42 PM UTC
Lukas Papantonopoulos this is nonsense: read what I fucking wrote about mixing inference from fat tailed domains with inference from thin-tailed domains. I do not want to rewrite the Black Swan to answer this Bullshit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 8:47:33 PM UTC
Can I have another one than Lukas Papantonopoulos ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 9:24:17 PM UTC
Lukas Papantonopoulos That's the BLack Swanm again, again, again. See fourth quadrant. Medicine may have fat tails, but the payoff is dampened by boundedness, so we are bounding integrals. See Chapter 9. Another one than Lukas?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 9:36:29 PM UTC
Good bye, Lukas Papantonopoulos.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 10:10:36 AM UTC
Junk. I explained why.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 10:17:52 AM UTC
This is not quite it, Assen Kantchev
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 12:42:19 PM UTC
read my tech book. It explains the nonsense in fudging fat tails out of matrices.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 10:42:07 AM UTC
Kahneman's work is robust. The application of behavioral to explain econ phenomena that have high randomness by such people as Thaler is a fake narrative.
Since I've posted my two doc showing excatly where economics use BS statistical methods that do not support their conclusions (=>irresponsible charlatans), no economist has anything said of *substance*. But the good news is that they were not silent, but annoyed and critical. Every sentence that is not directed at the argument strengthens it.
The doc is now 110 pages, here. Read Chapters 1-3.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit,
The econ professors (typically young professors starting a career) seem to comment here. Enjoy:
http://www.econjobrumors.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 2:03:54 PM UTC
I could not hesitate but call Herb Gintis a representative imbecile for "the plural of data is not anecdote" in my section ag. "N=1"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 2:12:26 PM UTC
I know it is not elegant, but it is a good idea to strike at the most prominent social scientist around who attacked me and show he is clueless about probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 4:54:58 PM UTC
Jazi Zilber he is not getting the point about incomputabity of small probabilities * Large effect in the tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 5:03:21 PM UTC
The way you define a charlatan is by insensitivity to rational argument. You can't tell a snake oil vendor/alternative medicine to stop using science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 10:17:25 AM UTC
Do you realize that all these guys are anonymous so they produce defamatory stuff (clearly wrong) and write like children... But in private they act like "serious" people. And it is easy to get their names through a routine subpoena. Typically they freak out when confronted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 12:54:59 PM UTC
Samir, are you in Tripoli?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 12:55:09 PM UTC
I will be there in 12 days.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/econfragilize.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 12, 2013 6:27:52 PM UTC
Cielo Almanza this is bullshit. "Many models are wrong, some are DANGEROUS"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 13, 2013 12:00:40 AM UTC
The textbook is more complete https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 12, 2013 6:23:59 PM UTC
Micahel Ladanov see next post.
(3rd revision)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 12, 2013 11:07:52 PM UTC
Not old enough yet but was looking at constipated Park Avenue rich people. Very constipated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 3:34:41 PM UTC
Leave the ethics aside, I am showing without specifying a probability distribution that incentives invite negative skewness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 3:45:02 PM UTC
Michal Kolano I had the same reaction, because it feels dishonorable to treat P/L of others ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 6:51:31 PM UTC
Conrad Young I wrote a f###g book on the topic, this is the math!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 8:52:33 PM UTC
Conrad Young This is a demonstration that is as general as it can get. It is best taken as backup.
***
From FBR (2001). "This point has applications in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, and conflict situations. A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say you always have the same threshold of reactions. You take a set level of abuse before getting into a rage and punching the offender in the nose. Such predictability will allow people to take advantage of you up to that well-known trigger point and stop there. But if you randomize your trigger point, sometimes overreacting at the slightest joke, people will not know in advance how far they can push you. The same applies to governments in conflicts: They need to convince their adversaries that they are crazy enough to sometimes overreact to a small peccadillo. Even the magnitude of their reaction should be hard to foretell. Unpredictability is a strong deterrent."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 12:52:39 PM UTC
Forrest Jehlik you can show that in fact the deterrent effect is strong enough to prevent escalation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 1:08:39 PM UTC
The PROOF is sketched as follows: if an agent has risk aversion, loss aversion, a concave utility, etc., then the gain from confrontation is not worth the pain of loss, and under nonlinear transformation it results in a left-tailed probability distribution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 3:27:15 PM UTC
Jeanne Sloane don't confuse deterrence with terrorism. It is the opposite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 3:46:22 PM UTC
Safety is based on that. The IRS practices the method. So do most states.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 11, 2013 4:51:01 PM UTC
This is why I am letting Mr Whelan the economist spread the word everywhere through his journalist friends that I "overreacted" to him. Most economists and econ journalists are sh*t-scared to engage. And logically I will need a second round to rattle him a bit more (he is slimy) so I get more accusations of "unfair".
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/summaryproblems.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 7, 2013 11:09:23 PM UTC
Andy kwok thanks for the link. Indeed Arn'old calls this marketing-oriented science the western way as opposed to russian emphasis on lasting work
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 7, 2013 11:11:57 PM UTC
And indeed almost all what we rely on in probability theory is russian: markov, kolmogorov, kitchin, pontryagin, shirayec, all the peers working with arn'old
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 12:59:41 PM UTC
Alexandrov! Alexandrov! My math model textbook is his (written with the great-great-great Kolmogorov). Completely devoid of the math version of bullshit/pedantry you see in Bourbaki tests.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 2:13:39 PM UTC
No, same guy, No, it is A.D. Alexandrov, the author of the great textbook with Kolmogorov and Laurentiev
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 2:16:07 PM UTC
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-Dover/dp/0486409163/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368022519&sr=8-1&keywords=alexandrov+kolmogorov
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 2:42:26 PM UTC
It is remarkable how clear and to-the-point Russians were... They were not Soviet-Harvard in mathematics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 7:04:15 PM UTC
No, it is not concise in that way. It is remarkably less loaded with formalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 10:06:12 PM UTC
They present everything as ideas, then derivations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 9, 2013 5:02:23 PM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev are you in Russia? I went there a few times, hung around intelligentsiya and universities and was astonished at how bimodal it was. One one side, purity unmatched elsewhere; on the other total corruption.
This is useful for persons, companies, etc. Never catch a falling knife: I prefer to buy the stock of a company that went down, then bounced back than an equivalent one that never went down to these low levels (adjusting of course for other considerations).
More technically, things that came back from level Si are stronger than things that came back from level Sj>Si. So for a family of processes {S} that start at the same point S0 and end at the same point ST, the one with the largest distance from its minimum (Smin) is the one that is potentially the most antifragile.
Think about it in terms of information: you know that coffee cup A experienced a stressor of intensity k *without* breaking, while you have no such information about coffee cup B.
(See development of the idea in Chapter 8 of the textbook https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 6, 2013 11:54:55 PM UTC
I adjusted the text. Many commenting do not seem to realize that this is not a sole criterion, but one that requires homogeneity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 7, 2013 11:10:35 AM UTC
Brownian Bridge means normalizing all sample paths to the same beginning and end, so the only difference is the intermediate stages.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 7, 2013 6:03:52 PM UTC
The idea of Brownian Bridge can apply to any stochastic process, even w/infinite variance. In fact even with infinite first moment, since the total variations are naturally constrained.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 7, 2013 7:42:29 PM UTC
Not quite, a recovering cancer survivor may violate the Brownian Bridge since it is not the same S(T), owing to sequels and conditional probability of second primary cancer and probability of recurrence. You need a recovering cancer patient of EXACTLY equal health, or someone who went through, say, externally driven trauma.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 1:47:16 AM UTC
My definition of fragility is concavity to random event, hence dislike of volatility. Time is volatility (though not necessarily sigma^2 as in Brownian motion). Now, separately, if you lift the perishability constraint, and survival is power-law distributed, the Lindy effect comes out (see my chapter 5 for E[X|X>K], which lengthens with K. So SURVIVAL => LINDY EFFECT =>INDICATION OF ABSENCE OF FRAGILITY.
(Convexity/Antifragility)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 6, 2013 3:30:00 PM UTC
How do you know they are really benefits?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 11:10:23 AM UTC
EXCELLENT, Max Lawson
I for myself feel as if I were reborn, after close to 40 days of the Orthodox fast, deprived of ~ all animal products.
Note 1: For those who are wondering, today is Easter on the Orthodox calendar.
Note 2: During my 40 day fast I read nothing that was not math (outside the web). It makes some (modern) texts appear weird and nonsensical, but enhaces the beauty of good (ancient) literature.
( "99 heuristics")
http://www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2000/longplayer/artangel_longplayer_letters/brian_eno_to_nassim_nicholas_taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 2:08:38 AM UTC
eleni, guess
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 9:57:50 PM UTC
I still don't know who to send the rely to. ANyone knows about AMory Lovins?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:05:39 AM UTC
Douglas Temple please explain.
It seems that our version of modernity seems to demonize outrage, sort of sterilize citizens' sense of indignation. The only criticism I am getting about my current approach with econoquacks is that I am "irascible" and should not have outbursts with fraudsters, "be less rude about it". Some moralizing idiots even try to pathologize temperament, for "saying it as it is". Yet ancient literature is nothing but a succession of angry heroes. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto".
Is modernity's mission to overdomesticate, castrate, neuter, even lobotomize citizens? Let us compare our values to more ancient ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 5:13:48 PM UTC
Where is Eleni?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 5:38:28 PM UTC
Susan this is sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 5:53:34 PM UTC
Susan You are falling into the logical hole of going from "anger is largely bad" to "all anger is bad". Also there is proportion to size of crime. You are condoning inertia and submission to iniquity and exploitation on grounds that anger is unconditionally unjustified.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 6:45:31 PM UTC
There is another point. Anger is ecological and signals authenticity, committment. Please do psychobabble System1/2 on it: it is part of the same discourse that pathologizes idosyncracies. Now it should be "rationed" so to speak, reserved to great crimes, extortions, eggregious exploitations of situations, irresponsible risk management.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 7:22:02 PM UTC
I personally think much more clearly and get much more motivated when angry. Further: I feel I am a fraud when containing anger.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 7:57:18 PM UTC
Scott Prichard , Excellent!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 9:29:14 PM UTC
Bill caplan not the stoics. They favored management of anger. Read the texts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 10:43:54 PM UTC
This idea that anger is bad because you lose control, release the dionysian in you, show your colors is careerist: virtue is to not manage how you are perceived but what impact you can make.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 10:50:32 PM UTC
I wrote an aphorism to the effect that the mediocre man is never angry at big things...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 12:31:11 AM UTC
John Vermazen what kind of bullshit is it to use slaveholding in antiquity as an argument against other attributes?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 12:41:03 AM UTC
An anger heuristic from my aphorisms: "if your anger abates, you did injustice, if it increases, you were done injustice." I will make a corrollary: "if you are angry about matters that do not harm you, you should vent it without restraint, and direct even more anger at those who try to restrain you".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 1:01:08 AM UTC
Michael Walsh please do not confute the management of emotions about things you can do nothing about, in dealing with randomness (that was Pyrrho the skeptic), and the natural emotions as deep moral motives, in which anger is strength.
(Modernity & Denial of Antifragility)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 25, 2013 6:48:04 PM UTC
Just look at numbers of diabetes and syndrome X on the planet compared to undernutrition and you will see.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 25, 2013 9:26:29 PM UTC
HEre is ref (thanks to Yaneer Bar Yam) http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/gbd/publications/burden-disease-and-injury-attributable-67-risk-factors-21-regions-1990–2010-c
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 26, 2013 3:00:02 PM UTC
There is some evidence for health benefits of moderate austerity: CUBA (recent data), UK (war years),
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 27, 2013 3:13:39 PM UTC
Mr Christopher Hufford please substantiate your claim.
"The paper argues that intelligent behaviour, which is hard to quantify, can be reduced to maximising one's options, which is relatively easy to quantify...."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 12:05:34 PM UTC
entropy ~ optionality
I just finished a very rough draft of *Fat Tails & (Anti)Fragility* (~100 pages).
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit?pli=1
PART I provides a mathematical toolkit to detect anything that is bullshit in economic modeling (particularly macroeconomics), figure out which papers are flawed from a scientific standpoint, etc. When I mean flawed, it is on the basis that the math used impresses nonmathematicians but does not support the stated policy conclusions.
So I start by putting one Karl Whelan "scientific" work under severe mathematical scrutiny. I select him to start as he worked with central banks, the perfect profile of the person supported by the taxpayer against the taxpayer's own interests. I also had a disgraceful encounter with him and his macro peers on twitter.
Mr Whelan's papers can be found here: http://ideas.repec.org/e/pwh23.html
We can progressively expose mathematized social science that way, as I am refining the text, adding words and examples.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:36:04 PM UTC
Ignore math and English typos
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:39:30 PM UTC
This is about 40% of the total text. Just the spine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:48:36 PM UTC
Younger Cato LaTeX is a pain with graphs coming from the same equations U see. This ports to LaTeX not the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:59:16 PM UTC
Jerry Msu the criticism here is directed at models claiming "scientific" standing behind macrobullshit. Jim Grant does not pretend to model and do regressions; he states his opinion and insights, and you can agree/disagree.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 8:09:30 PM UTC
Mark B Mark yes, TBA
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 8:28:21 PM UTC
MArk, read Book V of AF. It's there
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 9:07:59 PM UTC
Elie Sarraf medicine is coming. Chapter 14!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:36:50 AM UTC
Dermot Dorgan I had another target, but I do not want to harm another non-nasty person. And I am progressively working the way up: Markowitz is next, then Samuelson optimization, then Merton, then of course Krugman.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 12:40:04 PM UTC
Of all the models those based on Markowitz mean-variance are the most dangerous... But I need to add section on random matrices, much more involved mathematically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 2:53:57 PM UTC
Yes, I wrote the Black Swan before the mathematical ideas, but people are convinced of the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:43:24 PM UTC
Marco I will solve. THanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 5:10:00 PM UTC
If I issue a 6 by 9 version, it will print large fonts but will be ok for tablets.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 25, 2013 12:17:35 PM UTC
Is this book readable on a tablet? If so, I can reformat mine to same size http://www.math.umn.edu/~zeitouni/technion/cupbook.pdf
(Generalized Skin in the Game)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 22, 2013 4:59:09 PM UTC
Susan Lewis is the first troll found here in > 1 month.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 22, 2013 7:40:03 PM UTC
Ellen Biasin pls figure out the difference between necessary and sufficient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 22, 2013 12:58:02 PM UTC
A lot at stake. They will probability hire a PR firm and go after people like me, with smears etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 19, 2013 4:41:58 PM UTC
The reason in econometrics techniques are bunk see section 1.7 of my treatise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 19, 2013 7:28:54 PM UTC
No, no, no. Fat tails!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 18, 2013 8:33:26 PM UTC
J-L picked this up from the previous aphorism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 18, 2013 8:48:34 PM UTC
work and games are selfinflicted injuries.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 18, 2013 9:30:26 PM UTC
The idea is that a stressor only works if there is recovery.
FAT TAILS AND (ANTI)FRAGILITY: Lectures on Probability, Risk, and Decisions in the Real World, which should be a completely parallel piece of work, standalone.
2) Completed the main technical points of The Black Swan, and showed IN MATHEMATICAL TERMS the limits of current probability theory and the bullshit by social scientists misusing the math of probability.
3) Realizing that there is nothing more soothing than math in airports, hotel rooms, and train stations. Somehow, psychologically, if you put the argument in precise mathematical form, you feel it is there and you don't need to make extra effort to convey it to others and avert misinterpretation: truth is robust, particularly when put in non-ambiguous form.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit?pli=1
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 18, 2013 1:01:40 PM UTC
Van Zwet is a monograph. I think there is a PDF reissue by Wiley.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 18, 2013 1:41:46 PM UTC
Complex systems... typically a lot of pure bullshit that can't predict
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 18, 2013 4:50:04 PM UTC
Thomas Harris don't read the math unless you want to do math. Everything is in the books.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 18, 2013 5:13:47 PM UTC
I m doing math to show that the math used in stats is poor and detect its flaws.
[ANTIFRAGILITY]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 13, 2013 1:20:32 AM UTC
J-L' corrolary is stronger than the initial statement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 13, 2013 1:29:53 AM UTC
Stephan De Spiegeleire you are clearly an idiot. Pathologizing someone is the lowest form of discourse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 13, 2013 1:30:56 AM UTC
Pathologizing someone who bothers you with psychological/psychoanalytical bullshit is a horrible practice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 12, 2013 12:32:24 PM UTC
People reveal their temperament when they have choices.
http://stvp.stanford.edu/blog/?page_id=1277
(Friends of the area I apologize for not connecting as I am in-and-out.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 10, 2013 10:13:40 PM UTC
Killian, just ordered it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 11, 2013 11:43:35 AM UTC
A mess! At the very beginning of the talk I spilled water on the computer and my book, as an illustration of comparative fragility. It was filmed live. The computer is I think kaput and the book is safe. Then I bought another computer but can't transfer files as the old computer is acting up. All that in the heart of silicon valley.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 11, 2013 5:38:54 PM UTC
I have dropbox plus the whole shebang ...it does not help.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 12, 2013 12:19:28 PM UTC
The point is that rebuilding a computer is time consuming and delicate even if you have all the files.
Universities seem more metastatic in their bureaucracies than government ... and unchecked. Back-of-the-envelope: It could be that universities cost between 5 and 20x more to operate than the private. When I was at U Mass Amherst, I calculated that the costs of having someone clean my office there were 10-20 times that of my home office. And they would not let me use a private cleaning service.
And there is a huge amount of money spent of funding people to "do research" that is not research, but just something totally cosmetic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 10, 2013 2:37:27 PM UTC
The retention rate is not too relevant: It is the cumulative hours spent. People read books without finishing them, but more from book to book. And some textbooks are so concave that you get 80% after the first 10%.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 8, 2013 10:58:51 AM UTC
Friends, we need an Ostracon. A public list of individulas to shame.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 8, 2013 11:38:31 AM UTC
We need a web-list. Skin in the Game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 8, 2013 12:00:12 PM UTC
Let me think. I have little time in days to come to do anything as I am finishing my book and trying to lose 7.5 lbs
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 8, 2013 12:26:55 PM UTC
Anna Karanina Please do. I will reimburse you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 8, 2013 12:31:50 PM UTC
no need then.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 8, 2013 3:28:07 PM UTC
To prevent wrongful accusation, we should have simply an open system with arguments and voting on Ostracon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 12:16:24 AM UTC
I have to be off web I will be en route to Palo Alto... Who paid for the site?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 11:55:16 AM UTC
The most effective way would be to avoid naming people directly but rather listing articles in press, not blogs ( press is fact checked). Otherwise there is the risk of unfairly ostracizing people. Focus "legal but unethical".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 12:21:07 PM UTC
The most honorable way to do it is to build a repository of ethical violations from press articles and only from press articles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 1:00:47 PM UTC
I d rather not focus on persons, rather articles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 13, 2013 5:44:08 PM UTC
Anna Karanina I am on my way to Africa, so very short of time. Let me think of my involvement beyond the initial spur, or if it should be an organic libertarian enterprise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 8, 2013 10:56:51 AM UTC
The Romans built a network of roads in the Levant. The Arabs did away with it: a caravan is vastly more robust, thanks to the camel. It is also freer. It is like a ship on land.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 1:02:20 PM UTC
Pietro it happened during interregnum not Pax Romana etc
But luckily Beirut swallowed Lebanon. Lebanon was small enough a state to let itself be colonized by the City-State of Beirut.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 6, 2013 2:11:47 PM UTC
Commercial cities are"open".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 7, 2013 4:53:46 PM UTC
Randy Bosch The venitian republic survived 1000 years.
Chapt 2 of my textbook https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit …
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 5, 2013 12:36:08 PM UTC
No Kyle, a scientist discusses things that generalize not anecdotes or particular instances...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 5, 2013 10:35:03 PM UTC
Kyle biomedical is rarely in the Fourth Quadrant
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 5, 2013 11:33:25 AM UTC
Friends I am thinking about Pinker's "theories".
1) Find academics who are commenting on Antifragile and TBS with bitterness, and possible envy.
2) Send them academic version of backup work (which is referenced in books and they should have read before commenting).
3) Make them produce technical comments on flaws (they are spreading damaging information after all). If they find mistakes, I am a winner as I can improve the works. If they can't produce a technical comment on a remark which they made using their status *as academic*, then they are in trouble, for an academic is not a journalist and is supposed to not produce pure bullshit or shout his incompetence publicly. Anything an academic writes on a public domain is there for life.
I am fed up with academics who bullshit about my work without engaging substantive issues with it. I want my core points to be engaged.
Let us see the result with one Teppo Fillin. Who knows we might learn something. https://twitter.com/teppofelin
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 2:49:23 PM UTC
Not the point, Mark. This is not even an academic dispute. The fellow will show us if he is incompetent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 2:55:12 PM UTC
Graeme, the web can make people accountable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 3:20:34 PM UTC
Basil, he missed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 3:25:50 PM UTC
Damir look at the textbook version and the postscript showing prediction increases risk taking, even when known to be random.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 4:13:39 PM UTC
Not the point. If someone bullshits about my work, he should be exposed to being uncovered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 4:41:15 PM UTC
My filter is to wait 3 months before reacting. But then make sure to react.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 7:57:13 PM UTC
Friends, it is not an indictment of academia, at least not here, but of certain characters who bullshit about other people's work without substance, AND exploit the academic system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 1, 2013 8:44:10 PM UTC
Paul Wehage misrepresentation is a form of theft. You can ignore pennies, but sometimes it is your duty to stand up and shout "fraud". Just purge the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 2, 2013 9:59:29 AM UTC
It is UNETHICAL to respond en masse on theoretical points to establish a consensus opinion, unless you are reacting and calling out the shoddy aspect of the reviewing. But it is ETHICAL to put the man's scholarship in question. And recall it is a duty to call a fraud a fraud.
I do not want drones on the road.
Note 1- There are large trucks on the highways, and large vehicles in which the driver could cause harm than he could receive; as in a pecking order the smaller vehicles tend to give way. I was driving a small mini and got no respect from large vehicles.
Note 2- I recall seing, during the Lebanese war, Syrian tanks in Beirut systematically trampling over parked cars, not even bothering to pay attention to what was on the road -- the drivers in the tanks were shielded from physical and legal harm.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 3:21:03 PM UTC
My solution is vastly more robust.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 3:21:33 PM UTC
Only large deviations from past are informational. Plus fragility is measurable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:36:32 PM UTC
Richard Askew replaced by metaprobability
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 8:09:58 PM UTC
I write first, censor later
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 28, 2013 9:29:01 PM UTC
Andrei, this was lifted from *Nature*.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 28, 2013 9:29:52 PM UTC
This is a course for students, as well as a backup for my lit books. Everything is in TBS and AF.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 28, 2013 9:35:28 PM UTC
I am reading one of the most powerful papers in physics. Not once was the idea of theorem used. Because the result is powerful http://oldweb.ct.infn.it/~rapis/corso-fsc2/Tsallis88.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 7, 2013 5:51:29 PM UTC
I wrote it in Nature and we went through 99 iterations to get the right formula in compressed form.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 3:27:15 PM UTC
I never forget ills have done. I don't want to.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 5:11:09 PM UTC
The VERY idea of a heuristic is that it makes mistakes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 11:33:11 PM UTC
Iza karramta el la2im tamarrada
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 11:39:16 PM UTC
Iza akramta 2l karimu malaktahu
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 22, 2013 1:07:09 AM UTC
Thanks everyone for the support. But this web thingy is burning me out.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:23:04 PM UTC
deficit implies inflation...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:27:03 PM UTC
Joanna, those who made the mistake are the bankers who get upside no downside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:43:08 PM UTC
It is foolish to say "without this bailout" and not look at upside/downside asymmetries.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 18, 2013 5:15:17 PM UTC
CORRECTION(of the past)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 18, 2013 5:21:24 PM UTC
No, Lindy effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 18, 2013 5:24:12 PM UTC
The point is not that the future will resemble the past, but that what has survived the past has passed some kind of fragility test...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 18, 2013 5:50:53 PM UTC
The point is that SOMETHING would have been relevant x years ago, but NOT WRITTEN then.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 18, 2013 6:16:37 PM UTC
COMMENTS CLOSED HERE...Please move to revised post. Thankyouverymuch.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 16, 2013 5:38:46 PM UTC
FOuad, the email count is 867 ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 16, 2013 6:40:03 PM UTC
4 PM Brooklyn Time. All time is SBT otherwise specified...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 16, 2013 6:40:41 PM UTC
I can answer "constructive" questions and ignore others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 17, 2013 12:16:56 AM UTC
I looked. There is no deological conflict; further, the conversation is not about technology. And as I guest, I will be maximally courteous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 18, 2013 6:07:19 PM UTC
All Standard Brooklyn Time, SBT
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 15, 2013 7:51:21 PM UTC
Check the Saul Kripke argument in "Naming as Necessity"
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/makridakis.pdf
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/textbook.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 1:43:23 PM UTC
Gabino Carballo you call imbeciles imbeciles when harm is involved. Sorry, but that's my style, textbook or not.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:17:40 PM UTC
These are cut/paste... but keep nitpicking, no worries. Technical books are AF
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:42:30 PM UTC
No theorems, sorry. Or minimal. THeorems are in papers when necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:43:04 PM UTC
THermodynamics leads to Gaussian (Fokker-Planck)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:44:44 PM UTC
Informational randomness has no structure (think inflation vs heat diffusion)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:54:35 PM UTC
Jan, good typos the denominator is Sum[1] not Sum[1A]. And the bracket is closed (changed from i=1 to n to i=0 to n as some notes had different way)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 3:41:13 PM UTC
So far thanking Jan Novotny & Daniel Bernoulli
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 7:22:38 PM UTC
Jan Novotny excellent Q. If you assume empirical frequencies (robust statistics) then you miss the tails. The section on "telescope" is missing here. If on the other hand you take a "distribution", then you can extrapolate by giving frequencies to unseen points, but of course you run another spate of mistakes. I briefly showed the problem with both approaches. A third approach is to NOT make claims about tails. To come in another section.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 14, 2013 4:44:20 PM UTC
Jan Novotny added a few comments based on the discussion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 15, 2013 12:17:49 PM UTC
There are all expressed in The Black Swan, 2nd Ed. This document is more of a technical version/backup
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 16, 2013 12:04:47 PM UTC
It is not in word!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 16, 2013 7:47:12 PM UTC
David, the speed at which the higher cumulants (4th, particularly) reach 0. Thanks for the comments I will try to make it clear in the text.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 18, 2013 4:40:00 PM UTC
Moved here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hURjZxTkxUTFZnMVk/edit
[Opening of the Forthcoming Lecture on Antifragility at Stanford Technology Ventures]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 14, 2013 3:20:50 PM UTC
Amer Khan drive a bus for a summer and you will feel less risk of downside.
Friends, Sarkozy provides another example of someone selling contacts and prestige stolen from the taxpayer. We find it shocking if someone took priesthood "for a few years" in order to acquire contacts and to subsequently take a job as a salesman for Goldman Sachs; but we accept civil service as a nice career builder ... And of course we are offered the sophistry "everyone should be able to make a living".
The only way to 1) filter politicians and 2) purge the system from tacit delayed corruption is by forcing repayment of all income subsequently earned by ex-officials that is deemed to belong to the taxpayer.
Contrast this with Charles de Gaulle who, upon leaving office, spent a decade philosophizing in his austere country home.
Current culprits are: Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, John Major, etc. I can hardly find an exception.
I was offered a position in a "governance" thinktank with such blokes as Sarkozy, Blair, Schroder, etc. who have the nerve to talk about such a subject. I declined to be part of it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 11, 2013 1:36:48 PM UTC
Jaffer Ali Look up what DeGaulle said about Palestinians in 1967
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 11, 2013 2:10:55 PM UTC
Danielle Dufour-Coppolani tu peux m'aider a faire circuler en France? Il suffit d'afficher.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 11, 2013 2:15:52 PM UTC
Jaffer Ali De Gaulle escaped 5 assassination attempts by the right as he unconditionally gave back Algeria and "repatriated" the settlers (who were in fact only partially of French descent). He was the only one the FLN really trusted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 11, 2013 2:16:57 PM UTC
Danielle Dufour-Coppolani mon tweet https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/311099216783106048
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 11, 2013 3:01:56 PM UTC
Sarkozy is there for contacts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 11, 2013 5:51:27 PM UTC
Mike Wise and Linda Schmoldt you fail to realize that they MADE DECISIONS while in office.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 11, 2013 6:22:52 PM UTC
The idea of public service, like priesthood, is not an opportunity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 12:26:40 AM UTC
Merci Ernesto! Ernesto Cordoba
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 10:39:28 AM UTC
Yogesh that was before the crisis. Since then Greenspan became a liability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 8:06:17 PM UTC
Promontory... that's Alan Blinder!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:23:51 PM UTC
Linda Schmoldt I believe that your logic is severely flawed: defending moral hazard on grounds of "freedom" and invoking the "demonization of groups" in defense (while the moral hazard is a group behavior) is even more spurious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 13, 2013 8:03:50 PM UTC
Andrei Vorobiev you are breaking rules by using gender differentiation. And the idea of tolerating fraud (through casuistry) is hideous.
The document will be freely available electronically. I think it will come out at the same time as the U.K. AF paperback in June.
Will post chapters here.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/textbook.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 8, 2013 1:13:48 PM UTC
Everything is on the web but spread out in paper form. Mandelbrot said that all his ideas on fractals were present and published but nobody had a clue about what he was talking about. Until Mark Cac called him up and told him: write a book. A book? Yes, put them all together in a single doc. The more papers you write the more we are getting confused. Hence was born THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (actually he first wrote a French textbook that he later expanded).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 8, 2013 2:18:27 PM UTC
Robert Hart T So it is "negative" to call a fraud a fraud... but not "negative" to destroy society?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 8, 2013 2:28:38 PM UTC
Jan Novotny This is a situation where I will be massively convex to nitpicking!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 9, 2013 4:54:49 PM UTC
Mathematica exports into Latex. I need it to audit the data ... fewer mistakes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 10, 2013 6:46:40 PM UTC
dmitri changed notation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 10, 2013 6:47:15 PM UTC
Now sum is 1A so corrects things
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 10, 2013 10:15:41 PM UTC
Dmitri Gott look at this version. Bear in mind these are rapid course notes, with gaps/explanations to fill in.
(It just hit me that, in 14 years of reviewing books on AMAZON & elsewhere, I never posted a bad review. Actually, I've never written a bad review (except for one that I 've removed since).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3V94HTDKTOY1O/ref=cm_pdp_rev_all?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 7, 2013 6:01:43 PM UTC
It is an ethical point. By giving a low rating you are claiming that you are representative of the readership for the book. A book is not a restaurant or a dishwasher.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 7, 2013 6:19:23 PM UTC
I've been doing this since 1999 before I had people reviewing my work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 9, 2013 5:13:21 PM UTC
I can say if an idea is bogus, not if a book is inferior. It may be about something beyond the idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 10, 2013 11:09:59 AM UTC
I did not trash it...
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14316186/DarkSideAPA11.3AAM%20copy.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 8, 2013 12:29:17 PM UTC
Bent, less is more. I would remove anything that side-tracks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 8, 2013 11:44:43 PM UTC
I really insisg on removing them if they are not necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 5, 2013 2:21:46 AM UTC
Gabriele Giovanni Vecchio A random matrix will produce PCA1 that significantly contributes to total variance (see Wigner effect). But if your randomize again PCA1 you will have it made up of different linear combinations. Dimension reduction is often a sucker's game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 5, 2013 11:39:37 AM UTC
Fractal is nice description, but not possible to calibrate models.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 5, 2013 4:31:21 PM UTC
Simons is doing something SOLID linked to marketmaking, crossmarket liquidity arb. And we hear of him (the exception) not of the 10,000 quants who failed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 4, 2013 11:35:23 PM UTC
by 35000 I mean *at least* 35000
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 5, 2013 11:44:33 AM UTC
PCAs (see my comment on the next post) exacerbate the problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 7, 2013 6:51:40 AM UTC
Mastroianni GC and Andrei Vorobiev what does your discussion have to do with BIG DATA? This is not a discussion about what should or should not be "progressive". Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 1, 2013 10:41:12 PM UTC
It was the older Cato who said something similar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 28, 2013 4:44:32 PM UTC
Markets without volatility
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/nature-definition.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 9:32:01 PM UTC
BTW Shermer is one of those "skeptic-light".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 28, 2013 9:46:08 AM UTC
Aaron Elliott the model doesn't have to be accurate. All it needs is detect acceleration. That's the key advantage. See our paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 1, 2013 9:05:00 PM UTC
Mastroianni GC if you don't understand a book you don't review it by changing the subject. Simple ethics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 1, 2013 10:44:15 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer that's not the point, whether it is readable or non-readable. The point is that the same people who don't argue with a restaurant owner that he should have fast food argue with the author of a book on how he should be writing. I would NEVER read an author who would listen to my request on how HE should be writing. It is a take-it-or-leave-it deal.
***
[ Note 1- This is in response to a question by Adam Gurri who was wondering whether there was an inconsistency between being independent and skeptical, yet respecting the "inner" information in the time-tested thanks to the Lindy Effect.]
[Note 2- The "skeptics" of today do the exact opposite: an agglomeration of "light" intellectuals going against traditions but not against experts.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 3:27:09 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic how do you know it is "truth"? Are you smarter than time?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 8:40:35 PM UTC
I am going to be aggressive, on Jazi Zilber 's point. 1) A lot of religious fundamentalism is recent. In the Near East it spread partly thanks to television & Saudi Arabia's version of religion, and thanks to a few minorities in Israel. 2) Some religions are not made to exist together --except in such an environment as Lebanon in which people inherited tolerance as part of the tradition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 8:41:47 PM UTC
We need to remember that Catholicism did very well with popes who were extreme womanizers... They allowed some flack... not any more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 28, 2013 1:07:10 PM UTC
Fundamentalism cum Intolerance is not new. We had the Essenes, the Almohads, the Moravits, etc. But intolerance used to be the monopoly of the Catholic (papist) religion. So it comes and goes.
In this line of wisdom, I cherish the following expression about something hideous: "even more hideous than words without deeds": أقبح من قول بلا فعل (known then but not in this book).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:30:40 PM UTC
Mohammed AlQatari do you know an expression about words without deeds?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:35:43 PM UTC
Fouad Khan saying the truth is not sterile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:39:08 AM UTC
Steve Reilly overcompensation is good...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:47:22 AM UTC
Yahia Lababidi beware affirmation of the consequent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:49:29 AM UTC
(All As are Bs does mean all Bs are As)
Obviously, peer acceptance (or, rather fear of peer rejection), seems to be the main hindrance preventing personal and intellectual independence; it is also the cause of many, many ills, where the collective can be vastly more wrong than individuals taken separately. What is not obvious is that using courage to stand up against peers is not a solution: most people are chicken, pusillanimous, spineless, and unwilling to go the next step.
Now are there obvious heuristics to counter this peer rejection, without going against human nature, a la Odysseus tied to the mast? If so, what are these?
[Note that, missing the role of peer acceptance as driver of intellectual pursuits, universities established tenure to help intellectual independence. Instead they got more comfortable --and more stupid -- crowds. This gives us a hint for opposite tricks.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 1:09:12 AM UTC
Jaffer Ali that's the technique Stoics use: assume the worst, anchor to it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 1:29:20 AM UTC
Jerry Msu please tell us more. How did you defy them? Did you regain mobility?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:17:47 AM UTC
Pascal Wallisch "relevance bias"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 2:23:29 AM UTC
Pascal Wallisch it was not about spelling, but about the bias. Can you explain the connection?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 2:53:53 PM UTC
Peter and Linda, posted answer above.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 2, 2013 4:51:27 PM UTC
Bingo. My heuristic is to have this site.
Plutarch's biography of Cato Maior presents a no-nonsense man of strong moral commitments, the embodiment of the ancient man of virtue --in addition to his no-bullshit approach to things (he detected the charlatanism of ancient doctors). But Plutarch was annoyed that Cato treated his slaves worse than cattle, sold them when they were old and of no use to anyone instead of paying them back with a secure & comfortable old age; he banned them from having any other activity than work and sleep (to extend their shelf life). In contrast, the Greeks extended their gratitute beyond their slaves, with an impressively humane attitude towards animals. For instance, they rewarded the mules who worked in the Acropolis by according them the privilege to graze freely after their years of service. Granted Plutarch was Greek, but the contrast was striking.
Indeed, as shown with Cato's war cry "delenda Carthago", Rome had a inconsistent system of ethics. Cato visited Carthage, was irked when he saw that the inhabitants had too good a life (with figs that were too tasty) and vowed to destroy the place.
The Coliseum was built thanks to the spoils from the Jewish revolt. Rome, in the end, was, simply, a predator state, using the advantage of a superbly effective army, which was nothing but a machine to kill; they limited "virtue" to the treatment of other Romans patricians. No different from the ruthless Sicilian Mafia.
The Hellenes appear to be more universal, vastly more moral, and, except for a few such as Alexander, much less predatorial, which explains why hellenism spread in the Levant as a symbol of a way of thinking & being.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:23:55 PM UTC
Pax Romana, little different from A mafia lord selling "protection".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:25:52 PM UTC
Actually the Hellenes lasted quite a bit, mostly thanks to the Byzantines. The Hellenes ended up swallowing up the Roman empire from the inside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:31:49 PM UTC
Julian Caracotsios the mere fact that PLutarch mentions his annoyance at the Roman treatment of slaves implies humanity. Granted our Roman sources are scant: SUETONIUS, LIVY, few others. Most of the accounts of Rome referenced in Gibbon (Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, etc. ) were written in Greek.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:34:08 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita a smart predator state keeps its victims alive so he can milk them as long as possible. Like the mafia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:35:03 PM UTC
Eugene Ng The Cato institute... different Cato (the younger). A purely noble republican.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:41:17 PM UTC
Andea, excellent. The Empire moved East in heart, and spread Greek as a language. Which is what Cato Maior feared.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:52:59 PM UTC
I have been bothered reading Isocrates' "golden rule" for states, 5th century BC. It is remarkable how long it took for the culture to catch up to it... if it did.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 3:00:49 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita we know a bit more about propaganda/smear campaigns: much of the charges ag. Elagabalus were not true. And "punica fides" was the other way round. Even modern Italy continued: Mussolini blamed the Emperors of non-Latin blood (Septimus Severus, etc.) for changing the state.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 3:33:52 PM UTC
The later empire paradoxically changed the values,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 3:44:59 PM UTC
John Cato predates the Roman Stoics
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 3:45:53 PM UTC
(I meant the Cato i was discussing)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 4:00:47 PM UTC
Lets us be careful in doing asynchronic values... We can compare republican romans to greeks, not to us...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 4:49:25 PM UTC
Alessander, for Pompey, Caesar, Cato (the ancient), Scipio, etc., war was a source of spoils, revenue, and ...slaves. Then subsequently the survivors among the vanquished had to pay tribute.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 4:50:29 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou there has been some new stuff on the Spartans... not so militaristic. And was their militarism a la Switzerland, defensive?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 6:34:10 PM UTC
People seem to be bothered by my comparison of Rome a predator state & the mafia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 6:48:51 PM UTC
Francisco Salgado Cerredelo we know the clemency of the Spartans at the conclusion of the Peloponesian wars. They did not harm the Athenians after the surrender.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 6:51:37 PM UTC
Gabino Carballo the Sicilian mafia in New York: offer protection, pax mafiana, for less than 20%.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 9:21:52 PM UTC
Rome's wealth came from predation. The rest is a footnote.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 10:34:01 PM UTC
Interestingly Marcus Autelius philosopher king who wrote on practical stoicism (in Greek) pillaged, subdued Northern tribes
( such as the the Marcomanni) ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 25, 2013 1:02:01 PM UTC
Mr Forghieri, why did the Roman state build roads? Pleae explain and remember to avoid rudeness here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 25, 2013 1:22:33 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer typically the rudeness originates with 1 person (fat tailed distribution) and the conversation becomes clean & civil after the purge. The purge rate is <1/300.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 25, 2013 5:18:25 PM UTC
In fact a predatorial state such as Ancient Rome is quite indistinguishable from a mafia family.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 25, 2013 6:40:38 PM UTC
Linda Schmoldt when mfia is in competition with the state, it goes into these activities. We saw it in New York...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 25, 2013 7:34:50 PM UTC
Sean, you read my mind. I was going to mention that the fall of the republic was a popular wish: the crowd wanted emperors and hated the senate, as a blood-sucking oligarchy. Emperors were obsessed with popular acceptance (games, etc.).
Mutanabbi, to his friend who reminded him of his boast (in a poem M claims that he mastered both the sword and the word) :'your words have killed me... now I need to fight them to save my poetry so it remains pure, noble, and authentic". And he runs to his certain death, as he was outnumbered by his enemies.
This is a Lebanese play (Classical Arabic spoken with a Levantine accent).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D874W3qyn-4&list=PL0A78F5FE80F10185
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 23, 2013 1:14:46 PM UTC
Cicero was killed by his Philippic ag Antony. And he knew it while composing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 9:21:22 AM UTC
He was accompanied by his son and the devoted friend... Then he told his friend to take care of his son and seek safety for him "al ghulam".
And two of their editors have started a movement to track (and subsequently obsess) about EVERYTHING they can measure about themselves called ... wait for it ... http://quantifiedself.com/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 22, 2013 9:04:39 PM UTC
And none of these idiots understands statistics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMBclvY_EMA
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 12:51:04 AM UTC
Don't know who the pleasemishandle is. One of the people here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 24, 2013 9:01:43 AM UTC
Tali Iwanir, see paper 28 page 230 "Bleed or Blow UP" https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_31K_MP92hUNjljYjIyMzgtZTBmNS00MGMwLWIxNmQtYjMyNDFiYjY0MTJl/edit?hl=en_GB
Way before both Christianity and Rabbi Hillel.
"Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you."
ἃ πάσχοντες ὑφ' ἑτέρων ὀργίζεσθε, ταῦτα τοὺς ἄλλους μὴ ποιεῖτε.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0144%3Aspeech%3D3%3Asection%3D61
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:07:23 PM UTC
This is the negative rule.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:11:39 PM UTC
And the golden rule in the relationship between states (anticipating Ron Paul): TREAT WEAKER STATES THE WAY YOU WOULD LIKE STRONGER STATES TO TREAT YOU.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:11:44 PM UTC
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Isoc.%202.24&lang=original#note-link2
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 21, 2013 9:10:37 PM UTC
The axial age...
http://site.booksite.com/6665/events/?&list=EVC1&group=current&preview=1
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 21, 2013 3:03:29 PM UTC
The bookstore is not a classroom! It is the opposite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 21, 2013 3:16:33 PM UTC
Hard to bring an expresso machine to the store. But perhaps another party.
(A letter of advice to a younger person)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:08:50 PM UTC
Andrei, think about it for a moment and you will get it.
The natural benefit of a cell phone, laptop, and other indispensable modern items is the joy one gets finding the object after losing it. Lose your wallet full of credit cards and you will have a chance to have a great day.
(From Jensen's inequality).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 19, 2013 8:17:07 PM UTC
Nice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 2:21:55 PM UTC
I was invited by Anthony Dent | Regional Program Officer | Intercollegiate Studies Institute. But he is not answering my mail
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 2:34:24 PM UTC
Thanks Al!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 2:44:48 PM UTC
Thanks Rita, what's the area code?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 3:16:08 PM UTC
Friends here can come as my guests... but please mention.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 3:59:02 PM UTC
Thanks Rita, problem solved. Got the person through a chain. Worked. Will be there tonite.
C. Sandis & N.N. Taleb
Abstract: We propose a global and mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action that can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. We link the rule to various philosophical approaches to ethics and moral luck.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SandisTaleb.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 17, 2013 8:48:17 PM UTC
Let's remove the Gekko temporarily... takes us into bad debates
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 17, 2013 10:16:43 PM UTC
Will Caola if you cause harm you need to incur harm. If you don't , enjoy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 17, 2013 10:33:08 PM UTC
The consequence is that if you can't enforce skin-in-the game, change the system to lower the consequences of errors (hence decentralization, etc.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 1:01:43 AM UTC
nobody is saying it is sufficient; we claim it is necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 1:30:19 AM UTC
There is some liability if they harm you. A banker/economist has NONE
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 18, 2013 12:34:47 PM UTC
If they had skin in the game they would have exited the gene pool, punished by their mistakes.... GEmma you did not read ANTIFRAGILE
COMMENT: "Success", "performance", the so-called "excellence" and other goals in modern culture harm others, & belittles them -but courage, temperance, wisdom, & generosity don't. If you follow this logic, you should never (Lebanese grandmother-style) push people to "succeed", since it will put a shadow on others, and harm the collective (or themselves in the event of failure), rather nudge them to produce acts of courage for the sake of the general good, such as, say, standing up against fraudsters-hiding-in-groups, such as economists, banksters, and econ journalists. (Note to dispel an ancient confusion: There is no conflict between courage for the sake of the collective and the great virtue of prudence, since prudence is the courage of the general).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 16, 2013 10:16:58 PM UTC
Michele Roohani ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 16, 2013 11:30:53 PM UTC
Today we are exposed to "excellence" and "competition" all day long through media and computers, making people uncomfortable with their selves. Facebook causes unhappiness and envy. In normal societies these comparisons were not as acute...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 17, 2013 3:15:05 PM UTC
The highest form of courage is standing against the mobs.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02/big-data-means-big-errors-people/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 14, 2013 9:43:13 PM UTC
This is an old story for me. I've seen these arguments with financial data where it all started. And so far... It is remarkable how people give the same, the same answers.
The classical, mostly Stoic, idea is that what matters isn't the random event itself, but how one responds to it, how one acts when hitting a snag. This was believed by scholars to make people "robust", that is immune from adversity --since we can control how we respond to events. But the point is, once again, misHarvardified: the classical man was vastly more antifragile than academic & library rats want him to be. He was not withdrawn from the world, but above it. His principal asset was in how much courage and fortitude he put in front of circumstances, how he could say "f*** you" to fate, how he defied reversals of fortune.
If that's the case, then he is not robust, as academics want him to be, but antifragile, as he wants as much disorder, adversity, and volatility to show off, to say "f*** you" to circumstances. If so, he is long volatility.
The good news is that it takes a certain training. When a certain fellow failed his election bid for the Italian presidency (with an embarassingly low number of votes), as the results of the ballots were being announced, one of the senators was heard telling another: "now watch this man and learn from him how to lose".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 13, 2013 11:30:22 PM UTC
Gemma you can get some training.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 13, 2013 11:37:32 PM UTC
If you are bursting with anger, burst. But bear the consequences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 14, 2013 8:29:04 PM UTC
Eleni, the stoics are closer to what I am talking about than the cynics. At least those I've read in the text.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 15, 2013 1:56:52 PM UTC
Antifragile = Randomness, I love you but I don't need you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 16, 2013 2:39:17 PM UTC
Ricardo Alonso why not fight a sentence you find unjust?
IN ANCIENT ROME this was a privilege reserved for the patrician class. They were able to engage in professional activities without directly identifying with them: to write books, lead armies, farm land, or transact without being a writer, general, farmer, or merchant, but "a man (*vir* rather than *homo*) who" writes, commands, farms or transacts, as a side activity.
TODAY, as humanity got much, much richer, one would have thought that everyone would have access to the privilege. Instead, I only find it in minimum wage earners who just "make a living" and feel forced to separate their identity from their profession. The higher up in the social ladder, the more people derive their identity from their profession and "achievements".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 1:22:34 PM UTC
Massi Miliano ONORE
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 1:42:22 PM UTC
The kind of thing that makes you dress up on your execution day... Shifting your emphasis on behavior rather than result ... virtue ethics, of course.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 10:10:14 PM UTC
Harvey West the stoic stance: be proud of your actions, not the results.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 7, 2013 12:29:19 PM UTC
Pride in English has a bad press and lumps hubris; just isolate the honor/dignity/doing something right regardless of payoff part.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 7, 2013 2:04:36 PM UTC
Aaron Elliott exactly. It requires setbacks, and does not requires you to overcome them. All you have to do is act with dignity.
If you are human, you will not be able ignore some of your enemies, and there is no point doing so and playing fake Olympian as they will bother you even more when you try to push them out of consciousness (recall that efforts to "not think" about something turns it into an obsession). Which is a good thing: without your enemies, life would be bland and boring; enemies are vastly more entertaining than friends, so one should exploit them. Instead of ignoring them, you should use them for fun and relaxation.
Reliable enemies will be observing you, even spying on you, so feed them with information while making it seem hard to get. Nothing frustrates them more than a) the knowledge that you are enjoying yourself, or, b) if you happen to be troubled, that they are not the cause of your discontent.
Never ignore interesting enemies as they may lose interest and you may develop other harmful vices. Make sure to sustain their envy or anger. The test is: if you think of your enemies outside of entertainment, you will be harmed by them and they may become fixations.
Homo sum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 2:46:13 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 3:30:36 PM UTC
"Avoid creating enemies" is for frauds & moralizing abetters. Enemies are part of life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 3:34:23 PM UTC
I don't like this sang-froid business. We are humans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 4:02:14 PM UTC
Mastroianni GC chi e NR?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 6:00:28 PM UTC
2 of my enemies died: the mathematician Paul Malliavin and another (prof of Management at U Mass Amherst). I felt reduced and empty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 7:16:01 PM UTC
There is a French novel inspired by the poem "Le corps de mon ennemi"
1) Is this true? 2) Can the web free us of the problem? 3) Should we limit credentialization beyond the minimum to force scholars to justify themselves through pertinence? 4) Where is the position between the Charybdis of university bullshit and the Scylla of the web charlatan and can peer-reviewing à la PloS direct us to the right spot? [PloS reviews the rigor of the scientific paper not the perceived importance]
THANKS friends for the collaboration.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 1:43:20 PM UTC
Peter Woodward please say more. Can you give examples? I have had a bad time with comments as many are both highly rated and highly unrigorous and stupid. The collective is subjected to contagions.
Reading that passage made me wonder if we could transfer to the further point that occasional sleep deprivation can also be good for us. From my quick, haphazard research, it seems to relieve depression and also have some cognitive benefit.
Maybe we should pull an all-nighter once in a while?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 4, 2013 10:55:37 AM UTC
Of course!
In my entire career I have never seen a financial journalist go to "the other side", that is pull the trigger or engage in risk taking or in any situation in which one can be exposed to harm from one's opinion. This can be generalized to journalists in general, who rarely, if ever, switch to doing, all the while pontificating on "Steve Job's mistakes" or similar purported errors of others, or praising Geithner and other powerful frauds. Jazi Zilber wondered why journalists seemingly so knowledgeable about politics never become politicians. It is the same problem: modern journalists are designed to be either cowards, or have a need to escape reality.
Yet the tragedy is that doers are in contact with the world through journalists.
(SKIN IN THE GAME (BOOK VII), comment)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 3, 2013 12:51:56 PM UTC
We should have a gallery of HEROIC LIVING JOURNALISTS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 3, 2013 1:37:28 PM UTC
Abhi R'krishnan skin in the game removes the problem of conflict of interest.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 3, 2013 2:54:29 PM UTC
Hale, Melik Kaylan a friend of mine has skin in the game and was brutalized by art smugglers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 9, 2013 12:32:48 AM UTC
Antonio Silva Francisco you didn't get the point. If the journalist was gunned down, he was taking risks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 1, 2013 9:07:52 PM UTC
EDITED:"Great books elude summaries. Great aphorisms resist expansion. The rest is just communication."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 3, 2013 4:13:08 PM UTC
My friends, this was not meant to be self-referential; just a general comment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 1, 2013 2:46:46 PM UTC
Jean-Philippe!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 28, 2013 4:32:24 PM UTC
Ban kanj posted an identical comment
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 28, 2013 4:50:32 PM UTC
Andreas most hacks bureaucrats and economists are fraudsters perceived as honoran
I find it insulting to nature that a single individual would seek immortality (a follow up to Jean-Louis Rheault's posts here and my statements of revulsion at Kurzweil's "singularity"). Immortality is not only unethical; it is even unnecessary.
My genes can be immortal; they are the ones that should seek immortality. And they tend to do.
We continue our lives, our genes diluted at every descendant, but at every generation there are more descendants that offset the dilution. Simply, if one has 2 descendants who in turn have 2 descendants, at the 2nd generation I duplicate myself in two halfs (so stay immortal in 2 parts), and as the fractal tree shows, at the 7th generation, I am present in 1/128th of each of the 128 individuals.
(I am simplifying. More technically, one needs a bit more than 2 decendants to stay "whole", owing to genetic drift from the replication errors of the DNA. So no wonder we have historically had ~ 2.2 children per woman. Further, I am not counting the fact that my genes also survive through indirect descendans, such as nephews, etc. And I am not counting re-combinations, i.e. descendants marrying each other).
We are fragile; our genes are antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 27, 2013 3:20:26 PM UTC
Adrian Scott, sophistry alert. Try to read statements /understand what was written before commenting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 27, 2013 3:26:06 PM UTC
Dexter, 1) they are less fragile than you, and 2) they have the potential to swell if a descendent becomes massively successful at replication (Attila the hun, for instance). Of course they can be unsuccessful and face extinction, but they would have lived longer than you and that's the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 27, 2013 3:44:26 PM UTC
Steven Dube I removed it. It was "we are potentially immortal"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 27, 2013 4:05:38 PM UTC
Arthur Miller , both, which is the Stoic cosmogony... as well as beliefs in Eastern religions...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 27, 2013 5:17:59 PM UTC
James Watters : Nietzsche "aut liberi aut libris" (either children or books)
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Ilmanen.pdf
Comments on the first part is welcome as the editors need the paper by Monday. Thanks in advance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 26, 2013 7:11:48 PM UTC
Ilmanen (ABSTRACT) "Selling financial investments with insurance or lottery characteristics should earn positive long-run premiums if investors like positive skewness enough to overpay for these characteristics. The empirical evidence is unambiguous: Selling insurance and selling lottery tickets have delivered positive long-run rewards in a wide range of investment contexts. Conversely, buying financial catastrophe insurance and holding speculative lottery-like investments have delivered poor long-run rewards. Thus, bearing small risks is often well rewarded, bearing large risks not"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 27, 2013 1:13:30 PM UTC
Thanks I uploaded the new version.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 29, 2013 3:07:26 AM UTC
Chere Nazima Nazim Khaled il faut aller sur le site web fooledbyrandomnes.com et enjoyer un mail. Merci.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/01/did-davos-steal-its-theme-author-who-hates-davos/61329/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 24, 2013 1:49:39 PM UTC
Nick Gall this is a bit of bullshit-with-citations. AF is defined as nonlinear response (long gamma) and all these people tried to generate a theory around resilience trying to have a generator idea of things rather than map response to a stressor. Which is why nobody could do anything about it; one needs to map it through the transfer theorem which bridges functional (nonlinear) and probability space (fat tails). In short unless one defines fragility as nonlinear response (necessarily), then all the theories are nice dinner stories, historical and biological theories to drown in.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 24, 2013 1:50:54 PM UTC
And the paper is here http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.1189.pdf
A drivers license is something binary: Pass/Fail. Nobody is foolish enough to try to get high scores in it to improve his CV with a "drivers license from the prestigious center X, summa cum laude". We understand the nonlinearity there; and we get the point that failing the test makes one a bad driver on the road, but better grades at the test won't necessarily make one a better driver. It is an entirely via negativa statement; failing (the negative) is where the information resides, where school knowledge may map to reality. The necessary is not to be confused with the causal.
Now try to translate the idea into other areas of education. The statement "failing to get a degree is bad for you" does not necessarily mean that "better grades are good". It may even mean that higher grades might indicate a sick mind. This is the difference between SATISFICING and OPTIMIZING. An ecologically calibrated person, aware of the fuzziness of the mapping betwen education and skills, should be able to aim for just pass, and not be penalized by the nerd wasting time on fitting his brain cells to the exam at the expense of other skills and activities, such as street fights, reading Montaigne, or meditating under a tree. Given that university knowledge does not map to true knowledge, to protect people from themselves, university degrees should never be anything but binary, without the fluff "honors, shmonors", etc.
(Anything that caps the variable and prevents scoring should work.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 27, 2013 2:06:21 PM UTC
Sophie Clement strangely, I had never heard of him but wrote a chapter in AF saying exactly the same things...
(I am lecturing today to bank inspectors. They are good people looking for tricks and heuristics.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 22, 2013 1:52:58 PM UTC
Franco Franco indeed there are mixed nonlinearities but there is a more complicated test that detects these.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 23, 2013 10:32:21 AM UTC
Rahul Bhattacharya, this is a different way to view things. Higher orders matter little if there are no large deviations (in fact the Gaussian has declining higher order effects that compensate for the nonlinearity). So fat tailed distributions destroy the truncation of the expansion at lower terms (the ^2, 2nd order).
So mathematically things would be {-1, 0, 1} rather than the dyadic {0,1}
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 9:54:08 PM UTC
The Arabs have:mandatory, encouraged, permitted-neutral, discouraged, banned
The question is: from the risk management point of view how do I decide whether I should move my family out of the city to the country side, from downtown to greener district etc?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 5:26:35 PM UTC
Odds are 94% BS. Simply because of data mining. But the correlation can tell you that odds are lead does not *decrease* the crime rate (some via negativa value).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 10:11:46 AM UTC
I tried reading it but I gave up when I saw it was limited to Papua NG.
I found it after searching the net for something about side effects from caffeine dependence. I wonder what you guys think about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 9:48:56 PM UTC
more wine than coffee. And it is concave, so small quantitie.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 11:18:40 PM UTC
Very suspicious. I wonder if Spyros has something to say. If the fellow were true, then the life expectancy of coffee drinkers should be lower, in the aggregate, plus morbidity, etc. We've been drinking it for a long time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 10:09:48 AM UTC
Banking has changed, coffee has not. And it is not the survival of coffee but that of those who consume it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 10:10:41 AM UTC
Joel Smith I agree, but we can at least rule out coffee as a CAUSE of death.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 7:30:09 PM UTC
Yes but they made me gain 12 lbs!
I think "collective" and "unfit" are backwards. Should be:
"This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is transferring fragility from the unfit to the collective."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 1:14:15 PM UTC
Yes transfer of fragility -> whole spectrum, like transfer of wealth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 1:31:49 PM UTC
transferring antifragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 12:30:30 PM UTC
Only The Black Swan. I can't find a way to translated Antiragile into Arabic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 3:45:06 PM UTC
What should the word ANTIFRAGILE be in Arabic?
http://www.levantineheritage.com/pdf/LMD_April2012_Philip-Mansel.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 10:39:13 AM UTC
Michael Mitsakos sent it to me. But there is a discussion of Mansel's idea (and book) in Antifragile, page 95.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 11:55:34 AM UTC
The power of the Levant is that they had some kind of covenant with occupiers; pay taxes to the new mafia don.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 4:18:54 PM UTC
Things are deeper and older. The Phoenicians had a network of city states, nonaggressive (aside from Carthage, even then). They retained the language but gave in to the Hellenistic culture.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 7:16:42 PM UTC
Hale Soydan Worthy the definition of Levant mutated to just Eastern Med: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestinian Auth. In other words, old Canaan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 9:31:00 AM UTC
4 books coming out as "Incerto" in 2015.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 2:09:55 PM UTC
Grand Central is preserved... and beautiful
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 19, 2013 4:28:47 PM UTC
It is romantic love that is AF, not the individuals involved.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 19, 2013 2:12:52 PM UTC
Of course Festina Lente in Book II
These are 1st Century terra cotta oil lamps, one notices embellishments. (Later Christian era oil lamps are of course adorned with religious symbols).
I am now convinced, looking at a modern wall, that smooth surfaces hurt us deeply into our soul (We have already discussed how we crave some class of variations, something that can be mapped by Jensen's inequality).
(We are antifragile to dimentionality of objects. I feel that looking at a modern architectural object is an eyesore, even a soul-sore. I wonder if grafiti are a naturalistic rebellion against low-dimension).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 17, 2013 6:42:58 AM UTC
Plants don't boost productivity; absence of dimension lowers it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 17, 2013 6:45:10 AM UTC
Philistinism, rationalistic barbarity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 17, 2013 7:21:35 AM UTC
The pyramids are one instance of low dimentional and geometric found in the ancient worls, though a couple of millennia earlier, but again that was the top-down pharaonic state, focusing on the purely functional. Compare to the rich Corinthian columns of the classical era.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 17, 2013 8:42:36 AM UTC
This shows the evolution from Doric to Corinthian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schema_Saeulenordnungen.jpg Arab architecture is Corinthian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 17, 2013 11:57:14 AM UTC
Robert Kinosian that's part of the problem: things were not made to be disposable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 2:02:04 PM UTC
They are never smooth. Deserts are full of dunes and waves. The only exception is a view of the open ocean from a boat.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 20, 2013 6:34:25 PM UTC
Large open spaces are fractal, not smooth/Euclidian
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 10:54:59 AM UTC
It looks like fractal self-similarity is the best way to increase richness without increasing randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 21, 2013 9:01:21 PM UTC
In other words high dimensionality under constraints of harmony.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 22, 2013 11:56:01 AM UTC
Fractal roughness is self-similar
(revised aphorism)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:16:24 PM UTC
How about art? How about life?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:04:51 PM UTC
Ban and J-L, there is too much convergence here!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 16, 2013 9:14:25 PM UTC
NO pietro since perfection is defined as what cannot improve
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 10:52:49 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 4:53:44 PM UTC
questa primavera a Milano, Roma o in Toscana
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 3, 2013 2:24:14 PM UTC
Saro a Milano il 24 maggio e 19 settembre.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 3, 2013 2:24:37 PM UTC
E in Ascona il 24 Marso
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 8:51:42 AM UTC
Pietro where do you live?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:40:24 AM UTC
la prossima volta.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 14, 2013 8:25:04 AM UTC
Hi, nice to hear from you again. Yea, a rather more technical compendium, Metaprobability, Convexity and Heuristics, freely downloadable on my site.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 13, 2013 9:29:20 PM UTC
Didn't look at the review but the picture is fake (photoshopped to swell).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 13, 2013 10:05:15 PM UTC
Still haven't read it but I WANT to be disliked by transhumanists.
(Sunday in Rome).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 13, 2013 10:36:07 AM UTC
Dolce vita... Unfortunately there is this internet connection....
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 13, 2013 10:39:33 AM UTC
It is about economic robustness.. You can work the land in emergency in the event of extreme situations... but not normally so your consumption is calibrated to 7/6 of work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 13, 2013 11:01:52 AM UTC
I can probably do expresso at St Eustacio tomorrow around 6ish for anyone who wants to show up ... will confirm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 14, 2013 8:23:08 AM UTC
Yes. 6 PM café next to San Eustacio. Forgot the name but that's supposed to be the real thing. Who's coming?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 14, 2013 8:23:19 AM UTC
Are you in Rome Sam?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 10, 2013 12:19:57 PM UTC
He is clueless... I never read him.
http://btlecture.eventbrite.co.uk
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:16:13 PM UTC
Now only 17 left...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:16:32 PM UTC
I posted so that the balance would go to FB friends.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 2:32:20 PM UTC
Now Full. Thanks friends
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 6:59:48 PM UTC
Which character attack on FB?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 11, 2013 11:56:43 PM UTC
I don't remember who mentioned that Blackwell is the best bookstore in Europe. It is.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/makridakis.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 7, 2013 1:27:54 PM UTC
Jana Komankova There is a difference betwen very ill and mildly ill.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:33:11 AM UTC
That's not what Spyros is trying to say. He is simply wondering whether high blood pressure is something that protects us from the effects of aging. Nothing appears to contradict such a hypothesis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 8:38:32 PM UTC
Rosetta, please a)do not troll these comments and b) reveal your real name.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 8:13:56 PM UTC
The stairs: exactly a Heaviside function, to the left is convex, to the right concave. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/stairs.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 8:42:31 PM UTC
The stick is the phase transition. But many sticks makes it smooth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 1:35:21 AM UTC
Yes, make a demarcation between the harmful and the harmless ones
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 2:04:19 AM UTC
Rosetta, please never mention the FU money. It is the result not the cause.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 6:01:55 PM UTC
Linas Rukas you are right. I have been callling fraudsters fraudsters. This is to keep doing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 19, 2013 7:51:41 PM UTC
NO, No, Chris Ionescu I have been doing it forever, especially when all it could bring was injury to my career.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 1:41:08 AM UTC
ban kanj what do you mean by "sayeb"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 8:57:28 PM UTC
I would flip it: the situation makes the saint. Some people are insensitive to environmental bribes, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 9:04:51 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn just discovered reading your text that in Hebrew blind is
עור which means "one-eyed" in Arabic (3or ->a3war).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 9:06:56 PM UTC
(we have the same word with a slight variation a3ma, סומא)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 9:40:48 PM UTC
Yes M-SH-K-L mishklet is problem, mashkal is a fight, etc. But it comes from Aramaic (4 roots). The closest triplet root is SH-K-L, a form, but can't be it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 6, 2013 9:44:26 PM UTC
K-S-L ->lazy in Arabic
http://www.project-syndicate.org/focus/2012-year-end-series
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 4, 2013 9:25:35 PM UTC
Nicolas, surgeons have skin in the game (to some extent) in the form of liability. Not bureaucrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 4, 2013 9:54:19 PM UTC
It has to be somewhat symmetric. Or less asymmetric than what we have now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 5:17:36 PM UTC
milton friedman?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 5:18:00 PM UTC
I would flip it; make it painful to do the wrong thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 4, 2013 1:37:22 AM UTC
Guru Anaerobic bank robbers make much less money (net) than bankers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 5:18:44 PM UTC
Hi, are we cousins ...metaphorically?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 6:48:22 PM UTC
I was scared for a moment...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 12:50:29 PM UTC
Philosopher, c'est apprendre a mourir (Montaigne, recycling Cicero)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 5:20:02 PM UTC
By some coincidence I was reading Montaigne's discussion of Cato's view of death...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 10:05:24 PM UTC
Makes me look 12 lbs heavier
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 10:53:43 PM UTC
Still makes me look heavier!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 8:29:36 AM UTC
True I don't look I was born in 1924... I am doing something right.
If you are right on factor 1 (& possibly 2), the rest is irrelevant. But the problem is that those trained in debate will drag you into factors 3 through 99, just to distract from the core issue.
I have decided to avoid Cambridge and Oxford Union debates, those discussion with people trained in argument by debating societies. The Oxbridge system of "covering all sides of an issue" drives you to the irrelevant and drowns your Factor 1 argument. If you do things right you should have "only one argument", which clashes with this culture.
(This graph also explains in statistical terms the "lady complains too much", or why a "balanced" view presenting drawbacks is everything but balanced.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 1:19:50 PM UTC
Christian Sagmeister indeed, but they are orthogonal, so they count each as 1 "argument".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 1:32:30 PM UTC
Christian Sagmeister this is why it takes a lot a lot of thinking to make something simple. But in complex systems, Factor 1 is often simple to find and itself not much of a linear combination of variables. This graph is based on a Gaussian matrix.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 1:41:38 PM UTC
Christian Sagmeister "it is not the quantity of arguments but their quality".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 1:49:41 PM UTC
The fox/hedgehog is largely inapplicable to complex systems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 2:30:35 PM UTC
My FACTOR 1= Skin in the Game. The rest is chickens**t.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 2:32:34 PM UTC
Edward think in terms of contribution to deviations (not variance). In fat tails very concentrated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 2:37:16 PM UTC
Jan Novotny bingo. But follow the conditionality: conditional on using a lot of independent arguments, something is likely to be missing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 7:41:40 PM UTC
After the statement "Stalin killed 20+million people", every additional information weakens the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 8:26:13 PM UTC
Statistics: adding variables requires some penalty as variables are deemed, because of overfitting, to induce LOSS of information (Akaike AIC, similar penalties, etc.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 12:59:21 PM UTC
Joel in Medicine Factor 1 will be a combination. I needs to be independent from factor 2. I suspect Factor1 will be 99% (disease of civilization)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 1:00:45 PM UTC
i.e. Factor 1 will be a linear combination of sugar, NYT, frequent meals, no starvation, etc. Factor 2 might be living near a humid lake...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 3, 2013 10:20:41 PM UTC
Please no fox-hedge hog nonsense here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 4, 2013 1:35:56 AM UTC
The trick is that convexity is not necessarily the second factor or lower. It can be the first.
I am even more suspicious when someone benefiting from it insists on explaining why it is in my "best interest".
(adapting aphorism)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 4:16:36 PM UTC
Yes, Anne Strange, trust me on this.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 4:24:41 PM UTC
I think J-L has a ton of these.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 4:27:44 PM UTC
(I am reporting because I was just offered a "mutually beneficial" transaction).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 4:36:03 PM UTC
The worst are the ones "good for you", one step beyond the mutually beneficial.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 6:03:00 PM UTC
Sohrab E-z what was it in the original language?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 6:21:04 PM UTC
This is PErsian or Urdu?
Rewarded for failure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 1:38:35 PM UTC
I have a heuristic. The more decorated the book, the less the sales (with a low standard deviation). It seems as if these are obtained as compensation. Now the same applies to individuals. There is something alienating about becoming member of the establishment.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/precautionary.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 29, 2012 4:10:49 PM UTC
Further, this is to identify problems, not to deal with solutions. Just risk detection. Cameron Yick we will debate later whether regulation, liability, or some other solution needs to be found ---simply to avoid polluting the issue with political considerations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 29, 2012 4:11:24 PM UTC
Alexander Boland the risk is one-sided. That's key.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 29, 2012 6:31:20 PM UTC
It is key that concavity to parameter implies fragility to both variables and centrally to *model error*.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 29, 2012 9:40:44 PM UTC
Nicholas the power of a heuristic is in getting information from 2nd order effects. Acceleration of harm is quite sufficient as a detection mechanism,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 29, 2012 11:30:48 PM UTC
Matan Shenhav a model has variables. In 30 years (I am aging... but happily) I have almost never seen anyone miss a variable --typically people put too much, not too little (data mining). They do not even have to have the right first derivative (say, in a linear regression, the coefficient). So the limitation of this heuristic is missing variables. But there is something else: the same argument flips and since CONCAVITY <-> LEFT TAIL <-> FRAGILITY , you can just invoke left tail and forget about concavity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 1:24:23 PM UTC
Friends, the exercise here and what we propose are not panaceas, rather a fast-and-frugal heuristic. In other words, to make things *incrementally* more operational than the vague precautionary principle. The principle as it is is not applicable without narrowing it down a bit. So success should be measured in the incremental, not the absolute.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 1:42:06 PM UTC
Dru Stevenson absence of scientific certainty comes in 2 kinds: convex and concave. This is our improvement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 1:44:46 PM UTC
Further, this links to the 4th Quadrant here (the essay ends with CONVEXITY or CONCAVITY in the 4th quadrant). http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 5:31:17 PM UTC
Jan, this is very common and you can get information up to some realistic second order effect. We start moving X first by DeltaX, then P conditional on Delta-X and check the sensitivity. I call it "shadow gamma", etc, in Dynamic Hedging (1997). In stress test you use a "driver", then move other P with it. Then you perturbate the vector P around the cluster. You might miss a few higher order effects, but typically the information from this is huge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 31, 2012 4:57:40 PM UTC
Rupert Read Pascal showed that we formulate decisions from payoff * probability not probabilities alone. But this is only because "modern" probability was misdefined. The original meaning of probability was broader than p, meant what we approve of, trust, in other words what we need to decide, pisteion -> "provare".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 1:57:57 PM UTC
Something central. The note as presented does not link left tail to concavity (the Taleb and Douady theorems, 2013). But what we are measuring is not concavity, but concavity as a signal of danger from the presence of a thick left tail. Now if you believe in left tail, then you can automatically decide WITHOUT concavity. Look at figure 31 http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/graphicaltour.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 10:24:04 PM UTC
Marco and Rupert, I think the conditions under which such action should be deemed wise are very, very restrictive. You need to eliminate all possible side effects and have certainty about model error...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 11:59:43 AM UTC
I figured out the boundary between via positiva and negativa on statistical grounds. If I am mildly ill (1 standard deviation STD) odds are that nature dealt with the problem and is better than medication (with small upside, 1 STD, and unknown downside, possibly 10 STD) ->via negativa. But for extreme illness, 4 STD, nature had 5000 less exposure to the problem, hence I have more upside from treatment (hence convex). Emergency room surgery is vastly more convex.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/mishiko.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 7:39:32 PM UTC
look at the reference
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 7:53:47 PM UTC
Joseph Perkovich in the text I say nothing that is not in the scientific literature --with mathematical interpretations linked to my profession. The idea of a trained scientist is to never stray.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 7:54:54 PM UTC
Jan Novotny there are many such articles. And a book reviewer is more fragile than an author.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 8:01:41 PM UTC
Jaffer Ali so are the Bible and the New Testament.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 8:51:21 PM UTC
Her father wrote the most elegant (used it so much) expression of the recurrence in 2D vs 3D: "A drunk man might find his way home, a drunk bird is lost forever".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 9:03:37 PM UTC
Jeffrey Cash what kind of bullshit is this? This is not criticism, but misreferencing. I am tired of idiots lecturing me on "taking criticism" or similar BS (particularly in the Black Swan days) as an excuse for perpetuating misdeeds. And this is the NYT the prime real-estate in the world for book reviews, by a huge margin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 29, 2012 10:38:43 PM UTC
Where is Christopher Chabris when we need him?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 12:25:50 PM UTC
Salon rules...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 2:29:33 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault Béru's comments were not snide. He just writes in Argot.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 12:18:45 PM UTC
Tali Iwanir thanks for figuring out that readers want "System 2".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 4, 2013 2:49:12 PM UTC
Depends. A young book is fragile, up to the sales of, say, 50,000 copies. Then it is the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 4, 2013 3:31:02 PM UTC
Here are comments on The Black Swan. Sounds familiar? http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/my_review_of_ta.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 10, 2013 12:23:01 PM UTC
John Faithful Hamer critics cease to exist a month after the book is out. And I am sure she did not bother my book. Granted the book is fragile early on, but her review is too stupid to hurt sales.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/myths.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 27, 2012 5:59:22 PM UTC
Jaffer, Montaigne is worth paying for and having by your bed in hard copy. I read him in French (or in retranscription into modern French) but I happened to see the Penguin translation. Outstanding.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 27, 2012 3:49:19 PM UTC
Fake smiles are so easy to detect.
"New year resolutions" are typically modernistic self-enhancement aims such as losing weight/finding love/improving tennis/healthier habits. A loftier resolution: commit to at least one act of *ethical courage*, those acts of honor that counter harmful frauds (by individuals or groups such as media/ bankers/ politicians/ lobbyists/ pharma/ InternationalFraternityofHarmfulEmptySuitsWithNoSkinintheGame/ you choose) *and* put yourself at risk, professional, reputational, financial or physical for the sake of your opinions.
These acts are precisely defined as going against your self interest and call a fraud a fraud for the benefit (and the safety) of the collective, or shout the truth when it has everything going against it, everything.
In short *skin in the game* in 2013, for you and others. The more risks you take for your opinions the more honorable you will feel.
Happy 2013 everyone!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 27, 2012 1:36:56 PM UTC
Jörgen Modin the idea of skin in the game is true filtering/signaling. And imposing skin in the game in others forces balance, with people harmed and not harming others by their mistakes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 10:00:40 PM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault Béru might be Fat Tony. What do you think?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 11:07:12 PM UTC
Actually we differ. I prefer those who practice to those who believe. Don't believe in belief.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 28, 2012 11:08:14 PM UTC
Rosetta Muravi my "friends" turned on me during the dark years so I know the problem. I know it all too well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 29, 2012 5:14:36 PM UTC
Oliver Mayor it is about frauds who *harm* others. Recall transfers of fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 30, 2012 4:12:41 PM UTC
Nelson Mandela... A great man. Syria needs a Nelson Mandela.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 8:34:07 PM UTC
Ms Taru, did you read about these in the book or are you rehashing stuff from the press? A soccer mom is not defined as a) being a mother and b) having children who play soccer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 10:20:19 PM UTC
Philip Terry fragility is often measurable...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 27, 2012 2:02:48 PM UTC
Pietro I noticed that things built before the last Century were almost never ugly...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 26, 2012 12:19:36 AM UTC
I've already written on it... BOOK 1 of AF...
Mathematics/numbers are flat,platonic. No roughness.
That is why numbers feel alien, and people hate them
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 8:45:13 PM UTC
Yes... but mathematics can produce the Mandelbrot set!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 11:58:31 AM UTC
taxation and competition between cantons. In the US Federal dominates.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 1:14:15 AM UTC
Thanks Nassim!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 1:14:58 AM UTC
There you go! Indeed, like forest fires.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 24, 2012 10:44:59 AM UTC
Pinker's point is actually even more mistaken. Firearms are Mediocristan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 24, 2012 12:10:21 PM UTC
BTW Thanks friends this Op-Ed was written thanks to the dialog here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/stabilization-wont-save-us.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 24, 2012 1:54:47 PM UTC
The problem with such killers as cereals/orange juice/etc. is that they are 1) systematic & 2) marketed in a way to deceive you. It is no different from mass killing with cyanide, except slower. Murders are not systematic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 11:11:54 PM UTC
Simple: if you kill someone with a gun, or poison him with a slow-acting substance, both intentionally, isn't the guilt the same? So forget the sensionalism of the crime, and judge the effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 26, 2012 10:03:44 AM UTC
The point is that if you were to put energy into arms vs corn syrup & similar things, then you need to do it by a ratio of 100 to 1. ANything else is just populist/sensational
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 11:02:33 PM UTC
Baroque music. More modern: Mahler. Most of the concerts I attend are musica sacra, typically in churches. Also like muwasha7at poetry song.
Did it ever hit you that natural settings are never ugly? Paradoxically we seem to rest better under some type of natural "mess". My eye gets more solace looking at the "messy" Christmas tree rather than the smooth wall next to it.
We can generalize to life; just as we get repetitive stress injuries doing well-organized movements, our soul gets repetitive stress injury when deprived of fractal depth.
PS- Consider book that have survived, from the "messy" bible to Montaigne's essays: depth has these non-businessbook-like attributes. Which is why when I was told about Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan "your books are fun to read BUT disorganized" I understood fun to read BECAUSE disorganized (or fractally organized).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:24:35 PM UTC
Yes, David, but things come in a package. You cannot have depth within standardized structures.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:36:50 PM UTC
Things that self-organize tend to be fractal, in a natural or ancestral setting (considers medieval villages). Which is the problem of modernity removing this effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:42:24 PM UTC
Pedro Poitevin poetry tends to be rich, organic-like, and fractal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 4:05:05 PM UTC
David, poetry (unless free-form) is necessarily fractal, up to some self-affine transformation. Book of poetry/Poem/Strophe or Stanza/..../Verse
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 4:15:17 PM UTC
No, David Boxenhorn . Look at a tree in front of you. Fractal mean recursive and/or self-affine transformations. In other words, layering. A building has no layering. Nature does.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 4:22:02 PM UTC
No, David Boxenhorn. For prose to be like a forest, you need layering, in other words depth+structure+wealth. Most of what is written lacks layering.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 5:03:47 PM UTC
Yes Graeme Blake I like villages not nature... But I got a barbell solved by living very near NYC and working while looking at trees... without being in NYC...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 23, 2012 5:17:48 PM UTC
Anyone here knows much about the Gaudi architecture? I felt I had been there in a previous life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 1:18:29 PM UTC
Thanks Nadia, is there anything from him that is short (TNO is 4 volumes).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 22, 2012 5:23:17 PM UTC
Ktenneh Lnomat not to disappoint you but parts of the Incerto are now 17 years old (Dynamic Hedging, ancestor of AF, has been in MS form for 20); FBR, 12; TBS, 6...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 22, 2012 5:35:50 PM UTC
The reason this page is not on holiday: I decided to take a break rest and stay home to recover from the book tour and it is when I am doing nothing that I tend to post the most, write Op-Eds (NYT), scientific papers, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 24, 2012 12:10:33 PM UTC
BTW Thanks friends this Op-Ed was written thanks to the dialog here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/stabilization-wont-save-us.html
Cognitive dissonance works for self-perception (making someone feel he is not a fraud by demonizing messengers), but not to the outside. Transforming someone "who calls a fraud a fraud" into an "egomaniac" is certainly harmful for one's social life (assuming people don't know him in person), but has benefits for a book: nobody wants to read books by/have a dinner conversation with/ colorless textbookwriting nutty professors with a "well organized" discourse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 2:34:25 PM UTC
"egomaniac" is signaling for "trustworthy"...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 3:06:27 PM UTC
Paul Harte there is nothing wrong about being incompetent if you are not harming others. That's central.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 3:16:37 PM UTC
Terrance Jackson in other words one should have empathy for frauds? This is called casuistry. Where is Eleni Panagiotarakou ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 3:21:08 PM UTC
(It went to spam... new posters often have comments going to spam).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 3:27:01 PM UTC
Bruce, you immediately assume that people who are called egomaniacs by their enemies are actually unpleasant in person?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 3:57:41 PM UTC
Typical conversation.... https://twitter.com/graubart/status/282151683943968768
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 3:59:24 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou only a true Mediterranean classicist appreciates the notion of false humility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 4:00:20 PM UTC
Aaron Haspel ICHES hamful empty suits. Empty suits are OK if they don't injure others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 4:23:14 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou is Greek-Orthodox. Unlike the protestants, we never disowned classical culture.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 6:57:59 PM UTC
Rani, all prizes are out of the picture. All.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 7:12:52 PM UTC
Jon Hardy, this is precisely a demonizing translation: when I read what you are describing and what you are expressing; so "confidence", "enthusiasm", "belief", "courage" and "sincerity" becomes "egomania" when someone is ALONE in fighting for an idea. Quite dispiriting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 7:30:43 PM UTC
So Jon Hardy to play Socratic here, by ego you seem to mean determination.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 8:28:06 PM UTC
The correct meaning of egomania is someone who (pathologically, since *mania*) believes he is at the center of the world, with a narcissistic element, not someone with confidence, sense of mission, etc. (or an obsessive sense of mission...) That might actually apply to athletes who are aonly after some self-improvement or a score. This is where Jon Hardy you need to learn to use vocabulary that matches what you are trying to express.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 9:17:38 PM UTC
I think I found the problem: irreverence is what scares people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 10:43:45 PM UTC
John Searles obviously you are trying to lecture an author to write on YOUR terms. This is exactly arrogance. (The other notion is that my books ...sell. Empiricism, not theories. Which makes the statement foolish arrogance).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 21, 2012 11:21:15 PM UTC
The problem is that I sold 3 million copies of TBS written in a specific style, essay with depth sentence-wise, parables, Fat Tony, historical breadth, etc.. I would be a moron to change my style and listen to "professional" "Expert" advice of how to write books... I even insisted on having the same fonts as the other books of the INCERTO.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 10:47:24 PM UTC
Yes but his argument doesn't make things unpredictable in the aggregate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 11:10:00 PM UTC
The moves are Gaussian (he relies on quantum randomness).
How do individual researcher gains access to all of these scientific papers? Is it normal to pay 30$ for every click or I am missing something?
In my country, we do not have any single library (neither university nor public) with connection to pubmed, athens, nature, etc..
I am not poor nor beggar, but certainly can not afford myself this "public information"..
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 11:11:35 PM UTC
That was the principal reason I started an academic career: I wanted access to journals. Stanislav in general the papers are freely available on the site of the author, or circulating in nongated PDFs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 3:34:35 PM UTC
Via negativa! Of course! Thanks Pablo.
"Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior." - Wikipedia, 2012 AD (or any modern law textbook)
"Law is the art of the good and the equitable." - Publius Iuventius Celsus ~ 100 AD
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 11:29:00 PM UTC
Perfect!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 3:41:53 PM UTC
Frano, you will get another mention in one of my books.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 11:27:04 PM UTC
That's standard Arrow Pratt! Also based on Jensen's Inequality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 1:42:40 AM UTC
More x leads to less pleasure... so concave utility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 3:59:03 PM UTC
Wisdom = convex heuristic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 4:23:06 PM UTC
Wisdom is convex owing to having survived time...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 11:40:53 AM UTC
Yes VIrgil a thief with work ethics...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 11:45:40 AM UTC
If you want to improve the world, put ethics ahead of knowledge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 1:35:05 PM UTC
Walter Marsh Bingo!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 19, 2012 6:00:49 PM UTC
The idea is to suffer consequences when you are wrong. Hedge fund managers have skin in the game, usually. So do non predictive journalists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 3:32:07 PM UTC
A politician needs to represent his constituency. Otherwise there is an agency problem. Tamer Khraisha the other problems are not part of this discussion.
Now half way through ‘Antifragility’ (I’m a very slow reader). The surprise is how light and entertaining I find it. I read a few pages at a time at random moments and only for pleasure, almost as if it was a good ‘bande dessinée”
I realized today that this unexpected reaction is a direct result of having spent the past year on this Facebook page. In a classic Via Negativa way, the unique nature of the medium, the postings, the struggle with ambiguous aphorisms, the response of others and the admirable daily personal attention of the author to his site have all amazingly contributed to prevent a clutter of what Antifragilitiy is NOT.
Looking back, I now see how this immediate ‘like’ feedback loop from the author and others worked to ‘break early’ my running down many rabbit holes of my own sophistry, subtle prejudices and misunderstandings. I often came to understand my own misreadings when I saw others doing it and being corrected.
With all the not this & not that chipped away piece by piece, over many discussions, the book itself now appears lucidly clear and elegantly simple. And all its personal quirky idiosyncrasies that seem to bother some reviewers only make it that much better.
Since many people have thanked Nassim for writing the book, I want to thank him even more for his attentive and dedicated presence in this forum and the sustained vigor with which he has always kept it fresh.. And of course a big thank you as well to all the regulars who added greatly to the symphony of ideas and always cordial discourse. It would have never been the same book, or the same journey without this truly exceptional forum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 24, 2012 12:16:51 AM UTC
I know John Faithful Hamer , Jean-Louis Rheault and Eleni I owe you a trip.. .will schedule once I come out of lethargy. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 2:15:54 PM UTC
Optionality, hidden convexity
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 17, 2012 8:30:50 PM UTC
Russ Greene meaning skin in the game as well
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 17, 2012 11:33:03 PM UTC
Carl Fakhry Kimos if you do things you don't understand, they are conditionally convex. Hard to explain before dinner owing to time limit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 1:14:10 PM UTC
Eamonn Molloy this is sophisty. No sophistry here. Understood?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 1:24:21 PM UTC
TO continue, a principle is not a law, it is like a metaheuristic something that is superceded by other moral or risk-based considerations. So please no sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 1:41:07 PM UTC
Eamonn Molloy Invoking "freedom of speech" to nitpick and disrupt in a salon is another form of sophistry. You are free to write whatever you want, but cannot blame an academic journal for not publishing you on grounds of "freedom of speech". Inhibiting freedom of speech wd be if I stopped you from saying something on YOUR OWN own site, or on a public forum. Sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 1:56:35 PM UTC
Eamonn Molloy an academic should go write papers not troll websites with pseudologic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 2:48:04 PM UTC
Note that it does not mean that tinkering always superior to knowledge, but that, in matters related to real life, tinkering without knowledge is superior to knowledge without tinkering.
Shukran ya Dr. Nassim. ;(
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 16, 2012 7:41:10 PM UTC
Explained in my book. Studies include people who fast after a huge breakfast.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 16, 2012 5:31:06 PM UTC
True for Orwell ! The last person who should have been quoted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 16, 2012 10:02:32 PM UTC
I know. The list should have included other people. Has been changed.
(1) the Latin for "game" is ludus (ludus, ludi masc.) not ludes (though many derivatives in English inherit it thus, e.g. prelude, preludes; interlude, interludes).
(2) the text for Lucretius 6.677 is "maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit" not "maxima quae vivit ..." (which does not occur in any MSS I can find and makes no sense anyway) as your editors would have it.
Thanks for the books! (And for bringing Seneca back as a serious thinker in Antifragile. Many of us who read him for a living these days have not gotten past envying him the ability to do what we cannot--be independently wealthy and meet death purposefully without batting an eye. As a group we often appear more interested in being praised and getting tenure than in being Stoic, though I have had the good fortune to meet many exceptions to this rule over the course of my academic career. Now I just need to make sure I become one of the good guys.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 15, 2012 5:40:13 PM UTC
ludes is active form... Other is typo
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Rankbooksales.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 13, 2012 4:33:59 PM UTC
This is not a prediction but a translation rank->relative sales.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 13, 2012 4:34:18 PM UTC
called it prediction it is not so
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 13, 2012 5:21:49 PM UTC
this is mere nonlinear interpolation between data points
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 13, 2012 6:50:28 PM UTC
OK, OK, added a sentence: Note this is more robust in deriving the sales of the lower ranking edition (Subscript[r, y]< Subscript[r, x]) because of inferential problems in the presence of fat-tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 17, 2012 11:37:26 PM UTC
It is easy to reverse, but with error (Hill estimator) but I only use the method for semi-tails, interpolating.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 17, 2012 11:44:45 PM UTC
Not really, it is tail exponent, but I use it away from full tail.
http://www.edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 20, 2012 7:26:49 PM UTC
Jan, antifragile (if left bounded bets): a portfolio of options is more CONVEX than an option on a portfolio) & convex =antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 10:40:29 PM UTC
First reviewer who got the concexity
The implication is obvious: only treat the seriously ill (and overtreat them!). But for every person very ill (say 4 STD away for the norm), there are 5000 slightly ill (1 STD away). There we see why pharma has an incentive to treat mildly ill people.
Note that the iatrogenics are the same for both mildly ill and very ill.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 2:56:13 PM UTC
JB have you tried via negativa? There seems to be evidence from intermittent fasting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:00:12 PM UTC
David, of course we have no evidence of effectiveness of treatment for life expectancy. But they bundle the mildly ill and very ill. This allows us to see the underlying nonlinearity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:04:21 PM UTC
We see it starkly here. But note I am not against medicine, only against overtreatment of marginal cases.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:08:11 PM UTC
Spyros, Ben Goldacre and I met 2 days ago. This is the result of the conversation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:25:31 PM UTC
Kieran Denieffe nice story but I would like to see the evidence of effectiveness of pharmacological treatments for these. The NNT (number needed to treat) is 1 in 53. You see this is half the argument. The other one is much more powerful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:57:11 PM UTC
Ian Chui the noncardio is unrelated to blood pressure, hence flat to condition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 12:28:31 AM UTC
Kieran Denieffe I have some news for you in the paper Spyros Makridakis wrote he finds no evidence of improvement from treatment, and no evidence = no evidence; science works that way.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 5:43:42 AM UTC
Anna Karanina that's Spyros Makridakis ' point. We may have high blood pressure as a PROTECTION in old age.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 16, 2012 9:53:06 PM UTC
Excellent but no blood pressure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 12:32:13 AM UTC
The difference between virtue ethics (ancients) and rule-based (Kant)
NEITHER STATE NOR MARKET. The fiscal cliff is not really a "cliff"; the entire country will not fall into the ocean should we hit it. This cliff is a bump, but a necessary one, and the fear it instills should jolt us into solving the problems of both taxation and deficit, and find inventive solutions. But deep down in me there is a wish to hit that cliff, in order to accelerate a remedy for our disease. We are in a situation of learned helplessness and it is imperative to break out of it. Anything is preferable to the situation we are in currently.
For there is a issue, and one that begs for an urgent solution, and one that has eluded us and keeps been postponed. Almost five years into the latest crisis nothing has been done to address the source of our problem. In fact, we had it artificially good, with Novocain painkillers dumped on us by the Federal Reserve in the form of stabilization policies, with such success that we forget about our real structural defect. As commendable as such policy can be in averting chaos, it has certainly let deep problems fester in silence —and nothing has been done to fix the system. Nothing was done to cure the demoralizing inequity that bankers have continued to get rich using our tax money as both fuel and backstop. And our stabilization policies tend to disproportionately benefit a certain class in society—the rich and asset holders, rather than those it is meant to protect. All of this is done on borrowed money.
What we have been witnessing is the magnification effect of policy errors in a complex system. Consider the result of the Iraq war which, among other adverse effects, cost between 40 and 100 times its original estimates; and second, a financial crisis that results from an error that multiplied the consequences hidden risks in the system. Further, imagine that just as we didn't forecast these errors and the consequences, we will miss the next ones. Yet there have been no reaction to think deeply into the error prone system outside the conventional bipartisan paradigm of state versus market. No, it is not state versus market. The problem is simpler —and bipartisan. It is fragile versus antifragile.
THEN I DESCRIBE AN ANTIFRAGILE POLITICAL ECONOMY: 1) one that benefits from mistakes 2) the size/centralization matters more than the policital system, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 6:41:16 PM UTC
I hate to write articles. Books are more fun...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 6:51:33 PM UTC
Now in the rest I need 5 principles. Obviosously, 1) is skin in the game, and 2) is decentralized decision-making. but 3) is foreign policy that does not repress volatility. Now 4 and 5)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 6:54:41 PM UTC
4) is state for emeergency room, but should do it well + via negative...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 7:14:00 PM UTC
Yes, the more centralized the government, the easier it is to game it and the easiest for corporations to get bigger
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 7:25:25 PM UTC
too conciliatory, you think? bipartisan instead of saying they are all full of crap?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 7:26:47 PM UTC
Joseph Perkovich a large share of the web posters are unpaid, but trolls.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 7:44:18 PM UTC
John Chisholm don't worry about typos.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 12:40:59 PM UTC
Jaffer and Killian, please DO NOT fight here. Do it privately on some other forum. You are both valuable here. Killian has insights but can be categorical about matters out of context.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 12:43:22 AM UTC
I wrote the end but not allowed to show before publication
[Now adding APHORISMS.
I am having some fun translating book reviewer jargon, particularly from my experience with TBS. A real book should elicit a complaint about lack of immediately visible structure; so "messy" translates into "I don't see the junk food equivalent (cliff note)", hence this is a reading experience with surprises & atmosphere, not a textbook. Note that I intentionally made the INCERTO Trilogy completely impossible to speed-read by scanning & following subtitles. I caught a few cheaters (Tyler Cowen and Gregg Easterbrook) speedreading TBS. Remember the agency problem: the buyer doesn't speedread; he wants to consume the product.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 12:07:42 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn, 95% of the reviews have been positive. It is just that with some, you notice the negative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 12:09:39 PM UTC
BESTSELLER: Years ago, I was told by a publishing executive"To sell, a book should be like a pill, to be read at one go". I went to B&N and counted the pages of the bestsellers. The top three wer > 700 pages. His answer:"this is a history book; this is the most known journalist in America; this is...". Then I realized that longer was better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 12:41:04 PM UTC
My comments on Cowen's review www.fooledbyrandomness.com/cowen.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 12:51:16 PM UTC
Yes, I had >1000 and was prepared coming into AF for more angry people as the attacks are broader.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 1:02:23 PM UTC
Daniel Tung I am not interested in having people like you as readers. This is by choice, and no different from a cook who prefers not to have junk food clients. Clear enough?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 1:02:48 PM UTC
Shirine Abdallah I will translate
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 1:38:35 PM UTC
Also, pissing off journalists on my part has been deliberate. It worked.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 3:24:26 PM UTC
BTW the Guardian has been on a smear campaign for FOUR years. In 2009 they turned my "super-Green" into climate denier. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/my-letter-addressing-the_b_270737.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 4:29:12 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris I've seen your reviews. You are not doing them for the money. BTW I've reviewed books myself (>100), 100% positive. I've never reviewed a book except on its own terms, not mine. But you are in the minority. Here are my reviews https://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3V94HTDKTOY1O?ie=UTF8&ref_=ya_56
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 7, 2012 7:11:55 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris the idea of a deadline is some form of penalty if no agreement is reached, and a market reaction that would force some action.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 7, 2012 7:16:38 PM UTC
It is a form of "fail early".
http://www.edge.org/conversation/win-at-forecasting
Tetlock's techniques don't solve the black swan problem, but they do provide a framework for better understanding the current state of affairs. By forcing pundits to quantify their reasoning rather than resort to vague predictions, the techniques allow for algorithmic comparative assessment of forecaster error and judgement. Using a large enough pool of forecasters, the "foxes" tend to rise in accuracy over the "hedgehogs" (reference to Tetlock's "The Hedgehog and the Fox" Analogy, where-in hedgehogs tend to simplify their reasoning to broad principles, and foxes are less confident in their own judgement and more willing to second-guess themselves).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 6, 2012 5:19:17 PM UTC
MY point is that prediction markets are hogwash. See 2nd paper http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Ilmanen.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 6, 2012 12:01:21 PM UTC
Jeff, you fail to realize that many of my critics ARE frauds harming others with no harm to themselves (economists, predictors, etc.).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 6, 2012 5:09:59 PM UTC
Sorry friends for unanswered direct messages I have 388 in my mailboxes!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 6, 2012 5:10:15 PM UTC
389 now
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 2:16:02 AM UTC
Jaffer Ali a classical man doesn't turn the other cheek. But he doesn't seek revenge. He just punishes when necessary and voice outrage when the situation requires it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 9, 2012 2:17:25 AM UTC
And he calls a fraud a fraud.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 6, 2012 8:15:43 AM UTC
Trivers is a friend of mine. He has been demonized because of his personal attitude and mental illness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 12:28:18 PM UTC
NIetzsche figured it out.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 4:47:55 PM UTC
Vince Pomal remember what I said. You don't want to change identity again.
Also: "Increasing happiness if fragile, decreasing known sources of unhappiness is antifragile." (A footnote in Antifragile, based on the mafia expression "I have a pebble in my shoe I want you to remove it").
Looking for the brilliant Anonymous person who gave the quote yesterday at Politics & Prose in Washington, to give credit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 3, 2012 10:17:18 AM UTC
Actually there is something there: starvation improves eyesight.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 3, 2012 9:12:31 AM UTC
Done! I am on book tour let's organize something.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 7:56:06 PM UTC
those who paid, of course... loaded q.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 4:59:58 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 5:07:08 PM UTC
Your name in www.fooledbyrandomness.com/errata.pdf
Again, the solution to these complex problems are neither by abstract means nor by violence, but through simple (ancient) heuristics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 1:49:34 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic atheist fundamentalists with a "rationalistic" bias like you are more dangerous than any religious one...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 1:55:22 PM UTC
People fail to realize how robust religions are and how attempts to extirpate them have backfired, causing worse fundamentalism of "reason".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 2:10:05 PM UTC
The problem of the UK "enlightened" class is that they are theoretical, abstract. They respect the abstract rights of others, never socialize with anyone outside of their narrow circuit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 2:41:26 PM UTC
Guru you think you know the truth?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 3:10:06 PM UTC
This discussion is not about beliefs but about coexistence. Pls stop the rationalistic preaching.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 5:36:44 PM UTC
J-L that was Wittgenstein's main position on religion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 3, 2012 2:52:31 PM UTC
Vince slow down please or we will have the same problem you had in your previous name.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 8:54:46 PM UTC
It is certainly fragile. It is more opaque that we think.
Monday Dec 3 Washington DC Politics and Prose, Wednesday Dec 5 London, LSE; Thursday Dec 6 London, RSA
http://www.politics-prose.com/event
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2012/12/20121205t1830vSZT.aspx
http://www.thersa.org
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 12:36:20 PM UTC
Henry, where for? LSE?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 1:28:31 PM UTC
Nicolas Taousani very generous!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 2:39:31 PM UTC
Indeed Zeke the worst is people trying to give me a long very long story when I can't focus and can't make people wait for the signing...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 3:05:54 PM UTC
Zeke violations of ethics are not ad hominem in the bad sense. Judging criminals is not ad hominem. And I don't care about my reputation in lit circles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 4:44:10 PM UTC
Zeke the idea is to expose fraudsters not win arguments against them. Moral obligation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 10:25:32 PM UTC
Also Larchmont Public Library on Sunday
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 4, 2012 10:31:30 PM UTC
Hi I try to be anonymous in Lebanon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 30, 2012 1:44:25 PM UTC
Easier to understand when what is said is negative
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 30, 2012 3:50:10 PM UTC
Half the comments are missing the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 1, 2012 4:55:50 PM UTC
No the fact that you thought of someone and made the effort to discuss it is informational.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 29, 2012 5:54:55 PM UTC
Assahl almumtana3
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 29, 2012 12:44:34 PM UTC
Indeed! The ref to fire one is from Marcus Aurelius. The candle is from LaRochefoucault.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 12:52:16 PM UTC
The poor fellow is short volatility. Many people did not know it was a parody.
No, Small Probabilities Are Not “Attractive to Sell”: A Comment
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Ilmanen.pdf
Comments welcome.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 9:07:46 PM UTC
crash for ONE person is not unlimited losses.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 9:36:29 PM UTC
S * Exponential (r) more rigorous than S*(1+r)
Anyone going to DUNBO Brooklyn on Wed?
http://powerhousearena.com/newsletters/121128/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 7:06:36 AM UTC
Kenneth why didn't you come say hello?
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 26, 2012 1:01:34 PM UTC
Friends, who's coming tonite (London event)? Who's coming tomorrow or Wed (NY & Brooklyn event)?
Here are simple tricks to prevent bureaucrats, academics, bonus earners and other frauds from scamming the general public.
FROM FAT TAILS TO FAT TONY
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ECONOMIST2013.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 25, 2012 3:15:12 PM UTC
Alexander, PH is wednesday
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 25, 2012 9:21:01 PM UTC
"VAR working in the short term" is like saying a plane with a defect is working in the short term. This is called "Markov-error"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 2, 2012 10:44:58 AM UTC
Krzysztof Nędzyński I think I own the rights. I signed nothing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 24, 2012 9:21:38 PM UTC
Many of these people never chose to be famous. Not their families.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 24, 2012 9:27:54 PM UTC
I saw the BBC story. Sociopaths!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 25, 2012 1:33:36 AM UTC
michael , jonah lehrer is suffering
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/bmn.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 25, 2012 1:58:54 AM UTC
The geometry of ignorance!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 23, 2012 11:32:22 AM UTC
Exactly! Why is why the ONLY mathematically acceptable solution is skin-in-the-game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 23, 2012 5:01:25 PM UTC
Contrct theory and skin in the game rules. A politician votes for war, a child or grandchild dreafted
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/binaries.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 22, 2012 8:22:47 PM UTC
Greg, please stick to my point about probabilty, this is not a political discussion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 22, 2012 9:22:14 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita right
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 23, 2012 10:24:10 AM UTC
Marco Alves this is called EXITING THE 4TH QUADRANT.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 24, 2012 4:40:40 PM UTC
Soccer games are not binaries, but the max falls off like the Gaussian, in fact "compact support".
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324735104578120953311383448.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 12:27:47 PM UTC
I am not reviewing; it is something for ANCHORING the idea so it does not drift. And my essay is sort of from the Prologue, but limited to economics (because it is the WSJ). There will be another for medicine...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 12:42:11 PM UTC
Franco Franco So they attack MY idea if they want and give it a bad review or a good one, who cares. one should never attack the wrong idea. It is unethical but widespread.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 1:10:26 PM UTC
The best promoter of my ideas is a recent attack on my by a British statist David Runciman in the Guardian... He was so annoyed by the book... But he had not read the wsj piece otherwise he would have been angrier...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 2:45:09 PM UTC
Complained the GUARDIAN is not offended enough http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/totheeditor.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 3:48:45 PM UTC
A lot to do to fight the enlightenment
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 5:18:44 PM UTC
Gunter Busch I agree. But fragility is predictive of survivAl.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 5:19:07 PM UTC
Not causal though.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 22, 2012 12:33:49 PM UTC
(You have also to realize that he missed the central point of the book, convexity, so whatever he writes is pure verbiage).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 22, 2012 12:58:38 PM UTC
You also need to know that PENGUIN considers him a perfect inverse sales indicator as he trashed the Freakonomics guys and Gladwell.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 22, 2012 2:03:01 PM UTC
Friends you need to realize that I've had >1500 attacks & bad reviews over time; I have only responded to 3 so far (+ a couple of VINE pre-reviews on AMAZON for fun). Every day there is some academic trying to critique the Black Swan problem. So let's discuss useful things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 24, 2012 4:41:16 PM UTC
Didn't read it... is it fun?
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 11:12:54 AM UTC
Friends, just added graphs illustrating the gravity of the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 11:33:57 AM UTC
Daniel Hogendoorn, Both Flyvbjerg and Elster and are my friends, precisely for that reason.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 2:51:14 PM UTC
Walter, I tried and tried and tried with him, and now I have to do this.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 22, 2012 2:03:27 PM UTC
Great paper by Mercier and Sperber...
"But the idea of incentive in capitalism demands some comparable form of disincentive. In the business world, the solution is simple: Bonuses that go to managers whose firms subsequently fail should be clawed back, and there should be additional financial penalties for those who hide risks under the rug."
It is hard to agree with this statement when it’s a generalization to the business world in its entirety. I am sure it’s not, but for a person not familiar with your ideas it reads this way – I have already seen people drawing this conclusion, and this is why I am sharing this with you.
This kind of solution that you propose (bonuses to be clawed back after failure) should, in my opinion, be applied only to:
a) Institutions that are labeled ‘too big to fail’. Bonuses and bailouts should never mix. But I would apply a hard core via negativa here. For starters, your bonus is not getting laid off.
b) Institutions that are utilities and are a crucial (from robustness point of view) node of a system.
When the failure of a partiular business is not consequential for the entire system (does not hit the taxpayers) the decision to pay the bonus/take it back, should not be unified across the entire business environment. Let the evolution decide about the most suitable, and robust, remuneration policies are. Let them play with it, let them perish, let them prosper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 17, 2012 2:46:50 PM UTC
This concerns ONLY the taxpayer. People in private contracts can do what they want
"When you have absolute intellectual and moral disrespect for someone, the only real compliment you can possibly get from him is in making him angry."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 16, 2012 11:06:10 PM UTC
which bronx zoo?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 3:34:30 PM UTC
stand up. Don't compromise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 17, 2012 5:06:51 PM UTC
He was not totally off the mark. Epigenetic changes matter.
BACKGROUND: Every book written on the historyt of probability theory is bulls***ly based on some historian claiming that modern probability was "discovered" by Fermat, Pascal, etc., falling for the mential bias that the first account they could find in a language they could read is the first account that was made. And people cite each others and perpetuate the myth. For instance Bernstein's against the Gods theorizes that Arabs
figured out algebra but not probability. But in fact it is well known that in the Levant, (Omayad era) ~800 years before Fermat, there were mathematical methods to decrypt messages based on word frequencies. It turns out that Al Kindi in one of his treatises discusses "3lm al-Musadafat" , "the science of probability" and numerical theories of frequencies. The problem is that modern Arabic translates probability by "i7timaliyat" not "musadafat", which prevented people from connecting.
So we need the book. I would love to translate the right segments of it. The original manuscript is in Istanbul which I assume should be digitalized.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 1:32:22 PM UTC
Pradeep Al thanks a million! Here is the text in the original at the end.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 1:41:23 PM UTC
Tom Johnsen In Europe a very large number of scholars read Arabic, particularly in Medicine. It was considered like Hebrew a language of the "West", necessary for the very learned. For instance I have bishop Huet's discourse on Arabic proverbs. The idea only waned in the 19th Century.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 1:42:25 PM UTC
Web flar I can't get the text from the link
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 2:15:40 PM UTC
Michael 'Emporio' Lu and Mairu Gupta This discussion is not about the merits of studying historical precedence; you should go question historians of ideas about the legitimacy of their profession, not argue with us here. We are just discussing the historical information itself, not the metaproblem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 3:03:34 PM UTC
which book?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 18, 2012 7:22:52 PM UTC
Alcohol is Syriac (Al-Khl the blue) more than Arabic
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 11:44:46 AM UTC
No visible real relation, Pétur Halldórsson.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 12:06:52 PM UTC
I see your reasoning. Autists reduce the world. When you reduce the world to simple metrics you tend to optimize on them. I see it all the time in risk management, where they take a single metric. But on the other hand autistic people tend to be mechanistic, with heuristics, and heuristics often = satisticing.
Are these changes in violence *inherent* changes? or accidental (i.e. subjective to what happens, incentives etc.)
Progress believers like to assume inherent change. that men do not knife their wives because cultured men are different etc.
But changes may be completely situation dependent, accidental and conditional.
In a way that is the fooled by randomness argument
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 9:32:33 AM UTC
M= true mean, M* is observed mean, or sample mean. When you do science, you work with M* the sample mean so long as it represents M.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 11:06:19 AM UTC
The foundations of statistics is that you make science with M not M*. That is where people start mistaking sample error for information. What angers me with Pinker is that he knows M* is not M yet makes theories based on M*, an eggregious violation. He even says M* may not be even close to M. That's like a politician not a scientist. Even Bernanke and other economists would say "Sorry I made a mistake in my representation of M" not keep lingering defending their scientific violation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 11:56:42 AM UTC
It works differenty: this is what I refer to as asymmetry, or the power of disconfirmation. You can say "there is a Black Swan" never "there is no Black Swan"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 1:16:31 PM UTC
The only distribution for which the law of large numbers NEVER works is Cauchy. Otherwise works more or less slowly (pre-asymptotics)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 11:58:43 AM UTC
(cont) SOME LARGER LESSONS ON HOW TO DO SOCIAL SCIENCE: if you write "crime has dropped in NYC between 2000 and 2010", it is just journalism. You can report, but not make a theory out of it. And you cannot call journalistic reports "empirical evidence". To do SCIENCE, and generate a theory that generalizes the point, and invoke causes, you need to establish some truths about M, from the generating process. Nor can one do DECISION MAKING under journalistic reports of M* (which is why we traders are vastly more rigorous than social "scientists"). Bernanke was not doing journalism, he was truly mistaken about |M*-M| (and the difference is that Pinker is incoherent making scientific claims from journalistic observations, and not aware of M*, then saying M is different). To generalize beyong the "Pinker Confusion": I see social "scientists" in political "science" making such mistake left and right (Anne Marie Slaughter has just written something making eggregious claims statistically, but those claims would be acceptable for journalism by changing the presentation). This is why I am preparing an article with Aaron Brown (who surprised me with the VINE review of my book and exhibited better understanding of my own ideas than myself) on What Statistical Claims Can be Made By Social Scientists from Data, a short note to publish in a statistical journal or a journal for practitioners of statistics. It would be simply based on first principles of statistical theory. Note that Bayesians and frequentists both agree on the meaning of M and M*, they just don't think we arrive at M by the same methods. But I am not too fond of Bayesian claims of speed of convergence to M from priors under fat tails (when the conjugate distribution falls outside the exponential family). Aaron are you on this?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 1:52:38 PM UTC
Aaron let us look the claim by Slaughter, another social "scientist": WMC [Women who are married with children] earn less than MMC [men married with children], but WMWC [women who are married without children] earn the same as [men married without children] MMWC. Hence let us derive policies... Do you see a flaw as a statistician? My first obvious remark is that we are comparing the means of two population (twice) when these do not have the same properties , not the same variance (women may have less variance than men, given a smaller number of women in jail etc.),so V(WMC) different from V(MMC) and V(WMC) different from V(WMWC). Second level, both distributions do not have the same... TAILS! (4th moments diverge). So we have a problem in higher moments as well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 11:56:49 PM UTC
Slaughter wrote: " A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues. " in many articles. The point in that it is not a simple measure, nor does it reflect on the female condition (the max at the top obeys EVT, not the same distribution as the average and it is impossible to explain to someone outside probability that you can't compare stuff like that). While arguing with her (Chatham house rule so I can't elaborate) I realized that these anecdotal statistics detract from a real potent and statistically rigorous one: men don't live as long as women, and that IS a simple measure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 16, 2012 12:29:46 AM UTC
The MWC discussion felt frustrating because the distribution of the maximum of a random variable depends on the variance (or higher moments) more than the mean and you CAN'T explain it to Soviet-Harvard idiots who claims a monopoly on understanding the world. Now that my book is done all I feel like doing is just probability theory, the mother of all the sciences, the boss of all inferences...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 12, 2012 3:10:03 PM UTC
(note the mistaking of absence of volatility for true stability)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 12, 2012 7:30:33 PM UTC
Belbachir Mehdi now that you are here, there is in an El Gusto song a recurrent word "jen7ani" or "jen7an". What does it mean in Maghrebi Arabic?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 16, 2012 12:41:59 PM UTC
I invited him to interview me Nov 26 in London
Until I read this book, Buzzati's "Il deserto dei tartari" was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I cared to keep re-reading through life. This is, remarkably a very similar story about the antichamber of anticipation (rather than "the antichamber of hope" as I called Buzzati's book), but written in a much finer language, by a real writer (Buzzati was a journalist, which made his prose more functional) ; the style is lapidary with remarkable precision; it has texture, wealth of details, and creates a mesmerizing athmosphere. Once you enter it, you are stuck there. I kept telling myself while reading it: "this is the book". It suddenly replaced the "deserto".
A few caveats/comments. First, I read it in the original French, but I doubt that the translator can mess up such a fine style and the imagery. Second, the blurb on Amazon says Gracq received the Goncourt prize for it. Julien Gracq REFUSED the Goncourt, he despised the Parisian literary circles and by 1951 decided to stay in the margin. He stuck to his publisher José Corti rather than switch to the fancy Gallimard after his success (as Proust did) (or other publishing houses for the fakes and the selfpromoters). Third, this book came out a few years after Buzzati's "deserto", but before Buzzati was translated into French. I wonder if Gracq had heard of the "deserto"; the coincidence is too strong to be ignored.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Opposing-Shore-Julien-Gracq/dp/0002712245/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 4:35:50 PM UTC
The original Rivages des Syrtes (Gracq) was written in French
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 8:46:48 PM UTC
I was inspired by his story of sticking to the small publisher and felt shame switching. The only French publisher that accepted Fooled by Randomness was LES BELLES LETTRES, a quality, but very small house. After the success of The Black Swan, I was approached by other publishers (Grasset Gallimard, etc.) I felt shame to abandon the BELLES LETTRES and I am staying with them for ANTIFRAGILE and the rest. Actually I never changed publisher in other languages... except Korea...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 8:49:17 PM UTC
Je vais m'acharner pour qu'il soit publié chez Penguin a Londres.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 2:13:33 PM UTC
Hi, I have no opinion... but squatting with weights is not as ecological as deadlifts
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 2:28:16 PM UTC
Best thing for my back... and I deadlift 175% of my weight
http://objectifjo.blogs.lequipe.fr/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/alexeiev11.jpg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 4:11:07 PM UTC
Stan Des he would have been killed in battle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 4:22:15 PM UTC
You can SPECIALIZE, you shouldn't OPTIMIZE.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 4:39:43 PM UTC
Pétur Halldórsson explained the difference between specializing and optimizing. Optimizing (in this context) is when you maximize a single metric (here one-dimentional), a single number, at no penalty for a loss elsewhere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 4:56:31 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris, mathematically, if you optimize one variable without constraints on others, you end up with pathologies. In the case of competition, the pressure is to optimize to the hilt. This is how you see all the weightlifters in the limitless weight category looking like this fellow, with up to a 100 pounds of extra fat because once you hit the limit of your muscle size, you pack-on fat as it gives you extra strength (and possibly some extra muscles as fat comes with extra 1/3 muscles to support it). And the fellow died of health problems at 69. In academia some optimize on a metric (say H ratio or something as stupid)...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 5:01:03 PM UTC
Division of labor and competitive metrics have nothing to do with each other.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 5:03:21 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris (cont) look at the picture of weightlifters limited by weight, say 96 kg. They will pack as much muscle, as little fat and look a lot more athletic (but still not healthy). Just introducing a SINGLE constraint changed the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 5:11:22 PM UTC
(cont) specialization, unlike competitive sports, introduces constraints along with some optimization. So we do well that way.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 5:48:20 PM UTC
Satisficing is the alternative strategy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 6:19:16 PM UTC
Guru Anaerobic reread the definition of optimized used here (maximization with no constraint on a single metric) and you will see that your friends are not optimized.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 6:35:18 PM UTC
In defense of Guru I would say that the single harmless activity to (sort of) optimize might be running, provided one does not set a single metric (50m, 100m, etc.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 3:31:47 PM UTC
ANyone talking about specialization should delete post. OPTIMIZATION is NOT SPECIALIZATION.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 15, 2012 10:09:32 PM UTC
KArthik, excellent. There is one specialization now for people who are incompetent elsewhere: academia. No wonder they are largely socialists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 10:30:48 AM UTC
If he had something of substance to say, he would have had a much shorter reply.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 8:08:58 PM UTC
Friends can we move the discussions to the main post? Thanks; easier that way. I will repeat mine,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 10, 2012 9:50:07 PM UTC
David can you move this to main post? Just so other people can see it? And no, he did not get my point of the inconsistency between claims of probability and claims of consequence * probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 1:39:06 PM UTC
I meant POST there in the same thread.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 9, 2012 6:11:34 PM UTC
I am in my De Gaulle phase and it hit me that it was painful to have a conversation with him... even when rescued by Malraux who took walks with him around Collombey. Like prophets, De Gaulle never strayed too far from his central point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 10:29:13 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn the paper is statistically clueless... Extreme events cannot be dealt with using Gaussian concepts... And the idea of dealing with outliers has been well developed using EVT. Douady has written stuff on stress matrices, and there is a literature on regime switching.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 10:31:19 AM UTC
It is called anti-robust because robust statistics remove outliers; this one only uses them. But using powerlaws makes it unnecessary since the distribution is DOMINATED by outliers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 10:40:42 AM UTC
no, because robust statistics are not "robust".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 9, 2012 1:31:14 AM UTC
Not your students... Perhaps mine (sigh)
( Incidentally have been sleeping in my NY area house with no power no heat with sub freezing temperatures outside and getting to understand how exposure to thermal stressors should be a necessary workout. )
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 10:47:33 AM UTC
Life expectancy should be analyzed conditionally. In other words, conditional on being 60, how many years of life, etc. Something tells me it was flat, did not change between 20 and 60.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 10:55:11 AM UTC
Power. Ones back nov 11! Meanwhile enjoying candles... Only access is IPad as can read in the dark...unintended benefit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 11:04:09 AM UTC
The entire point is that a 60 year old person then would have be healthier than today's 60 y old (conditional on being alive)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 12:22:20 PM UTC
What if you remive trauma and adjust?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 3:02:11 PM UTC
Thanks a million Pascal Venier, Merci mille fois!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 7, 2012 12:46:41 PM UTC
In Antifragile I show data from the CDC
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 8, 2012 9:25:21 PM UTC
Here is the link to aging: http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/2/4/998
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 1:07:00 PM UTC
The idea is to be fit physically, ecologically (have muscle mass, not artificial fitness).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 4:27:54 PM UTC
Good enough... but you are right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 4, 2012 11:10:52 PM UTC
A caveat: Technically this ONLY works if you have a preset mechanism to remove a bad leader. You chose randomly, remove deterministically.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 2, 2012 8:04:29 PM UTC
The fact that we are prone to sensationalism and get overwhelmed by trivial but mediatized risks does not imply that severe tails risks are not growing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 2, 2012 10:45:03 PM UTC
When you use statistical information from the past to describe the present state of a system, you are no longer making historical analyses, but producing a RISK assessment. Now the statistical data shown by P does not match the statements, since he himself states that it is a powerlaw with low tail exponent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 2, 2012 10:45:53 PM UTC
(cont) When I talk about the risk of the Brooklyn Bridge collapsing I am not talking about historical information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 4, 2012 9:15:33 AM UTC
My point is the SEPARATION between small and large, same as in finance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 4, 2012 9:16:41 AM UTC
Had Pinker written a book WITHOUT power laws and limited claims to civil domestic mores, it would have been OK. But he messes with powerlaws which in fact prove the opposite point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 4, 2012 11:03:27 PM UTC
I will be on a plane all day tomorrow and can't reply but in the end it is all Mediocristan/Extremistan/X-Extremistan (that is fatter tailed Extremistan). Sadly even things we believe come from Mediocristan are powerlaws: we have committed massacres with simple weapons without the big extra-Extremistan help with mass weapons, so deaths from violent crimes are never from the Gaussian family, even those limited to knives. And you realize it is X-Extremistan when it is too late: since it all takes place with one big event (the Thanksgiving surprise for the TUrkey). I THANK EVERYONE HERE FOR HELPING US WITH OUR ARTICLE!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 10:01:26 AM UTC
The opposite of "si uis pacem para bellum"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 3:18:53 PM UTC
Summary of a talk by Pinker:
“Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state,” declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The evidence shows that Rousseau was wrong and Hobbes was right, said Pinker. Forensic archaeology (“CSI Paleolithic”) reveals that 15 percent of prehistoric skeletons show signs of violent trauma. Ethnographic vital statistics of surviving non-state societies and pockets of anarchy show, on average, 524 war deaths per 100,000 people per year.
Germany in the 20th century, wracked by two world wars, had 144 war deaths per 100,000 per year. Russia had 135. Japan had 27. The US in the 20th century had 5.7. In this 21st century the whole world has a war death rate of 0.3 per 100,000 people per year. In primitive societies 15 percent of people died violently; now 0.03 percent do. Violence is 1/500th of what it used to be.
The change came by stages, each with a different dynamic. Pinker identified: 1) The Pacification Process brought about by the rise and expansion of states, which monopolized violence to keep their citizens from killing each other. 2) The Humanizing Process. States consolidated, enforcing “the king’s justice.” With improving infrastructure, commerce grew, and the zero-sum game of plunder was replaced by the positive-sum game of trade. 3) The Humanitarian Revolution. Following ideas of The Enlightenment, the expansion of literacy, and growing cosmopolitanism, reason guided people to reject slavery, reduce capital crimes toward zero, and challenge superstitious demonizing of witches, Jews, etc. Voltaire wrote: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
4) The Long Peace. Since 1945 there has been zero use of nuclear weapons, zero combat between the Cold War superpowers, just one war between great powers (US and China in Korea, ending 1953), zero wars in western Europe (there used to be two new wars a year there, for 600 years), and zero wars between developed countries or expansion of their borders by conquest. 5) The New Peace is the spreading of the Long Peace to the rest of the world, largely through the decline of ideology, and the spread of democracy, trade, and international organizations such as the UN. Colonial wars ended; civil wars did flare up. 6) The Rights Revolution, increasingly powerful worldwide, insists on protection from injustice for blacks, women, children, gays, and animals. Even domestic violence is down.
Such a powerful long-term trend is the result of human ingenuity bearing down on the problem of violence the same way it has on hunger and plague. Something psychologists call the “circle of empathy” has expanded steadily from family to village to clan to tribe to nation to other races to other species. In addition, “humanitarian reforms are often preceded by new technologies for spreading ideas.” It is sometimes fashionable to despise modernity. A more appropriate response is gratitude.
In the Q & A, one questioner noted that violence is clearly down, but fear of violence is still way up. Social psychologist Pinker observed that we base our fears irrationally on anecdotes instead of statistics---one terrorist attack here, one child abduction there. In a world of 7 billion what is the actual risk for any individual? It is approaching zero. That trend is so solid we can count on it and take it further still.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 9, 2012 10:48:46 PM UTC
Friends, with all this crowdsourcing, nobody came up with the *RECURSIVE* argument that: had some LONG PEACE thesis been published by some Herr Doktor Professor Something von Something in 1913 3/4, it would have offered very similar (and very convincing) arguments as the contemporary narrative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 1:09:03 AM UTC
Prof Doktor Pinker: "The specific year 1913 has been chosen post hoc because we know in retrospect that a war broke out the year after." This is a naive naive naive misuse of "post hoc" since when it comes to large deviations one SHOULD take obligatorily the large deviation plotted against previous beliefs (see the Fourth Quadrant paper comparing the large deviations period t to information t-1). If a plane crashes, it is NOT cherry picking to consider beliefs about event preceding it, not is it ANECDOTAL to use n=1 when it comes to such extremes (as Prof Doktor Pinker accused the Great John Gray, non-naive). I had to discuss this error of naive statistical inference (resulting from misunderstanding of asymmetry) in Antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 9:01:55 AM UTC
David Boxenhorn Good analysis, but you wrote "Taleb's work shows that unexpected events happen frequently - much more frequently than we expect." Not quite. Unexpected events play a larger role in determining the statistical properties. In fact tail events become rarer and deeper in Extremistan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 10:09:03 AM UTC
George Varughese please have some respect for visitors, and tone down; limit to intellectual matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 1:26:51 PM UTC
Ben Lambert this is the exact point: since FBR I've had a rough time with people who conflate probability and expectation (more severe in fat-tailed domains). My experience is that social scientists have no clue, given how mechanistic they are with statistical tools. The only domain where the difference between Pr and Expectation is small is the one of binary bets (a la Nate Silver) (2nd or 3rd Quadrant). Here is what I wrote in my central paper: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/probability.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 8:25:03 PM UTC
I tried to reason with Pinker before posting this (sent him a few pieces of mail) but he was impossible to communicate with and incapable of getting my point, while thinking he got it (prickly and not very bright, which is sad because I liked his books on cognitive science, but it's an area that is not my specialty so I can't judge. He may have had a lapse of judgment writing a book about a subject he has not been immersed in all his life, like a student who went to the library, and now needs to defend himself and his FRAGILE reputation --academics are fragile). But he thinks he does not contradict me; he does. A state of the system is not described by its Probability but in the Expectation...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 11, 2012 10:08:24 PM UTC
The living thinker I admire the most is John Gray.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 12, 2012 1:26:29 AM UTC
Killian, pray continue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 12, 2012 12:33:32 PM UTC
Pinker:" what is the actual risk for any individual? It is approaching zero". So he is saying a lot of contradictory, incompatible things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 12, 2012 1:14:50 PM UTC
A 3 sentence rebuttal for a 2006 words piece. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinkerrebuttal.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 2, 2012 10:06:58 AM UTC
I build it with small cap funds + index funds.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ConvexityScience.pdf
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/EVT.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 31, 2012 3:54:14 PM UTC
arrow model -> reality
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 1, 2012 7:23:49 PM UTC
Excellent Nicholas Teague
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 1, 2012 7:24:43 PM UTC
Kam Hamidieh no but people in finance do particularly for joint probabilities!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 2, 2012 9:13:58 PM UTC
Kam Hamidieh but 1/100 becomes 1/1000 these are very very common risks (bridges, options, etc.).
When The Black Swan came out, the first NYT reviewer (Gregg Easterbrook), a professional journalist was clueless and had not read the book (nor did he understand much of it)... Same with other reviews by academics who skimmed the book and found some angle that links it to what research tradition they knew (worse, academics tend to be envious of other writers as I can predict a review from the name of its author) ... Professionals cut corners and work from secondary sources or within agendas and scan books for familiarity with prevailing concepts; so it took a while for the real ideas of TBS to percolate. Because of the journalistic distortions people believed my book was about forecasting Black Swans, etc., not about epistemic opacity and perceptional distortions etc.
This time, 5 3/4 years later Amazon sent the galleys of the new book to members of the VINE program for trusted and genuine readers who review books for free. They can get things wrong, but the crowdsourcing works, supplying both DEPTH and VARIATIONS of opinions, provided such advanced reviewing is limited to those who are deemed reliable by their ratings.
And the author can respond on premises.
This insulates us authors from corrupt & paid laborers: academics & journalists.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067820/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=test12-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1400067820
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 29, 2012 2:15:45 PM UTC
Surowiecki is the exception, and he knows it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 29, 2012 3:27:10 PM UTC
My problem is not positive or negative, but ACCURATE representation of the ideas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 29, 2012 4:05:55 PM UTC
Please friends, this discussion in not about whether you like the book, but about the crowdsourcing system working well when we bypass the prostitutes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 29, 2012 4:36:55 PM UTC
Marko, Wiki is too wild. You get ONE VERSION. Amazon VINE is more managed, and supplies different versions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 29, 2012 5:18:05 PM UTC
Brian, it is the mechanism that counts... Once you become commercialized you lose in reliability, the web makes it appear faster & you will be displaced by another not-yet-corrupted reviewer... The idea is to accelerate the cycle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 29, 2012 7:49:17 PM UTC
Kenneth with TBS distortions took 2 years to clear up, and the book WAS a bestseller!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 29, 2012 8:27:10 PM UTC
Vergil Den, in the end it makes no difference. What is fragile will vanish, what is valuable will make it. Time is smarter than humans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 3, 2012 6:41:55 AM UTC
Crowdsourcing is self-adjusting, unlike fixed reviews. We had some problems of course with the VINE crowdsourcing, with a troll quite incompetent reviewer (we get some here that I eventually weed out) ... but at least the author call expose the trolls.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 3, 2012 9:38:25 AM UTC
Margorie Marjorie Gigi Strom, I am not part of this discussion but your statement is grounded in sensationalism. The great majority of these 50 states have highly predictable binary outcomes. Please rephrase it in more rigorous terms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 4, 2012 10:35:23 AM UTC
(cont) if someone predicted the sun would rise 49 out of 50 days it would not be a good record.
Both were uncannily prophetic, in the small and the large. De Gaulle predicted in 1967 the Israeli-Palestinians problems, & that Jackie Kennedy "would end up on an arms dealer's boat". Malraux predicted the 21st century "would be religious or would not be". Malraux 50 years ago predicted the television set would merge with the computer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy_uZF4WbyI
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 27, 2012 12:45:21 PM UTC
Malraux's memoirs... a masterpiece of insights.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 8:49:57 PM UTC
It should be a crime to CLAIM one can predict them and misrepresent errors.
Did you see this ruling in Italy? How far have they digressed?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 8:37:28 AM UTC
The problem is not there: giving people CONFIDENCE about an event and not making them understand that the statistics are UNRELIABLE is the problem.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/10/19/when-taleb-met-davies/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 22, 2012 2:10:22 PM UTC
The result is here: https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/259340633385353218
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 22, 2012 4:51:55 PM UTC
Michal, excellent. They say endogenous, and think that they took care of feedback loops. But the relationships can be stochastic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 22, 2012 10:44:59 PM UTC
David not the point. Stochastic means something can change. Anything. Includes causal links.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 9:10:17 AM UTC
John Aziz, forget this adapt business: the point is a layer of stochasticity coupled with risk aversion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 12:44:22 PM UTC
no, if you stochasticize, for the layer of stochasticity to reverse preferences you need risk aversion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 12:58:41 PM UTC
(stochasticize -> Inject RISK in model)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 1:20:09 PM UTC
Risk aversion simply make you like volatility of outcomes less. You need to compensate with higher returns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 1:53:06 PM UTC
no, U(x) utility, risk aversion when U''(x) <0; volatility -> variance of x.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:21:47 AM UTC
Michal Kolano where is the text by Andrew Lo that you posted earlier? Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 1:23:34 PM UTC
Marshall i explained it in nonanticipAting ito term. Bingo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 2:48:22 PM UTC
Yes Michal Kolano, thanks a lot. Looks like they will hear from me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 2:49:53 PM UTC
Marshall Murphy you are right this is the proof www.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/260836995507552258
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 27, 2012 2:13:40 PM UTC
No Marshall, there is no such thing at dS=0 when dt->0 which is why we have Ito Calculus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Lycée_Franco-Libanais#Notable_alumni
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 21, 2012 2:55:00 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris you are telling the wrong guy...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 21, 2012 3:56:23 PM UTC
AbdelRahman Tekriti of course not, which is WHY they were assassinated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 21, 2012 5:36:34 PM UTC
It is the only award I respect yet I am not looking forward to it.
A practical definition of wealth: one is wealthy in inverse proportion to the mentions of "money" (whether positive or negative) during the course of one's year. This also applies to societies: hunter-gatherers were most certainly the wealthiests of all (the world was their property), social climbers and unemployed bankers the poorest by far.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 20, 2012 6:38:32 PM UTC
Rob James if you re-read your statement you will realize that these people are poor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 20, 2012 6:41:37 PM UTC
Chris Schuck this is the wrong question with respect to this post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 20, 2012 6:42:31 PM UTC
Rob James reread your second statement. Nobody is denying the role of real events.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 20, 2012 6:58:45 PM UTC
The fact that people are talking about money, the "conditional" in probability, contains most of the information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 20, 2012 7:05:39 PM UTC
The answer, as always, is detected thorugh a simple heuristic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 20, 2012 10:11:21 PM UTC
Ketan Shrimankar why don't you think about the aphorism/heuristic before replying????? If the person doesn't talk about money, he doesn't need money. Poor people who talk about money are those who are poor. nothing to do with state of mind, CONDITIONALITY of speaking about something.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 1:06:40 AM UTC
And the French state called the Algerian independence fighters "terrorists", using the same language Assad is using now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 11:16:10 AM UTC
"high octane" is tiny, minuscule compared to the Republique Francaise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 3:17:46 PM UTC
Peace will come when Assad and his regime leaves. It does not mean the rebels can be trusted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 5:20:54 PM UTC
The Assad regime is very vicious, extremely nefarious and unreliable. We saw what they did in Lebanon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 7:10:09 PM UTC
The other problem; I am (like everyone in Lebanon, literally everyone) a MINORITY and I don't want a minority to rule. It happened in Lebanon and destroyed that minority. Syria is the personal province of a minority and this is not stable... for them and for other minorities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 7:11:20 PM UTC
The other issue: the Assad have perfected a method of causing trouble between other factions, divide, etc. And political assassination ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 7:42:59 PM UTC
Exactly. The problem with Assad is that there is not even ideology, 100% mafia rules with mafia techniques, plus something other Levantines don't do, kill his friends in the back. Pure mafia. This is why he needs to go.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 10:29:58 PM UTC
Jaffer, no human being should defend Assad on grounds that the substitute is worse. Morallyt corrupt argument. Via negativa: he should go; we will see then.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 22, 2012 8:33:13 PM UTC
Saeb El Zein I find Jaffer Ali' s thinking a bit offensive but Jaffer is a good guy. My moral point is that one cannot use conflicts of interests to justify keeping a criminal leader.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 10:29:46 AM UTC
Chakid Nakad you seem to be looking for arguments to justify the Assad regime, a patently and overtly criminal one. You even seem to justify killing journalists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:35:44 AM UTC
Jaffer Ali this is exactly where my moral and epistemological rules are violated. Removing a criminal (for let's call a spade a spade) and mafia lord is an imperative, no matter who will replace him. You know he cannot last forever; better deal with it now than later and spare blood.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 31, 2012 10:41:22 AM UTC
Arbi this is not the place for Assad regime propaganda
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:29:28 AM UTC
So you subscribe to the theory that the Jews originate from Najd (now in the nation state currently called Saudi Arabia)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:31:02 AM UTC
And that they are a proto Arabian tribe?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 2:30:31 PM UTC
Najd (extended) is Arabia Deserta. Arabia Felix is ~ Yemen.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 9:44:04 PM UTC
By the way my Semitic pals David and Ban do you know what "to the right" in Semitic comes from?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 9:55:42 PM UTC
guess... think of the region we were talking abt
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:12:38 PM UTC
could be the other way... but my inkling...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:13:45 PM UTC
the other root could be "on the sea-side", as well as the area, same thing
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:29:52 PM UTC
east is mizrach I thought (sunrise)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:31:14 PM UTC
yamin has a link to "yam", so does "yaman"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:42:31 PM UTC
yes but we know that coordinates had a physical connection East-West are polar (sun), left-right might have been fixed... forgot the references...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:45:17 PM UTC
In Arabic poetry, north is sometimes called sham- a- li sham2ali, a region, when in Hebrew SML is left (as well as in Levantine dialect, SHMEL).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:54:37 PM UTC
I believe in physicality... we find it in so many places. Take ge-henom (in Arabic Jehannam) hell, is a hot unpleasant valley near JRSLM
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 18, 2012 1:41:50 PM UTC
Woke up and realized that Yemen = on the right, Levant (Sham'2l) on the Left. Speculation, but speculation that feels right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 12:38:01 AM UTC
Ban, نشيد الاناشيد
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 12:42:39 AM UTC
SHR-H_SHRIM is an ode to Lebanon, mentioned in so many ways in a short poewm, כְּרֵיחַ לְבָנוֹן, (RY7 LBNN smells or winds form Lebanon).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 10:53:24 AM UTC
The money changers in the temple of Jerusalem that angered Christ... they had to change money was because the G..d of the Hebrews would only accept the currency of Tyre, the SHKL (or Thekel, weight), and people had to change into it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 19, 2012 11:25:37 AM UTC
I am talking 1000 years later, time of Christ. Shekel was the currency of Tyre (also means weight...)
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
150 The Stickiness of Languages
Many Greek Cypriots still speak the language called "Cypriot Maronite Arabic", that is, 12 centuries after their settlement and integration in the Greek side of the Island. Languages are stickier than we think (People tend to associate languages with states, when the correlation was low before 1917: around the Mediterranean, particularly in Asia Minor, languages had no link to the rule (Armenians spent thousands of years in the area between Cilicia to Aleppo, way past the lifetime of some "Armenian State";etc.)). It is only today that the Cypriot Arabic language has weakened , thanks to Facebook and intermarriage. Semitic languages being based on the triplet of consonnants --using vowels mainly for declensions -- are very stable (the drift in Cypriot Maronite Arabic appears very small).
This stickiness of the Semitic languages supports a speculation: by the 7th Century there had to be many pockets in the Western Mediterranean of Punic-Canaanite speakers, about a thousand years after the fall of Carthage. Falling under Roman rule did not turn the population into Latin speakers (only for scholarly purposes, say Saint Augustine of Hyppo; we have much evidence of diglossia in the Levant, of the use of a language at home and for oral communication that is different from the language of writing, and doing so for 1000 years). And there had to be plenty of Semitic language speakers; just follow placenames from Carthage to Ramatuelle in France near Saint Tropez (ramat el means hill of God in both Canaanite and Hebrew). Even Marseilles seems to come from Marsa, port in Canaanite (and not from Massilia the Roman name since the Romans did not make names, but transcribed them). I estimate that the third of the coastal villages spoke Semitic dialects. The modus of the Phoenicians was network, hence a system of trade links built on trust (you send merchandise to a relative who pays you back; you needed a certain amount of trust before the letter of credit). The region is large: it extends all the way to Mogador on the Atlantic coast.
This explains the mystery of the effortless Arab invasion of the Southern and Western Mediterranean, all the way to Spain (and, less advertised, the Portuguese Algarve). They had to be welcomed by the local population along the coast. Canaanite and Arabic are easily mutually comprehensible (the distance between Semitic languages is very short, a corrollary of the stability thanks to the triplet of consonnants). And it is wasy for a Punic speaker to progressively become an Arabic speaker, since he already knows 80-90% of the vocabulary.
This also gives some credibility to the thesis that was popping up in the 19th century that the North African Jews had a Phoenician origin (or that the difference between Canaanite and Jew before the rabbinical period was not very pronounced for people to see an immediate difference). This is very plausible, since the Phoenician Canaanite diaspora had characteristics in trade networks that is similar to that of the Jews of later period. We find them in the same places as the Phoenicians. They had similar Gods (plus or minus monotheism & the beastly tophet, but we know of syncretisms as because religions were not very differentiated, as we saw evidence in Doura Europos and there were places of worship that would accommodate both Jews, early Christians, and pagans). They had a nearly identical language in the East (Canaanite) and a very similar one in the West (we only have one punic passage transcribed into Latin in a play by Plautus: in spite of the geographic distance it remained very close to classical Hebrew and Canaanite). My speculation is that many of the Jews are those locals who did not convert to Islam, and did not feel that had to. I voiced the idea to Jacques Attali (of North African Jewish ancestry) who boasted a historical relation to Phoenicians; he blurted out "tu me dis que les juifs sont des phéniciens, je te dis que les phéniciens sont des juifs").
It is remarkable how people fall for the retrospective distortion, by imparting to ancient religions modern definitions and differentiations from rituals and theologies developed after, and to ancient "states" the definition of the modern state. "Identities" did not exist at the time, so "Canaanite" or "Arab" were not part of the discussion: one belonged to a certain network, a tribe, bottom up, using the Semitic patrilinear line of belonging. Ibn 3am means "cousin from the father's side" (Remarkably, in Hebrew 3am means people, or tribe).
Finally, the Maltese, in spite of having been a bastion of Christianity, still speak a Semitic language easy to understand by Arabic speakers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 12:20:18 PM UTC
Alberto Bolognini they spoke something Semitic before Siculo-Arabic: the languages are so close ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 12:20:54 PM UTC
And Sicily had pockets of Punic language speakers before the Arab invasion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 12:49:27 PM UTC
David,the Arabs invaders were very, very few, unlike the Turks who came as an entire population. And the Arabs had cities of their own, like Karawan in Tunisia, while the indigenous were left alone. So the linguistic change can be explained only by similarities in languages on the ground.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 12:51:07 PM UTC
and note the Berbers still speak Amazigh!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:00:35 PM UTC
David, it is close to half of some areas, after 1400 years. The Arabs who came to the Levant were pastoralists; they were not settlers in the West (Maghrib, which incidentally is spelled the same as MAAREV in Canaanite, since the 3ayin and Ghayin are spelled the same).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:16:01 PM UTC
Much of the difference between Canaanite-Hebrew and Arabic is a matter of pronounciation, more likely to come from modern changes, with b and ב , w and ו , T س ش ש The ghaym went away in modern Hebrew ( ע with a dot) but they write 3aza ע not ג Gaza.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:18:08 PM UTC
David the Arabs who came to the Levant were pastoralists, mostly from the areas near Yemen. They settled over centuries, progressively. But the Arabs who went to North Africa were a very small number of warriors. We have a lot more data on the settlers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:24:09 PM UTC
No David, my point is that the locals were already speaking a Semitic language close to Arabic (unlike the Indians), and they WELCOMED the Arabs (unlike the Indians) and most took Islam as a family religion. Further by then there were no standard language since every town spoke its own variety so they might not have realized they were not speaking Arabic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:34:14 PM UTC
Yes David, the Levant remained diglossic Greek-Aramaic for 1000 years in spite of Hellenistic then Roman rule and the crust vanished. It may have to do with the power structure. Or take France, which became Francophone only very recently. So perhaps my idea should be phrased "LANGUAGES, SEMITIC LANGUAGES, CAN BE VERY STICKY".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:39:24 PM UTC
David what do you think about my idea that Sephardic Jews are the closest thing to Phoenicians?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 1:56:25 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn I will be crucified for this, but the Lebanese are close to the Phoenicians, but not as close as we think. Too much Crusader, Ghassanite, and Greek blood (plus the Persian invasions). Which is why I am looking at the Sephardic jews because they did not mix much.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 2:04:18 PM UTC
David, Punic is very close to Hebrew, but Tyrrean and Sidonian are "the same as" Hebrew.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 2:34:51 PM UTC
Alberto, the tophet is the story of Abraham & his son. Easter is the rite of Adonis. Lamb sacrifice was common in the Levant in all ceremonies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 3:49:21 PM UTC
David another important unnoticed fact: Persians used Aramaic as state language. It did not stick,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 5:24:54 PM UTC
David, the Achaemenid is commonly called "First Persian Empire" and covered pretty much the same territory. With Aramaic as a language of administration.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 8:07:42 AM UTC
Yes Brian. The modern state was powerful between Jules Ferry and the internet, capable of imposing linguistic uniformity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 18, 2012 9:38:01 AM UTC
belbachir, tarjim.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 18, 2012 8:38:07 PM UTC
what does bezef mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 22, 2012 9:02:19 PM UTC
Saeb, beware DNA studies, mathematically they have severe problems...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 9:30:32 AM UTC
It is my specialty... discused in my new book. Not well known. Blood types and genetic diseases work better.
In 1926, on discovering that his novel, "Arrowsmith," had been awarded what was then called the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, author Sinclair Lewis wrote the following letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee and declined the honour. He remains the only person to have done so:
"Sirs:—
I wish to acknowledge your choice of my novel "Arrowsmith" for the Pulitzer Prize. That prize I must refuse, and my refusal would be meaningless unless I explained the reasons.
All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards: they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.
Those terms are that the prize shall be given "for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.
That there is such a limitation of the award is little understood. Because of the condensed manner in which the announcement is usually reported, and because certain publishers have trumpeted that any novel which has received the Pulitzer Prize has thus been established without qualification as the best novel, the public has come to believe that the prize is the highest honor which an American novelist can receive.
The Pulitzer Prize for Novels signifies, already, much more than a convenient thousand dollars to be accepted even by such writers as smile secretly at the actual wording of the terms. It is tending to become a sanctified tradition. There is a general belief that the administrators of the prize are a pontifical body with the discernment and power to grant the prize as the ultimate proof of merit. It is believed that they are always guided by a committee of responsible critics, though in the case both of this and other Pulitzer Prizes, the administrators can, and sometimes do, quite arbitrarily reject the recommendations of their supposed advisers.
If already the Pulitzer Prize is so important, it is not absurd to suggest that in another generation it may, with the actual terms of the award ignored, become the one thing for which any ambitious novelist will strive; and the administrators of the prize may become a supreme court, a college of cardinals, so rooted and so sacred that to challenge them will be to commit blasphemy. Such is the French Academy, and we have had the spectacle of even an Anatole France intriguing for election.
Only by regularly refusing the Pulitzer Prize can novelists keep such a power from being permanently set up over them.
Between the Pulitzer Prizes, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and its training-school, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, amateur boards of censorship, and the inquisition of earnest literary ladies, every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
I invite other writers to consider the fact that by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.
I am, sirs,
Yours sincerely,
(Signed)
Sinclair Lewis"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 5:25:29 PM UTC
Nobody is perfect.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medconvex
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 15, 2012 9:07:14 PM UTC
Luke any relation?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 5:34:34 PM UTC
I meant your name.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 15, 2012 12:01:26 PM UTC
Ya ban, man qala haza?
http://www.la7oon.com/lyrics/lyrics/v/F40BEA93D3
This is from the moving reunion of the Judeo-Moslem orchestra El Gusto
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/arts/music/algerian-chaabi-musicians-reunite-in-the-band-el-gusto.html?pagewanted=1
Thanks, N
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 6:49:36 PM UTC
Shukran Albdelkader ! How about
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 6:50:15 PM UTC
اشعال متمولع عباد الغافلين قبلك وقبلي
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 7:04:10 PM UTC
Thanks Nadia Erraji what does تعيا وتولي mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 7:11:27 PM UTC
Thanks again everyone! What is the difference between اشعال and شحال ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 7:17:07 PM UTC
No Ban, a lot of commonalities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 7:28:13 PM UTC
Wissam wa Nadia, ahal hiya sh7al am sh3al bil-2asl?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 7:52:25 PM UTC
Wissam Abbas you are like me, clueless about the dialect & the roots. Let us let the Maghrebis like Nadia and Abdelkader speak.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 7:56:37 PM UTC
it looks like Algerian is ch7al as well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 9:14:19 PM UTC
Also noticed that for identically written words, the tonic accent is at the end (similar to Greek , Japanese or French); for the Levantines it is in the middle (similar to Italian or, to a lesser extent, English). 3ARABI has the accent on BI with the A in RA almost silent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 12, 2012 8:28:15 PM UTC
That famous saying Dmitriy Goncharov has to be made in the Soviet Union...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 12, 2012 10:02:17 PM UTC
Dmitriy Goncharov this is hurting participants and setting back the discussion to topics covered in the past and CLOSED. This is a collaborative intellectual effort and we can't go back to things like techne-episteme covered earlier (you should have done your homework and seen replies, we don't want to repeat replies every few months on the same argument). Sorry. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 13, 2012 5:19:38 PM UTC
Stanislav Yurin also what has "science" in its title isn't scientific: cognitive science, political science, economic science, compared to biology, physics, math, geometry, algebra, ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 14, 2012 1:29:24 AM UTC
not everyone is raving abt her... sorry.
(HEURISTICS)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 10, 2012 1:23:51 PM UTC
MG Harris I NEED a book agent to protect me from correspondence, contracts, emails, cross-country taxes ... And to iron out problems with publishers. I have 94 different book contracts. And an agent is a filter used by publishers (for the beginner, not for the established author). But don't ask the barber if you need a haircut. Determine by yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 10, 2012 1:28:24 PM UTC
Laszlo Kovari not at all. Even when there are gains to trade, there are problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 10, 2012 3:02:51 PM UTC
Arnie Schwarzvogel what Anthony Danes is doing is ethical backfitting, and I wrote an entire section on it... It is not permissible in a world in which people are FREE, no longer slaves or serfs, to claim that you are FORCED into professional action by other circumstances and use seemingly altruistic terms like "feed a family" (which I call ETHICAL CRUTCHES).
[HEURISTICS]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 9, 2012 7:34:33 PM UTC
No, your friends don't call themselves your friends.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 7, 2012 9:57:44 PM UTC
Bad Pharma his new book is very good. But there got to be a text somewhere rather than TED
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 6, 2012 7:36:24 PM UTC
Mohammed AlQatari just produced a verse from AlMutanabbi: If you are faulted by an faulty/incomplete person is a certification that you are faultness/complete.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 5, 2012 4:52:28 PM UTC
never repeat that in the levant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 4, 2012 3:00:32 AM UTC
Hilarious! I will start imitating.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/minexponents.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 3, 2012 10:28:11 AM UTC
Christian, it tells you: BE ROBUST, estimations are bunk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 3, 2012 10:44:17 AM UTC
I have another one on errors of errors. check the technical companion (my web site)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 3, 2012 11:20:42 AM UTC
Kiran Pai are you a mathematician?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 3, 2012 12:58:35 PM UTC
I learned from economics, political "science" and sociology papers: a lot of words, no substance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 4, 2012 12:15:36 PM UTC
Anmol, this is no longer true: unfortunately for academics, I am cited like hell (though not on SSRN), up to 6 additional citations a day. Check google scholar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 4, 2012 12:21:58 PM UTC
Anmol SSRN is not peer reviewed, nor does it carry weight in science. Can you stop posting NONSENSE?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 26, 2012 9:25:06 AM UTC
Excellent but the shadow implies boundedness
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 26, 2012 12:53:22 PM UTC
No Marco it becomes the lottery ticket fallacy, "long odds",e tc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 1:33:57 AM UTC
Yes Pascal you end up with Wittgenstein.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 1:41:29 AM UTC
Pascal it NEEDS to be against one's interest.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 1:53:08 AM UTC
Wesley Yang, Wittgenstein. Marx. Darwin. They all hated it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 1:58:30 AM UTC
It is the same with sainthood. They didn't do it because they *enjoyed* it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 2:04:47 AM UTC
Truth is not like an athletic prowess: it is not something you enjoy. It is not a consumer product. It is not an activity-for-reward. Research is the opposite of other, lower human activities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 2:08:17 AM UTC
I hate much of what I've discovered. I don't enjoy truth-seeking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 2:12:49 AM UTC
OK, I also HATE the process. Clear enough? I mitigate it with the writing (I enjoy writing parables), but it is highly counternature to fight for what should stand as True.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 4:31:30 PM UTC
George, what department are you in?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 5:29:01 PM UTC
Please leave mathematics alone. It is not science; it is more like a self-contained game, rather dangerous when applied outside its direct fields of application. Besides Erdos did not understand the Monte Hall Problem, something rather dangerous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 21, 2012 10:33:27 PM UTC
Fat Tony is no saint.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 23, 2012 3:33:29 PM UTC
The problem is that loving what you do and shooting for aesthetics lead to Platonicity.
The person is nervously waiting outside the room, waiting to be called in. Or, worse, he is at home checking the phone.. I could imagine no worse condition than this FRAGILITY, the helplessness of the person being judged by people one was certain to be faux-experts, or depending on a lottery, or facing an outcome that made a huge difference, good or bad without one's ability to control it. And rank makes things worse: I vividly remember my grandfather, then minister, waiting by the phone for the formation of the new cabinet; he wanted the position very badly, was completely dependent on it, kept discussing the odds (the outcome was that he lost his position in the reshuffle)... I also remember the vice chairman of an investment firm nervously pacing while expecting a phone call...
(The wild can be a single Cauchy-distributed random variable or anything with a tail exponent <=1).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 15, 2012 10:19:05 PM UTC
There is no Cauchy in biological variables, Ban. only informational ones. Don't worry.
So if you are told that a result is deterministic, say by theorem, but the person saying has a small probability of having made a mistake, the result will no longer be deterministic, but random.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 15, 2012 3:31:34 PM UTC
Yes dru this is the telescope problem
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 15, 2012 7:40:12 PM UTC
Guru with water you get dilution. With some probabilities (Extremistan), there is no dilution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 14, 2012 4:45:33 PM UTC
Double meaning: Abd (Oved) means servant, slave, but also worshipper (Ovadiah, Abdalla)...
(SACRED AND PROFANE)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 12, 2012 6:19:58 PM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 12, 2012 4:14:16 PM UTC
Thank you! I "feel younger", as they say!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 13, 2012 1:03:45 AM UTC
tarjem... rabb muballagh am rob mublagh? ma fhemta
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 13, 2012 1:23:03 AM UTC
so it is rubbama (maybe ) not rabb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 11, 2012 10:51:32 AM UTC
no, via negativa.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 11, 2012 1:53:49 PM UTC
Better Failing, stop the BS. via negativa means REMOVAL of bad rulers.
Absolute success is mostly found among ascetic persons.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 9, 2012 1:14:57 PM UTC
Asim: ascetics, as those who do not want more than what they have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 9, 2012 1:23:32 PM UTC
Michael this is not about asceticism but about not wanting more in response of what others have, which ascetes satisfy. But ascetes have other attributes/goals.
"J'ai dû manger des amanites mortelles"
( I had to eat deadly Amanita phalloides [mushrooms])
And so he did. Though it is generally considered that only a couple of grams could be deadly, French GP Pierre Bastien devoured 250 grams.
So how come? Bastien found a cure to the mostly deadly Amanita phalloides mushroom poisoning. Though he had already treated with success some patients suffering from Amanita phalloides poisoning in Remiremont's hospital, the scientific community did not take him seriously. They simply rejected his finding. So he had to devour an overkill amount of "death caps" and to survive without permanent damage. Needless to say that he got it right...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 7, 2012 12:09:45 AM UTC
Same with the heliobacter discoverer(s)
It's a reform of the electoral system. Namely (to use my own Croatian system as an example), instead of the members of parliament (and city councils, regional councils, etc) being elected by popular vote, anyone who is of age and of sound mind (and a citizen of the country naturally) can apply to enter the voting lottery. Then, from this pool of people 150 are chosen at random to be the MPs for the next 4 years.
The ministers are selected via a public job interview by the parliament and stay ministers until a parliament votes them no confidence or they resign. The ministers choose a prime minister amongst themselves every year.
The president (and mayor etc) is chosen via direct popular vote as usual.
At worst, I think, we would get what we have now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 7:55:56 PM UTC
You should only vote DIRECTLY to REMOVE an a***hole from power.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 8:04:35 PM UTC
Please do!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 4:37:28 PM UTC
A man who got richer is often making others richer. A man who got promoted got many others to be demoted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 6:00:21 PM UTC
Someone who wants money is telling you he wants money; someone who wants credentials is telling you he is into something else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 7:25:16 PM UTC
PROLOGUE: After more than twenty years as a transactional trader and businessman
in what I called the “strange profession,” I tried what one calls an
academic career. And I have something to report— actually that was the
driver behind this idea of antifragility in life and the dichotomy between
the natural and the alienation of the unnatural. Commerce is natural,
fun, thrilling, lively, and natural; academia as currently professionalized
is none of these. And for those who think that academia is “quieter” and
an emotionally relaxing transition after the volatile and risk- taking business
life, a surprise: when in action, new problems and scares emerge
every day to displace and eliminate the previous day’s headaches, resentments,
and confl icts. A nail displaces another nail, with astonishing variety.
But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each
other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy- cold hatreds, with
small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness
of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of
their environment. Not to mention a the level of envy I have almost
never seen in business . . . My experience is that money and transactions
purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and
“credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry.
Commerce, business, Levantine souks (though not large- scale markets
and corporations) are activities and places that bring out the best in
people, makes most of them forgiving, honest, loving, trusting, and
open- minded. As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I
can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to
tolerance— the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It
beats rationalizations and lectures. Like antifragile tinkering, mistakes
are small and rapidly forgotten.
I want to be happy to be human and be in an environment in which
other people are in love with their fate— and never, until my brush with
academia, did I think that it was a certain form of commerce. The
biologist- writer and libertarian economist Matt Ridley made me feel
that it was truly the Phoenician trader in me (or, more exactly, the Canaanite)
that was the intellectual.*
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 7:54:34 PM UTC
OK,OK I will replace "greed" with "desire". But no matter how bad economic greed, it is no match for the other type...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 9:04:35 PM UTC
Peter, yes I believe that a whore is PURER than a bureaucrat, and NO, this has NOTHING TO DO with Ayn Rand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:05:57 PM UTC
No Pascal, the world needs transactions...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:06:23 PM UTC
No Pascal, the world needs transactions...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 10:06:14 AM UTC
Indeed credentialization is linked to interventionism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 8:23:50 AM UTC
Hilarious. But the f(x) here is tangential. It is the ludic v/s ecological problem.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Onepercent.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 30, 2012 6:26:41 PM UTC
The point is NOT social justice (or absence of it); this is about a mathematical property.
The essence of life is some volatility.
[ANTIFRAGILITY & variations]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 30, 2012 12:30:49 PM UTC
Bingo, Eleni. Paradise is a place where you get hungry, thirsty, tired, disapointed, etc. Like life on earth. It may be here on earth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 2, 2012 4:47:36 AM UTC
WHich one Samir?
It hit me thinking of this commoditized-metricized-modernistic sports-fan worshiping business why
1) two of the three Semitic religions (Judaism & Sunni Islam) have a thing against human representation & consider that perfection and purity is not the business of humans (&, critically, we humans should not be burdened by such aims, so better work on being a "good" human);
2) the third (Catholic & Orthodox Christianity & some branches of Islam) retained virtue from ancient thinking & limit hero-worship to (dead) saints and martyrs;
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:15:03 AM UTC
No Carl, you respect people for their advice and wisdom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 11:12:30 AM UTC
George, no TED for me. I speak little, preferably only in universities, usually technical lectures, and mostly for (the unnecessary but publisher mandated) book tour.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 2:20:37 PM UTC
...unless they play the charity game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 5:20:57 PM UTC
Hi Dru, it is an honor. My email is on www.fooledbyrandomness.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 9:06:17 PM UTC
Killian, admiration, pictures -> fetichism -> hero worship
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 9:58:32 PM UTC
Vergil Den you are not supposed to do any personal thanking here or promote a person... except for ideas. Ideas, not people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:39:04 PM UTC
Doesn't work: your friends in the past were Binladen (remember Afghanistan-Soviet Russia conflct). Friends change all the time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 7:29:44 PM UTC
David, Tit for Tat is the only strategy. Mess with no one, don't let anyone mess with you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 3:52:14 PM UTC
David, let us leave this topic as it will become heated.... Not that I am against, but this site needs to transcend these...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 3:54:46 PM UTC
Let's call this area the Levant, the least politically charged yet historically and culturally accurate designation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 6:22:06 PM UTC
David, Levant is a proxy for CANAAN, the NorthWest Semitic people we can call Canaanites (even if your tribe claims to not be exactly Canaanite, the Jews spoke an *identical* language to the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidnon now called "Phenicians" and very close to "punic"). Remarkably the Levantine dialect today lines up to the ancient demarcation (from Ugarit to North of the Gaza strip). People from Gaza do not speak Levantine, but rather, Egyptian. (Let us keep the discussion away from current politics if we can, or postpone for a while).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 6:28:08 PM UTC
Indeed, the distance is equal or smaller than the one between accents of Sidon and Berytus, or that between Brooklyn and Westchester. Also you need to realize that you may not be using contemporaneous texts, and only fragments from inscriptions. The only long text we have is
in Plautus; it concerns Punic which evolved a bit on its own from the dialect of Tyre.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 8:41:15 PM UTC
It all comes down to the nonaggregation of virtue under scale transformation. You want others to be virtuous but your country to be selfish.
You should limit the "fan" business to the non-publicity-prone people around you who exhibit outstanding ethical behavior and have made sacrifices for the benefit of others --far from the aberration of the competitive athlete and the cancer-marketing-self-promotional phenomenon. (As I said, I am entitled to comment on the cancer-marketing business).
Finally, we need to clean this page from the lowly class of "fans" and autograph-stamp collectors; I am only interested here in those interested in the advancement of ideas and the development a certain way of viewing the world.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:05:38 PM UTC
This page has been a two-way orderflow in the DEVELOPMENT and testing of ideas; I have been careful about limiting it to a certain type of thoughtful people genuinely interested in the process, or to those with some non-modernistic deeper values.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:33:51 PM UTC
Iulia I am interested in development, incremental development, not interested in proving a point and entering debates (here), repeating the same argument every time, returning to why the Black Swan event is not predictable, etc. If I keep reopening the old debates every time this would go nowhere. There is the open Web for people to say what they want; here I am looking for SPECIFIC arguments and counterexamples, not reinventing the wheel. This is similar to a philosophical/scientific discussion: needs to be focused. Plus this is my ONLY access to the web, so I am not interested in inelegant people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:35:38 PM UTC
Pascal Wallisch, thanks to you & people like you, it has been working here. So far, thanks to continuous expurgation of (mostly) newcomers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:36:42 PM UTC
Graeme Blake, yes, it was a mess at the beginning, now it works fine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:37:42 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita, you want conflicts, not trolls, philistines, prevaricators, or people who are arguing without understanding the problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 4:00:26 PM UTC
Tim you can't undo it without side effects. People are free to pay each others; but we are free to direct our respect elsewhere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 4:06:25 PM UTC
Yes, Pascal Wallisch but all I do is scan the comments and weed out a small number of people... About 3 persons a week... Only 2% of the people comment regularly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 5:39:49 PM UTC
Talking abt publicity i dread the 2 weeks after november 27. So far i n the last couple of y i only went on tv to express my anger at the hidden risks and fraud,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 7:04:42 PM UTC
Oliver Mayor would answer: if you want to marvel at a very fast biological machine, you would do much better with a cheetah. What makes us human is largely ethics, not numerical performance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 7:31:05 PM UTC
Osvaldo, what you are saying disgusts me. Go marvel at those who do something for the sake of others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 9:53:31 PM UTC
Michal Kolano there is no need for defense. The best defense is the Truth; in the case of ANTIFRAGILITY the best defense is the Math. https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_31K_MP92hUNjljYjIyMzgtZTBmNS00MGMwLWIxNmQtYjMyNDFiYjY0MTJl&hl=en_GB
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 11:40:08 AM UTC
Lea Mackay is right about Jack Welch... he loaded the firm with debt...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 1:08:16 PM UTC
As an aside, my problem with Lehrer is mostly in "How We Decide" and "Imagine" in addition to the articles... But it is a mute point now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 1:19:03 PM UTC
These remarks on the side by weirdoes do not harm as much as breaks in the regular conversation such as this one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 28, 2012 11:48:47 AM UTC
Pietro this is sophistry. You can always invoke envy to go against an argument.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 28, 2012 10:02:40 PM UTC
James Book signing is a necessary evil around book lectures and publishers organize these and it is a tradition. So I only sign books there. I get plenty of email requests from, say, someone who wants a book signed for a surprise birthday for her boyfriend, and I decline. Or something of the sort...
"They strive after determinate quantities, whilst in War all is undetermined, and calculation has always to be made with varying quantities.
"They direct the attention only upon material forces, while the whole military action is penetrated throughout by intelligent forces and their effects.
"They only pay regard to activities on one side, whilst War is a constant state of reciprocal action, the effects of which are mutual."
Sounds to me like thoughts congenial to Taleb's mind. (From, On War, 1832, Book Two, chapter 2, section 12.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 12:20:58 AM UTC
Thanks William
(For obvious reasons, I am entitled to comment on the subject).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 8:11:00 PM UTC
Joseph Gresham Miller nec possum dicere quare: a great quote, even if ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 8:19:14 PM UTC
Those who survive cancer and have a sense of decency don't show off their having survived cancer, no more than someone who won the lottery should shows off and display his wins in the face of his failed friends.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 9:14:12 PM UTC
Bravo Lea. He was just an agent, used by a system that exploits our emotions for profit. And he used the system himself, for gain. Never trust anyone who uses celebrity for "causes": these are often ways for the celebrity to work on his image. Unless the "cause" is unpooular.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 9:25:07 PM UTC
I would like to see someone become an activist for via negativa methods,s.a. fasting (autophagy, etc.), more effective preventors of cancer that MAKE NO MONEY FOR PHARMA.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 9:49:49 PM UTC
Christian, no sophistry on this page. Cancer is up or out, not by itself a handicap for the survivor, unlike an amputated leg.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 11:12:29 PM UTC
Ash Edwards, testicular cancer is one of the very rare few that are curable after spreading.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 11:13:50 PM UTC
Steve Sullivan, if someone accused you of a charge that YOU KNOW you are not guilty of, would you submit without a fight?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 12:42:00 AM UTC
I find it very lowly for anyone to be a fan of a competitive athlete... Anyone of you who worships a man whose contribution is riding a bicycle faster than someone else deserves what he got. I am just disappointed so many people who visit here worship athletes as if they were role models.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 1:06:32 PM UTC
I do NOT WANT on this page the lowly class of "fans" rather people interested in the advancement and promotion of ideas and a certain way of viewing the world. One should be "fan" of people who exhibit outstanding ethical behavior and sacrifice for the benefit others --far from the aberration of the competitive athlete and the cancer-marketing phenomenon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 26, 2012 1:22:34 PM UTC
Yes, Ktenneh Lnomat, it is for entertainment; but do not worship those who play these metrics above the saints.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 27, 2012 2:10:45 PM UTC
Guru Deb Ellatio is a troll that opened an account just now to comment...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 28, 2012 12:15:35 AM UTC
Christian success stories depress cancer patients, much like your neighbor winning a lottery ticket, while you can t make ends meet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 28, 2012 9:17:11 AM UTC
Here is the NON MARKETING STORY of Livestrong (prescient, written 9 m ago)... http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/athletes/lance-armstrong/Its-Not-About-the-Lab-Rats.html?page=all
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 28, 2012 9:41:58 PM UTC
No, the people out of here are not those in disagreement but those who hamper the progression of ideas by revisiting elementary discussions...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 24, 2012 10:14:41 PM UTC
John Aziz There is something as underintervention. Interventionism leads to underintervention when necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 24, 2012 10:18:01 PM UTC
Elie Al-Chaer what you are doing is EXACTLY casuistry to justify atrocities by invoking some moral rule.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 12:12:37 AM UTC
a rapid comment. I am not a spokesman for Ron Paul for the simple fact that I prefer him to other candidates. And being against interventionism (as I am in, say medicine) doesn't mean I am against intervening. It is the same as medicine: less elective medicine, more emergency room assistance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 12:50:14 AM UTC
Killian Denny, try to avoid saying nonsense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 1:00:53 AM UTC
Abu Al-Sous I despise such cheap remarks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 1:10:19 AM UTC
Killian, please stop posting on this topic. This is a disgusting violation of ethics similar to stretched consequentialism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 11:10:38 AM UTC
My initial point was that you should act BEFORE warning, otherwise you give false hopes to the ones on the ground, and encourage the perpetrator to commit more atrocities. Some military action to show you walk the walk. The second one is that systematic interventionism is what causes us to neglect emergency room treatment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 25, 2012 2:58:29 PM UTC
The other intervention I want is to stop people from messing with the environment. Less is more in intervention, but intervention nevertheless.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 23, 2012 1:51:54 AM UTC
Some fellow tried to revive the story of why I wrote I did not want awards... because it is not honest to say "no thank you". Same with interviews.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 24, 2012 9:53:45 PM UTC
Antonio, Ayn Rand is pure BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 22, 2012 8:16:43 PM UTC
Bingo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 21, 2012 6:55:22 PM UTC
And the ultimate respect is the one you have for yourself.
"Nock believed that the code of government should be that of the legendary king Pausole, who prescribed but two laws for his subjects, the first being, Hurt no man, and the second, Then do as you please; and … the whole business of government should be the purely negative one of seeing that this code is carried out."
... vs via positiva:
"By contrast, Nock argued, the state did not originate in the common understanding and agreement of society; it originated in conquest and confiscation. [...] Its primary function or exercise was not by way of … purely negative interventions upon the individual, but by way of innumerable and most onerous positive interventions [...]. The order of interest that it reflected was not social, but purely antisocial; and those who administered it, judged by the common standard of ethics, or even the common standard of law as applied to private persons, were indistinguishable from a professional-criminal class."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 20, 2012 2:30:16 AM UTC
I love the insights of Scott. Just ordered this book.
(Aphorisms)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 10:43:34 PM UTC
My trip is not until a week or so (the stupid book production process)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 12:57:19 AM UTC
No seminars, no events, nothing. Only contact with nonprivate matters is Facebook. Arak+writing+reading+ overeating with family. Samir are you based in Tripoli? The best sweets in the Mediterranean.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 1:29:01 AM UTC
Anyway the homicide rate in the US is 3 times the one in Lebanon. In NYC should be much much higher. So I am going to Lebanon solely for safety reasons.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 2:00:07 AM UTC
My theory is that Tripoli (10 miles from Amioun but a world away) destroyed Western civilization by teaching crusaders deserts and high carb diets (sherbet comes from shurba, snow from Beshareh + Crushed fruits). Ice cream was invented there (Ashta). Before that the Franj had NO idea about the existence of sweets.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 2:04:24 AM UTC
As a Christian I was brought up to NEVER eat sweets made by a Christian (now they have Dwaihy and the rules changed). My grandmother would get hysterical. Maybe it is the secret of peaceful coexistence. This is the reason we Greek-Orthodox never ever had problems with Tripoli Sunnis in our history.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 12:32:55 PM UTC
Yes Alexander, but the sweets were another step up... All there was before was honey...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 2:40:21 PM UTC
Ban I have some comments on Ramadan in my book, with studies of the effect of fasting. My point is that the effect is cancelled because people eat before dawn, hence only fast for about 12 hours. I tend to fast a minimum of 15-17 hours EVERY day and have done so for 3 years.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 10:53:18 PM UTC
It is easier to fast from dinner to (late) lunch. Hard to fast when you have a social life and family members etc. Otherwise I would do the 24-30 hour thing
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 17, 2012 1:21:30 AM UTC
Killian, the only man in the history of Lebanon who was unconditionally released by his kidnappers was a cousin of mine ( a Taleb of Amioun). In 1980 he was such an unbearable prisoner they returned him: he only drank water from unoped bottles, refused food except if he could himself open a can (really, refused), didn't care about their threats . They swore they would never ever kidnap anyone from Amioun.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 8:13:34 PM UTC
Not quite. Toothpaste has low dimentionality; a pill has a higher one.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/spurioustail.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 10:39:13 PM UTC
Please limit comments to the SCARY property shown in the paper (that the future is getting more random) not to some politico-economico-theorizing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:09:47 PM UTC
Scott it is a thought experiment, thus needs to be stripped down to the bare necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:40:33 PM UTC
No, just get into a niche play ... protected from winner-take-all effects
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 1:18:13 PM UTC
I analyzed in terms of Mean Absolute Deviations. It is the equivalent of "Sharpe ratio" but more scientific. You need to scale the return by MAD plus a corrector, so Soros Would be far to the right in MAD terms of someone with less significance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 10:05:14 PM UTC
James, if you are not competing for funds, no.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 16, 2012 12:04:26 PM UTC
Tom Leritz you are getting things backwards. Of course you will have a small number of billionaires. and a large cemetery. That's the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 13, 2012 4:46:01 PM UTC
No, no, no, it is fragile; fragility is a probabilistic notion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 3:50:32 AM UTC
Think ergodically
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 13, 2012 11:21:40 AM UTC
Michal you can test for partial inherited fragility, with respect to a given source of randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 13, 2012 12:48:52 PM UTC
The problem is that my method does not cover UNKNOWN sources of randomness. But good enough.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 13, 2012 1:35:19 PM UTC
How this takes me to the Lindy effect is unclear.... so far
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 13, 2012 2:59:44 PM UTC
Lindy effect tells you that what DOES NOT break is robust and time = information. Things tend to break early.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 9:09:02 PM UTC
All a question of SIZE.
(may seem simple but we are severely violating this principle...)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 3:31:44 PM UTC
No, Oliver, city-states...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 3:36:10 PM UTC
Michal, we have no choice... consider crowd behavior in nazi germany
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 3:43:56 PM UTC
yes, minority rights and separation of powers... but now we have the FED
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 3:55:08 PM UTC
never their banking system. their political structure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 3:56:29 PM UTC
No Olivier, they were not city states! THey were empires. VEnice, Genoa, Alexandria, Aleppo, THe Dutch republic, and small statelings, yes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 11, 2012 11:55:05 PM UTC
Yes Pascal, but that should tell us something about preferences!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 11, 2012 11:55:41 PM UTC
That wealth is a substitute
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 11, 2012 11:59:33 PM UTC
Pascal Wallisch He is gone. I try to clean out from this site people with a negative bent and such interpretation, simply out of aesthetics as it contaminates others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:00:25 AM UTC
Federico Cepeda these studies about the unhappiness of parents are bogus.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:02:16 AM UTC
(it is intellectually offensive to interpret my comments by referring to my financial condition)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:04:40 AM UTC
My point is that wealth is mere substitute and a self-feeding goal, beyond its initial motivation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:05:31 AM UTC
Vergil when you North from the equator, on average, ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:09:36 AM UTC
Truxton what does democracy have to do with this?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:16:04 AM UTC
Federico Cepeda when in math or physics a result is counter conventional wisdom, accept it blindly. In Psychology, scrutinize the experiments and the statistical interpretations. Or wait for another study to debunk earlier ones. https://docs.google.com/a/ucr.edu/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=dWNyLmVkdXxzbmVsczAwN3xneDo2MTcxYjM1MzI0YmRjODMx
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:18:44 AM UTC
Just consider that rich people from, say, France, work hard all year to go on vacation in "relaxed" places, say Morocco, and wonder how it looks to the people already in Morocco. I am not saying that Morocco is a better place to be born, I am simply saying that you can see the preferences right there in front of your eyes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:19:46 AM UTC
Jorgen, the cold-climers ... outside of two severe wars. Let's not discuss the statistical naivete of Pinkers' study.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:22:53 AM UTC
No, people in the South have severe problems... the point is that people in cold climates haven't learned how to stop, as they say in trading, cash-in on the money. Only perhaps in France, they are getting it...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:30:49 AM UTC
I was in Portugal last month ... the entire Northern Europe is down there... so you can see who won the argument about priorities...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:35:21 AM UTC
Pascal are you 1) French , 2) Psychologist or cognitive scientist?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 12:38:57 AM UTC
The cold story is just correlative, not causative. Civilization started in the fertile crescent and in Egypt, warmer places than the Mediterranean, then spread North. It could be that the Northerners don't know how to stop.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 1:00:42 AM UTC
Brian, these are narratives. We don't need explanations except robust extraction of preferences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 12, 2012 1:52:38 AM UTC
Friends this is NOT about north south merits etc but about PREFERENCES
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 10, 2012 2:45:51 PM UTC
You are not getting it. You should be the one defining yourself as "African American soccer player" or "doctor", or "professor or Turkish history", whatever corresponds to your designation, that of some idiot with less information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 10, 2012 3:06:21 PM UTC
(Removed some sophistry from the discussion here. It is remarkable how one a small number of persons represents a large corruption of the debates.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 10, 2012 3:48:44 PM UTC
For instance we should allow people to bear the flawed designation "Keynesian economist" or "Surrealist writer" without recourse on grounds that "others are more objective" in their assessment? So I deleted such comments are they are not worth being part of this discussion here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 10, 2012 3:56:22 PM UTC
No Charles Lambdin this is a very different problem of improper methods of reduction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 7, 2012 9:27:51 PM UTC
Ken , alas , no.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 7, 2012 9:41:43 PM UTC
I ve never seen anyone make more logical mistakes in real life than logicians
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 7, 2012 11:24:04 PM UTC
Friends, you seem to fall for the green lumber problem
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 8, 2012 12:20:17 AM UTC
Paul Reynolds alas that's the case. No substitute for the hard thing. Doesn't come in an amazon package.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 8, 2012 1:00:35 AM UTC
Ben, Publilius was born a philosopher and he meditated by himself
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 8, 2012 1:00:53 AM UTC
slow walks beat any textbook
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 8, 2012 1:01:14 AM UTC
Alexander, courage is everything; everything flows from it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 7, 2012 12:59:41 PM UTC
Andrew Lo is the perfect academic empty suit. All show no substance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 7, 2012 1:00:00 PM UTC
Michal and others I am putting up my final notes.
I have one problem with iatrogenics.
First of all, I think that in complex domains it is not true, that iatrogenics remain the same with changes in severity of the condition. You have demonstrated nicely in your chapter on medicine that assuming iatrogenics are constant for all categories we should focus on high-symptoms conditions and really ignore others.
But what if iatrogenic effects exponentially grow given rising severity of the condition? What if by iatrogenics we define not only harmful side effects to a subject inflicted directly by some disease but also to those surrounding the subject, i.e. to entire macro-system, assuming they are interdependent and by protecting the vulnerable link you actually endanger all the others? (because there is a feedback between them). Something like a second order iatrogenics (as in case of zero fire policy and Yellowstone Fire that was a result of it)
And I am not talking about biological organisms over here, but more broadly about anything that is complex and dynamical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 7, 2012 2:49:42 AM UTC
Michal, in a complex domain you detect by small perturbations... then you act small. you don't work with macro. That's key: the more macro things are, the more micro you need to act, locally, and small. hence convex and barbell heuristics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 5, 2012 7:35:54 PM UTC
people metabolically unfit suffer ... as if someone who never worked out started suddenly to lift weights...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 5, 2012 7:47:20 PM UTC
start slowly: low carb first, then energy deficit while exercizing...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 5, 2012 9:37:22 PM UTC
Marco diabetes is the result of steady eating.
"We now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions. We have no patience for mystery. We want the deciphering of gods. We want oracles. And we want them right now."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, August 4, 2012 11:54:52 PM UTC
Science is counterintuitive. But data mining is not science.
Also, THANK YOU ALL, the book goes to production today. I am done! over the past 5 years, 1150 complete days ALONE in my library thinking about (anti)fragility and nonlinearity.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medicine.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 1:55:21 PM UTC
Catherine Coll Schaefer please read the text before commenting. Or read it twice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 1:58:13 PM UTC
Yes, but I am not getting comments on the chapter... technical disagreements etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 2:21:48 PM UTC
Thanks. The idea for me is to include nonlinearities in things... nonlinear decline of iatrogenics to the severity of condition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 2:23:47 PM UTC
Eric D. Ryser I cite the paper. It FINDS no evidence in favor, and the burden of evidence here is on us to prove. Case in point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 2:24:29 PM UTC
"no compelling empirical evidence in favor of the reduction of swelling."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 2:25:50 PM UTC
Maybe my message is that "medicine is to save lives, not made for comfort".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 2:33:03 PM UTC
Jake Shannon Psychiatry is too obvious. I just addressed the general methodology in treatments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 2:36:06 PM UTC
Eric D. Ryser these are very very weak arguments "in favor"... meaning just to improve comfort. How about the sugar-free drinks argument?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 3:03:01 PM UTC
Michal, yes plenty, but NONE for the healthy. 1) It would have revealed itself already 2) It takes time to figure out the iatrogenics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 3:25:47 PM UTC
David, then if we rarely encountered it in our history, I agree.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 4:10:42 PM UTC
Eric D. Ryser I completely avoided the placebo discussion because it is not linked to nonlinearity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 6:39:40 PM UTC
Jazi the point is whether sugar-free provides the caloric deficit without offset by metabolic reaction. The only thing I saw is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2007.00286.x/abstract;jsessionid=EDF62C3C7CAF169407D6FFCCEE419840.d01t03?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+4+August+from+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST+%2805%3A00-07%3A00+EDT%29+for+essential+maintenance&userIsAuthenticated=false&deniedAccessCustomisedMessage
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 6:44:09 PM UTC
It says after 35 years of these sweeteners " evidence supporting a role for LCS in weight management is lacking. "
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 6:54:05 PM UTC
No, my point is that the CALORIES SAVED don't seem to show in the numbers. Instead, just drink water, coffee, wine, tea, infusions, wisky, gasoline, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 3, 2012 8:09:32 PM UTC
Yes, much more intense than The Black Swan, more interesting, more in line with the central mission. The Black Swan was like reading the beginning of a Russian novel, you struggle to know the characters. This was cruising.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 5, 2012 12:41:01 PM UTC
Jazi the authors of the study showing that *sweeteners don't make us gain weight but we don't have evidence that they make us lose weight* got funds from food companies!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 9:19:15 PM UTC
My point is: Why don'e we give tax breaks to those who don't look attractive?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 10:02:53 PM UTC
f(x) is what you feel, x is an event
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 10:02:59 PM UTC
or x is a condition
When it comes to narratives, the brain seems to be the last province of the theoretician-charlatan. Add neurosomething to a field, and suddenly it rises in respectability and becomes more convincing as people now have the illusion of a strong causal link—yet the brain is too complex for that; it is both the most complex part of the human anatomy and the one that is the most susceptible to sucker-causation and charlatanism of the type "Proust was a neuroscientist". Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons brought to my attention in their book The Invisible Gorilla the evidence I had been looking for: whatever theory has a reference in it to the brain circuitry seems more “scientific” and more convincing, even when it is just is randomized psycho-neuro-babble.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 1:27:47 AM UTC
The fact that there are neuro correlates allows people to build huge narratives from little data--as Lehrer did. It does not mean all neuro is bunk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 1:38:15 AM UTC
Christopher, I mention it twice. Once for the gorilla, once for "brain porn". And maybe once more for reasons you don't like: chess skills don't translate into "large world" skills which I use to question "classroom science".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 1:44:48 AM UTC
I made a bet that anything in modern psychology that makes sense scientifically should have Latin, Greek or Semitic antecedents in more robust form. For instance loss aversion -> Ennius; treadmill effects (about 4 sources, Seneca being one), attribution bias (Montaigne cites 2 sources) etc...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 1:46:35 AM UTC
Yes Christopher Chabris doesn't. I am the one who suggests testing the school thing and found tiny references of tasks made in Germany.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 1:48:54 AM UTC
Yes Pascal, but psychology is not the field--too lab oriented. The real field is time, Lindy effects so the Romans win. But psychology can work well by via negativa.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 1:50:32 AM UTC
Christopher I did not cite the study for that reason. I just mentioned the transferability of memory skills
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 1:58:49 AM UTC
Adalberto, I wouldn't know. Too much noise and as an author I forget the details of my writings faster than those of others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:00:41 AM UTC
Scott, a little bit of grace since Christopher (one of the authors) is on this site. Plus I disagree. I liked the book enough to extract three ideas. Re-read it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:07:57 AM UTC
No, Polanyi is about tacit knowledge, but codified. Read him late.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:10:45 AM UTC
Birdsong, no sophistry here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:15:40 AM UTC
Scott, my curves have nothing to do with organizational stuff. They are nonlinear responses mapped into probability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:21:39 AM UTC
Actually few people know that Karl Marx may have done the same misquoting as Lehrer, with an equivalent cover-up. It was a citation by Gladstone that he may have made up then claimed later was redacted out of the record. But it was different
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:21:59 AM UTC
not essential to his story, not even beneficial ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:23:50 AM UTC
Jeffrey Olson, I am evidence-based. I don't need / don't like neural correlates. Read his stuff about the Dalai lama, or some monk with a better vascularization in the left frontal cortex. Fell for it. Then learned to stay away. We can do very well with ecological responses and phenomenologies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 2:50:30 AM UTC
Jeffrey Olson and Joseph Gresham Miller here is the section that precedes what I wrote above: We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations change all the time, and have changed all the time in history (because of causal opacity, the invisibility of causes) with people involved in the incremental development of ideas thinking they always had a definitive theory; experience remains constant.
As we saw in Chapter 7, what physicists call the phenomenology of the process is the empirical manifestation, without looking at how it glues to existing general theories. Take for instance the following statement, entirely evidence-based: If you build muscle, you can eat more without getting more fat deposits in your belly and can eat plenty of lamb chops without having to buy a new belt. Now in the past the theory to rationalize it was “Your metabolism is higher because muscles burn calories.” Currently I tend to hear “ Youbecome more insulin-sensitive and store less fat.” Insulin, shminsulin; metabolism, shmetabolism: another theory will emerge in the future and some other substance will come about, but the exact same effect will continue to prevail.
The same holds for the statement Lifting weights increases your muscle mass. In the past they used to say that weight lifting caused the “micro-tearing of muscles,” with subsequent healing and increase in size. Today some people discuss hormonal signaling or genes, tomorrow they will discuss something else. But the effect has held forever and will continue to do so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 2, 2012 3:57:42 AM UTC
Mohamed I haven't read his neuro stuff. His other arguments against religion either imply that he doesn't know what religion means, or that he doesn't know how to argue ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 7:41:07 PM UTC
survival.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 7:52:20 PM UTC
Those populations that accept interdicts survive. Others...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 26, 2012 2:53:43 PM UTC
No, no, no. No.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 26, 2012 6:58:45 PM UTC
I disagree with the notion that optimism is convex. it makes people concave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 26, 2012 7:05:44 PM UTC
You can only take a lot of risks when you are pessimistic. Your example is a real N=1 (you forget the cemetery of optimistic risk takers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 26, 2012 7:53:36 PM UTC
Then David, there is barbell optimism (open right tail, closed left tail), and nonbarbell sucker optimism (exposed left tail)
We can certainly attribute the fragilizing effect of modern globalization to complexity, and how connectivity and cultural contagions make gyrations in economic variables much more severe —the classical switch to Extremistan. But there is another effect: wealth. Wealth means more, and because of nonlinear scaling, more is different. We are prone to make more severe errors because we are simply, wealthier. Just as projects of one hundred million dollars are more unpredictable and more likely to incur overruns than five million dollar ones, simply, just by being richer, the world is troubled with more unpredictability and fragility. This comes with growth —at a country level this Highly Dreamed Of GDP Growth. Even at an individual level, wealth means more headaches; we may need to work harder at mitigating the complications arising from wealth than at acquiring it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 23, 2012 8:57:57 PM UTC
Luciano do you have the quote in Napolitan?
The 2012 UEA Philosophy Public Lecture Series
PHILOSOPHY AND THE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CRISIS
27 September: Prof. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan – “What is the opposite of a ‘fragile’ system?” [Working title; Exact title TBA]
11 October: Panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Judith Mehta (ECO): Prof. Shaun Hargreaves-Heap (ECO), Dr. Alex Haxeltine (ENV) & Dr. Rupert Read (PHI) bringing different disciplinary perspectives to bear on “The current state of play of the Euro-crisis”
25 October: Prof. Catherine Rowett (PHI) – "Learning from Greece: thinking about austerity and monetary union in Pythagorean and Platonic politics"
8 November: Prof. Raymond Geuss, Cambridge – “The political philosophy underlying our financial and economic system”
22 November: Shaun Hargreaves-Heap vs Bob Sugden in debate over “The rationality (or otherwise?) of ‘rational choice theory’ and of contemporary economics”
6 December: Dr. Davide Rizza (PHI) – “What money can do for you: Insights from the philosophy of money”
All lectures held in Lecture Theatre 2 at 6.30 pm.
Admission Free - Everyone Welcome.
Philosophy has always gained strength from its engagement with the world around us, and in turn may help us to understand this world in which we live. In this series of lectures, philosophers and philosophically-minded scholars from other disciplines analyse the financial and economic crisis that has overtaken western economies in the last five years. How does it relate to our political and social philosophies? What does it mean for our ideas of Europe? Can philosophy contribute to our understanding or even point out directions we could follow to help get us out of this crisis? Will the crisis be resolved by a return to 'business as usual' - or is a whole new philosophy of economics or indeed of life on the point of emerging?
Series organised by Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough, PHI, UEA, UK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 19, 2012 12:01:10 PM UTC
Wrong title. Should be: Ethics, Opacity, and Asymmetries
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 19, 2012 12:01:31 PM UTC
Opacity, Asymmetries, and Ethics
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/appendix1.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 9:15:41 PM UTC
Thanks Georgi! But it is initial concavity which is difficult in nature.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 9:16:42 PM UTC
the bound of a monotone concave will look like linear, but it is imperceptibly concave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 10:11:19 PM UTC
Michal, more convex becomes vertical on the right...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 10:58:47 PM UTC
It turns into concave later... I might replace.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 11:02:03 PM UTC
Type 1 is rare for reasons too long to explain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 19, 2012 12:28:56 PM UTC
The book is in production... Just finishing the appendices/notes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 16, 2012 6:56:56 PM UTC
He did not use proper integration, which makes it naive. It should not be square, more ovoid!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 16, 2012 7:36:29 PM UTC
I was joking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 15, 2012 10:24:41 PM UTC
Britton T. Burdick : please don't use spurious arguments here. Existing religions are around, which incorporate many more ancient ones; the majority of the people on the Planet practice relifion; don't look for extinct ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 16, 2012 12:00:26 AM UTC
BTW I was reading the bio of a Sicilian mafia person who killed a lot of people. He was expelled from the mafia at some point for abandoning his wife.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 16, 2012 10:48:38 AM UTC
The web is making people prone to be idiots even more idiots; the entire problem with technology is that it only hurts the unwise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 16, 2012 2:42:15 PM UTC
No, Alexander. Communication is natural.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 17, 2012 9:07:19 PM UTC
Thanks Henry
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 15, 2012 7:06:24 PM UTC
You people here seem to think it is a bad thing. It is a good thing. THings break in an accelerated way. That's what I meant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 15, 2012 4:43:54 PM UTC
Entropy is a HORRIBLE way to describe randomness, particularly in fat tailed domains. It does not go by payoff, just probability. It is totally useless outside of coin tosses and other tin-tailed variables.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 16, 2012 2:41:26 PM UTC
Yes Cristian, but unnecessary; the mere idea of higher moments do so.
Dixon's thesis is that there is an equilibrium state of language development, and a non-equilibrium state. This corresponds well to your ideas: the equilibrium state can go on for a long time, but it is fragile. The non-equilibrium state is a kind of breaking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:01:22 PM UTC
David you are using Persian-Urdu, not Arabic calligraphy . As a Semite you should use Ar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 12, 2012 2:07:42 PM UTC
دود بكسنهرن
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 2:27:52 PM UTC
Yozan, not all...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 2:34:58 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris let us proceed. Can you show me convincing evidence that education brings wealth? It is easy to establish that rich countries SPEND MORE on education.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 2:37:52 PM UTC
Randy those who do not have a brand degree can't get interviews for the entry-level jobs. It is more probable to get hit by a truck than get an entry level interview for the training program of a major Wall Street firm unless you have a Cartier-watch type degree.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 2:39:49 PM UTC
(with my Wharton degree I was able to pick the job I wanted then. My friends from other schools could not get interviews).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 2:46:27 PM UTC
Sanjay Khanduri, it was just a tag.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 3:09:54 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris There have been a lot of studies: Pritchett, Alison Wolf, Hi-Joon . You need an extraordinary amount of data mining / fudging to show the arrow education ->wealth. But you see the costs: nonstochastic expenditure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 3:13:15 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris my main problem is whether education reduces tinkering. Also @David, I agree, professional and technical schools are another game. Medicine seems like education but is largely a mechanism of apprenticeship (after two years of "science", they switch to clinical matters).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 3:19:21 PM UTC
(note that what I am discussing is ORGANIZED education).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 3:26:45 PM UTC
Gerry Tsoukalas as a professor you should know better than argue the sophistry that your Wharton product teaches people something useful BECAUSE you put a lot of efforts into it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 3:50:33 PM UTC
I have a chapter on it... posted here once...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 3:55:38 PM UTC
Gerry Tsoukalas you are still missing the point. Are you selling education or pimping with Warren Buffet/networking. Does it translate into wealth for SOCIETY?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 4:23:15 PM UTC
Gerry Tsoukalas you are using the arguments of a charlatan/ snake oil salesman. Not surprised: from my experience most business school professors (if not all) are CHARLATANS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 4:24:20 PM UTC
David, bingo! external stressors!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 4:34:39 PM UTC
Gerry Tsoukalas I am allergic to charlatans. You are a certified charlatan to use tactics and standard snake oil arguments here (that business schools are good because two people can meet there as if the reasoning did not apply to restaurants or bordellos where people can also meet) . And I am fed up with business schools teaching portfolio theory (which we know is wrong) and other nonsense because they can't do better. Charlatan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 5:04:17 PM UTC
Actually one can spot a charlatan in the argument "do you have an alternative to my snake oil?". The FDA had to fight it by showing that it is the vendor who needs to prove efficacy, not society. My idea is to limit "business" school education to: accounting, law, and computer programming. Best to shut them down: private training programs can teach these matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 5:05:24 PM UTC
(when I was at U Mass, they wanted me to teach portfolio theory, a fraud, on grounds: you got to give students something). I called the dean a fraudster.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 5:08:36 PM UTC
Michal Kolano they do need to prove they are not harming the tinkering spirit that led to the enrichment in the first place.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 5:18:28 PM UTC
illusions of knowledge makes one TELEOLOGICAL. Much like models cause the buildup of debt. Less rational flaneur, more into strategic plan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 6:00:43 PM UTC
School of Hard Knocks + library + plus practical experience + specialized courses (say accounting). Fughet universities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 6:03:48 PM UTC
THE TYRANNY OF THE COLLECTIVE
Mistakes made collectively not individually are the hallmark of organized knowledge —and the best argument against it. The argument “because everyone is doing it” or “that’ s how others do it” abounds. The issue is complex: people who on their own would not do something because they find it silly now engage in it collectively.
One doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts, Chris S. once came to tell me that he believed in my ideas of “fat tails” but that it would not help him get an academic job. “It’s what everybody uses”, he said. Likewise I was asked by the administration to teach standard Black Swan generating risk methods (I refused). Is my duty as a professor to get him a job (at the expense of society), or deliver my civic duties? Well, if the latter is the case, then academia has a severe problem. For the point is generalized and that’s why economics hasn’t collapsed yet in spite of the obvious nonsense in it.
And academics use the notion “ethical” in their defense — From my experience, the best way to tick an academic off is to call him unethical: I was thrown out of École Polytechnique in France for discussing the iatrogenics of risk models, the ones Stiglitz condoned, when I shouted “this is not just dangerous, but also unethical”. Before that telling people they are wrong doesn’t seem to phase them, let alone insult them. But unethical they couldn’t swallow.
I am convinced that a single person with courage can bring down the collective composed of wimps.
And here, once again, we need to go back into history for the cure. The scriptures were quite aware of the diffusion of responsibility and made it a sin to follow the crowd in doing evil —as well as giving false testimony in order to fir
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 6:05:47 PM UTC
Abhi I have an aphorism on that
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 6:20:16 PM UTC
And Einstein was NOT at a top university. He was a mediocre student. ETF became huge thanks to his reputation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 6:20:47 PM UTC
ETH
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 6:48:54 PM UTC
What is this BS of confusing bankers an hedge fund managers, or physicists with B-School education. please stop!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 7:30:44 PM UTC
Kiran, Abhi, I don't mind these fights and nitpicking with each other in this context. I just couldn't stand a B-school professor in the conversations and diverting the topics. They feel polluting,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 7:55:48 PM UTC
Anne Helen Kennedy when you throw someone out all comments go to spam. But regardless, B-School prof should not be on this page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 8, 2012 9:50:12 PM UTC
Abhi and kiran pls stop fighting
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 1:20:30 PM UTC
Karen when I call B-Schools charlatans, it is not because of the effect of the word on my vocal cords.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 2:21:34 PM UTC
Belbachir Mehdi, I don't teach in a business school. I teach in an engineering school. A HUGE difference. And had I not been to Wharton, I would not be able to genuinely question its existence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 6:07:05 PM UTC
Michal, there is something called "evidence against one's self interest". If a tobacco field owner stood against smoking, he would be more credible than another person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 6:31:54 PM UTC
Abhi, Britton doesn't seem to get the point that information is not in a vacuum; we get it from a background, hence conditionality. It is similar to probability. You have prior and background information that allow you to interpret what you are hearing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 6:33:32 PM UTC
So if a poor man says wealth is bad, the information is not as potent as when uttered by a wealthy person. But this doesn't mean that a regular citizen should not criticize the mafia, economics, and other criminal activities etc. It is a different problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 7:07:04 PM UTC
No, David. It is similar to the Monry Hall Problem, when you think of it. Background information matters. This is an old debate between Bayesians and others. In real life nothing is "small world"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 7:07:19 PM UTC
I call it the ecology of the problem/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 9:07:33 PM UTC
If I estimate that a wine tastes like Argentinian Malbec, with 95% probability, but I am in a French restaurant there is 99% probability that the wine is French not Argentinian. that's background information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 9, 2012 9:24:24 PM UTC
Karen think of someone who benefits indirectly from tobacco sales, yet votes to ban smoking. The skin in the game is that he has something to lose from his choice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 4:58:49 PM UTC
Modernity
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 5:27:56 PM UTC
Leandro, I disagree a bit about Olympic weightlifting because it is ecological... It uses the entire system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 8:31:11 PM UTC
Guru, I DON'T like Extremistan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 11:03:44 PM UTC
The key is not to shoot for a metric
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 5, 2012 1:51:21 PM UTC
The best exercise has no metric. Weightlifters compete to LIFT weight. I try to hold the weight to stress my bones. And the negative (lowering) is even more ecological. Likewise when I hike I go up and down. When you cycle there is no negative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 5, 2012 8:02:27 PM UTC
Greg, I gave up on long distance cycling. I have never been happier. I walk, unfettered by these machines...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 5, 2012 8:11:58 PM UTC
Another discovery. I recently slacked off and owing to an injury (from weightlifting) did close to nothing for 2 months, except a 15 min visit to the gym every 10 days for deadlifting up to the max lift. I was shocked that my gains have never been bigger than during that period.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 5, 2012 8:44:25 PM UTC
In general the more there is a machine between you and the sport, the worst ecologically, etc. And the more disorganized, the better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 6, 2012 1:18:22 AM UTC
KAren doesn't really mean it. She wants more philosophy here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 7, 2012 1:51:22 AM UTC
Guru, I disagree. Squats are necessary but low weight (h-g do hundreds a day as part of life), deadlifts are infrequent but very heavy (that's how we pick up heavy things).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 10:20:43 AM UTC
But at the core nobody is seeing the optionality. Easy to model.
A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.
My greatest lesson in courage came from my father — as a child, I had admired him before for his erudition, but was not overly fazed since erudition on its own does not make a man. He had a large ego, immense dignity, and required respect. But he was once insulted by a militiaman at a road check during the Lebanese war. He refused to comply, and got angry at the militiaman for being disrespectful. As he drove away, the gunman shot him in the back. The bullet stayed in his chest for the rest of his life so he had to carry an X-ray through airport terminals. This set the bar very high for me: dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it.
A lesson I learned from this ancient culture is the notion of as Megalopsychon (a term expressed in Aristotle’s ethics), a sense of grandeur that got superseded by the Christian values of “humility”. There is no word for it in Romance languages; in Arabic it is called Shhm —best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men those who don’t risk) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 3, 2012 10:05:07 PM UTC
Christian humility excludes megalopsychon
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 4, 2012 1:18:53 AM UTC
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/megalopsychia-pagan-syria.pdf
As usual at the end of the journey, while looking at the entire manuscript on a restaurant table, someone with a Semitic culture asks me to summarize my book standing on one leg. This time it was Shaiy Pilpel, a probabilist with whom I’ve had two decades long calm conversations without a single episode of small talk. It is hard to find people knowledgeable and confident enough to like to extract the essence of things, instead of nitpicking.
With the previous book, one of his compatriots asked me the same question, but I had to think about it. This time I did not even have to make an effort.
It was so obvious that Shaiy summarized it himself in the same breath. He actually believes that all real ideas can be distilled down to a central issue that the great majority of people in a given field, by dint of specialization and emptysuitedness, completely miss. Everything in religious law comes down to the refinements, applications and interpretations of the Golden Rule “don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do to you.” And this was a true distillation, not a Procrustean bed.
Shaiy’s summary was: fragility is what loses from volatility. Everything gains or loses from volatility. The glass on the table is short volatility. Things in life are either short or long volatility.
Then he added: it is The Plague of Albert Camus, a man spends part of his life searching for the first sentence for a book. Once he had that perfect sentence, he had the book. In your case people will have to read the entire book to understand the sentence. Some rules are only grasped thanks to their interpretation.
I glanced at the manuscript with a feeling of calm elation. Every sentence in the book was an application or interpretation of the short maxim. Some details and extension can be counterintuitive and elaborate, particularly when it comes to decision making under opacity, but at the end everything falls under it.
The reader is invited to do the same. Look around you, at your life, at objects, at relationships, at entities. You may replace volatility with other members of the disorder cluster here and there for clarity, but it is not even necessary —when formally expressed, it is all the same symbol. Time is volatility. Education, in the sense of the formation of character, personality, and acquisition of true knowledge, likes disorder; label-driven education and educators abhor disorder. Some things break because of error, others don’t. Some theories fall apart, not others. Innovation is precisely something that gains from uncertainty: and some people sit around waiting for uncertainty and using it as raw material, just like our ancestral hunters.
The glass is dead; things alive are long volatility.
Prometheus is long disorder; Epimetheus is short disorder. We can separate people and the quality of their experiences based on exposure to disorder and appetite for it: Spartan hoplites contra bloggers, adventurers contra copyeditors, Phoenician traders contra Latin grammarians, and pirates contra tango instructors.
It happens that everything nonlinear is convex or concave, or both, depending on the intensity of the stressor. We saw the link between convexity and liking volatility. So everything likes or hates volatility up to a point. Everything.
We can detect what likes volatility thanks to convexity or acceleration and higher orders, since convexity is the response by a thing that likes disorder. We can build Black Swan protected systems thanks to detection of convexity. We can take medical decisions by understanding convexity of harm and the logic of mother nature’s tinkering, on which side we face opacity, which error we should risk. Ethics is largely about stolen convexities and optionality.
More technically, we may never get to know x, but we can play with the exposure to x, barbell things to defang them; we can control a function of x, f(x), even is x remains vastly beyond our understanding. We can keep changing f(x) until we are comfortable with it by a mechanism called convex transformation, the fancier name for the barbell.
This short maxim also tells you where fragility supersedes truth, why we lie to children, and why we humans got a bit ahead of ourselves in this large enterprise called modern history. Distributed randomness in a necessity, not an option: everything big is an abomination. Modern times don’t like volatility.
And the Triad gives us some indication of what should be done to live in a world that does not want us to understand it, whose charm comes from our inability to understand it.
***
Once again, reader, thank you for reading my book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, July 3, 2012 2:50:49 PM UTC
Bravo michal, thx
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 1, 2012 7:53:42 PM UTC
The difference is that one falls for the narrative fallacy not the other. Forget the deception part.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 1, 2012 8:23:49 PM UTC
PROMETHEUS AND EPIMETHEUS
In Greek legend, there were two titan brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus means “fore-thinker” while Epimetheus means “after thinker”, equivalent to someone who falls for the retrospective distortion of fitting events to the past. Prometheus gave us all these new things such as fire and represents the progress of civilization while Epimetheus represents backward thinking, staleness, and lack of intelligence. It was Epimetheus who accepted Pandora’s gift, the large jar, with irreversible consequences.
Optionality is Prometean, narratives are Epimethean —one has reversible and benign mistakes, the other symbolizes the gravity and irreversibility of the consequences of opening Pandora’s box.
You make forays into the future by opportunism and optionality. So far in Book IV we saw the power of optionality as a alternative way of doing things, opportunistically, with some large edge to them coming from asymmetry with large benefits and benign harm. It is a way —the only way —to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future —while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite, in which one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set backwards. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.
This brings us to the difference between doing and thinking. The point is hard to understand from the vantage point of intellectuals. As Yogi Berra said, “in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is”. So far we have seen arguments that intellect is associated with fragility, and instills methods that conflict with tinkering. So far we saw the option as the expression of antifragility. We also separated knowledge into two categories, the formal and the Fat Tonish, heavily grounded into antifragility of trial and error and risk taking with less downside, barbell-style —a de-intellectualized form of risk taking (or, rather, intellectual in its own way). In an opaque world, that is the only way to go.
Table x summarizes the different aspects in the opposition between narrating and tinkering, which we will do over the next three chapters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 6, 2012 8:31:16 PM UTC
The punishment for doing well.
As usual at the end of the journey, looking at the entire manuscript on a restaurant table, someone asks me to summarize my book standing on one leg. This time it was Shaiy Pilpel, a probabilist with whom I’ve had two decades long calm conversations without a single episode of small talk. It is hard to find people knowledgeable enough to like to simplify things, instead of nitpicking.
The last book, one of his compatriots asked me the same question, and I had to think about it. This time I did not even have to make an effort. The last time I made two or three attempts before settling on a final one; this time it was all obvious.
It was so obvious that Shaiy summarized it in the same breath. He actually believes that all real ideas can be distilled down to a central issue that the majority of people in a field, by dint of specialization and emptysuitedness, completely miss. Everything in religion come down to applications and interpretations of “don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do to you.” And this was a true distillation, not a Procrustean bed.
Shaiys’s summary was: fragility is what loses from volatility. Everything in life gains or loses from volatility. The glass on the table is short volatility.
I calmly looked at the manuscript with the feeling of calm elation. Every sentence in the book was an application of the short maxim.
The reader is invited to do the same. You may replace volatility with other members of the disorder cluster here and there for clarity —but when formally expressed, it is all the same symbol. Time is volatility. Education likes disorder; soccer moms repress disorder; innovation is something that gains from uncertainty. Some things break because of error, others don’t. Some theories fall apart, not others.
We can detect what likes volatility thanks to convexity or acceleration and higher orders, since convexity is the response of a thing that likes disorder. We can build Black Swan protected systems with detection of convexity. We can take medical decisions by understanding convexity of harm.
This short maxim also tells you where fragility supersedes truth, why we lie to children, and why we humans got a bit ahead of ourselves in this large enterprise called modern history. Modern times don’t like volatility.
And we know what should be done.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 12:01:16 PM UTC
George, now on amazon us. others will update soon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 12:12:53 PM UTC
George, thanks, but this page is not for promotion, just development. I hope you don't mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 2:29:29 PM UTC
I added a few things... that was the first draft, without a stop.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 2:31:07 PM UTC
Added: And this extends to epistemology. Exposure to error from absence of evidence is short volatility...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 2:48:20 PM UTC
Ben Champion Thanks for the Schubert hint. Played it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 4:22:03 PM UTC
Alexander Hourani-Photography what's the photography in your last name?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 4:51:32 PM UTC
Alexander is the book your doctoral thesis?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 6:03:31 PM UTC
pray, more information
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 6:34:46 PM UTC
Alexander, in all fairness I think that you could make it look more like a scholarly document. Then write a book on it and I will introduce you to Belles LEttres. A lot of erudition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 10:27:33 PM UTC
Hello, please no infighting here. Keep these things to correspondence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 1, 2012 1:45:11 AM UTC
Casey, I see no venom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 1, 2012 1:46:43 AM UTC
Killian, please limit your posts to one per conversation--respect others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 1, 2012 10:53:11 AM UTC
If I were to explain it scientifically, it would be that nonlinear transformations f(x) have certain shapes in their distributions and makes the average include dispersion in it(E[f(x) depends on s(x) were s is variance, etc) , and makes all lower moments depend on higher moments. This is why dose-response is hard to map verbally.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 1, 2012 2:00:01 PM UTC
It means that because of nonlinearity you can say "this is good" or "this is bad"; you need the dose as additional information
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 1, 2012 2:35:20 PM UTC
can't say.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 29, 2012 12:23:34 PM UTC
as many data points as you can get , as few parameters as you can use.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 29, 2012 12:54:13 PM UTC
You still will be likely to fall into the turkey problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 29, 2012 1:55:11 PM UTC
Then you are doing a convex transformation and the properties of x don't count as those of f(x)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 29, 2012 6:34:16 PM UTC
Hi Stefano and Andrea. Andrea any tail truncation is in the form of f(x) convex in the negative domain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 29, 2012 6:48:43 PM UTC
f(x) does not have to be continous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 1:01:31 PM UTC
Stephano there is something I worked with called alpha time a weighting operator with a form a(t) t as weight for periodicity (the world is slower on weekends, the world goes faster after an election, etc.). Naively a(t)= 0 on weekends and 1 on weekdays. But alpha time is nonstochastic; it is a sort of adjustment to the calendar function. So sigma t^exponent should be sigma (t*a)^exponent. In the long run it should not matter; this is just a correction for short term.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 7:58:54 PM UTC
el faylasouf biyejeh ysahhil el-ishya w bi3a22idon.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 7:59:47 PM UTC
ghayro biyejeh's y3aqqid el-ishya bisahhilon
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:41:58 PM UTC
When you are both you are neither.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 30, 2012 5:16:24 PM UTC
you need a loss function for complexity
Second principle of iatrogenics: it is not linear. I do not believe that we should take risks with near-healthy people; I also believe that we should take a lot, a lot more risks with those deemed in danger.
Why do we need to focus treatment on more serious cases, not marginal ones? Take this example showing nonlinearity. When hypertension is mild, say marginally higher than the zone accepted as “normotensive”, the chance of benefiting from the drug is close to 5.6% (only one person in eighteen benefit from the treatment). But when tension is considered to be in the “high” or “severe” categories, the chance of benefiting are now 26% and 72%, respectively (that is that one person in four and two persons out of 3 will benefit from the treatment). So the treatment benefits are convex to condition (the benefits rise disproportionally, in an accelerated manner). But consider that the iatrogenics should be near-constant for all categories! In the very ill condition, the benefits are large relative to iatrogenics, in the borderline one, they are small. This means that we need to focus on high symptom conditions and ignore, I mean really ignore, other situations in which the patient is not very ill.
Another way to view it is by considering that mother nature had to have tinkered through selection in inverse proportion to the rarity of the condition. Of the hundred of thousands of drugs today, I can hardly find a via positiva one that makes a healthy person unconditionally “better”. And the reason we have not been able to find drugs that make us feel unconditionally better when we are well (or unconditionally stronger, etc.) is for the same statistical reason: nature would have found this magic pill. But consider that illness is rare, and the more ill the person the less likely nature would have found the solution, in an accelerating way. A condition that is three deviations away from the norm is more than three hundred times rarer than normal; an illness that is five deviations from the norm is more than a million times rarer!
The medical community does not seem to grasp such nonlinearity of benefits to iatrogenics, and if they do so in words, they have not integrated it into a decision-making methodology. Pharmaceutical companies under financial pressures to find diseases (thanks to “efficiency” they are fragile, a few medications away from bankruptcy, so they need to use their large machinery to generate revenues). They have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking for disease among healthier and healthier people, and lobbying for reclassifications of conditions. Now if your blood pressure is in the upper part of the range that used to be called “normal”, you are no longer “normotensive” but “pre-hypertensive”, even if there are no symptoms in view. There is nothing wrong with the classification if it leads to healthier lifestyle and robust measures, typically via negativa —but what is behind, typically, is a drive for more medication.
Another way to view it: the iatrogenics is in the patient, not the treatment. If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be permitted —no holds barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then mother nature should be the doctor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:20:46 AM UTC
Victor, this is not the same issue. Iatrogenics are weak for old people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:25:53 AM UTC
Elie, FIRST PRINCIPLE OF IATROGENICS
The first principle of iatrogenics is as follows: we do not need evidence of harm to claim that a drug or a via positiva procedure is dangerous. Recall my comment earlier with the turkey problem that harm is in the future, not in the narrowly defined past.
Consider the adventure of a human-invented fat, trans fat. Somehow, humans discovered how to make fat products and, as it was the great era of scientism, they were convinced they could make it better than nature. Not just equal; better. Chemists assumed that they could produce a fat replacement that was superior than lard or butter from so many standpoints.
First, it was more convenient: synthetic products such as margarine stay soft in the refrigerator, so you can immediately spread them on a piece of bread without the usual wait while listening to the radio. Second, it was economical, as the synthetic fat were derived from vegetables. Finally, what is worst, trans fat was assumed to be healthier. Its use propagated very widely after, for some reason, after a few hundred million years of consumption of animal fat, people suddenly started getting scared of it (particularly something called “saturated” fat). So today trans fat product is widely banned as it turned out that it kills people, as it is behind heart disease and cardiovascular problems. The statement “statistically significant” by some semi-informed researcher can turn people into complete suckers — like many things called “statistical”, it is rarely statistical and even more rarely significant.
For a particularly murderous example of such sucker (and fragilizing) rationalism, consider the story of Thalidomide. It was a drug meant to reduce the nauseous episodes of pregnant women. It led to birth defects. Another drug, Diethylstilbestrol silently harmed the fetus and led to delayed gynecological cancer among the daughters.
These two mistakes are quite telling because, in both cases, the benefits appeared to be obvious and immediate, though small, and the harm remained delayed for years, at least three-quarters of a generation away. The next discussion will be about the burden of evidence, as you can easily imagine that someone contesting these treatments would have immediately raised the “Monsieur Taleb, do you have evidence for your statement?”
Now we can see the pattern: iatrogenics, being a cost-benefit situation, usually result from the treacherous condition in which the benefits are small, and visible —and the costs very large, delayed and hidden. And of course, the potential costs are much worse than the cumulative gains.
For those into graphs, Appendix X shows the potential risks from different angles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:38:02 AM UTC
I tasted a smear campaign from economists/quants/bankers. I am quite ready for one from pharma.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:44:10 AM UTC
Jaffer Ali you can cure diabetis with starvation diets / more effective than medicine. But pharma makes no money from intermitten fasting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:45:39 AM UTC
As I was writing these lines above some pharma fellow put an abusive rant. Can't wait.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:47:58 AM UTC
Yes of course we need pharma, but for deviations from the norm, rare diseases that had a lower frequency.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:52:59 AM UTC
PLease NO alternative medicine here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 1:07:20 AM UTC
Elie Al-Chaer 1) The problem is sort of solved with the nonlinearity of deviations. So something that deviates from normal by 2 mean deviation is just idiosyncratic, or another phenotype, something that deviates by 10 mean deviations is two hundred thousand times more likely to be pathological. 2) The irrelevance of the average is another, linked issue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 1:24:03 AM UTC
Ken Baumann sorry to ask but it is not clear: did you have the surgery?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 1:50:23 AM UTC
Ken Baumann, all OK now?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 2:36:20 AM UTC
Casey Plante bingo. note I use mean deviation ... Works better than std
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 11:24:40 AM UTC
Dominik Dotzauer I have NEVER seen a medical textbook explicitly dealing with nonlinearities. Practitioners sort of know things, but not the science. I spotted many errors in texts. The fundamental issue is that nonlinearity leads to certain classes of probability distributions for decision making DIFFERENT from others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 11:48:43 AM UTC
The 4th Quadrant is an epidemic, near-unbounded payoff, something affecting the collective. My death is a bounded small event, not the worst case scenario, even for me (my death + the death of my family, tribe, friends, humanity, my domestic pets, all dogs, etc. would be more severe than just my death).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 4:38:03 PM UTC
SOrry friends, but there is a basis to the Vit D worries, except not in the form of pharmacological treatment, rather lifestyle alteration and food etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 7:18:57 PM UTC
Killian, let's not go far. They may kill but they also save people. The idea is to defang them
Time to get more technical, so a distinction is helpful at this stage. Let us separate the perishable (humans, single items) from the nonperishable, the potentially perennial. The nonperishable is anything does not have an organic unavoidable expiration date. The perishable is typically an object, the nonperishable has an informational nature to it. A single car is perishable, but the automobile as a technology has survived about a century (and we will speculate should survive another one). Humans die, but their genes —a code — do not necessarily do. The physical book is perishable —say a specific copy of the Old Testament —but its contents are not can they can be expressed into another physical book.
Let me express my idea in Lebanese dialect first. When you see two humans, one young and the other one old, you can bet that the young will survive the elder. With something non perishable, say a technology, it is not the case. We have two possibilities: either both are expected to have to same additional life expectancy (the case in which the probability distribution is called exponential), or the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young, in proportion to their relative age. In that situation, if the old is eighty and the young is ten, the elder is expected to live eight times as long as the younger one.
Table 6- Domains and comparison of life expectancy when we compare the “old” to the “young”/
Comparative Life Expectancy Domain Probability
Distribution
The young is expected to live longer than the old. Perishable:
Life of humans and other animals Gaussian (or close, from same type of family)
Both the young and the old have equivalent life expectancy. Non-Perishable
Informational:
lifetime of species Exponential
LINDY EFFECT. The old is expected to stay longer than the young in proportion to their age. Non-Perishable
Informational:
Life of intellectual production
Lifetime of genera Power Law
{discussion of the table}
Now conditional on something belonging to either category, I propose the following (building on the so-called Lindy effect in the version later developed by the great Benoit Mandelbrot) :
For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day implies a longer life expectancy.
So the longer a technology lives, the longer it is expected to live. Let me illustrate the point (people have difficulty understanding it at the first go). Say I have for sole information about a gentleman that he is 40 years old and I want to predict how long he will live. I can look at actuarial tables and find his age-adjusted life expectancy as used by insurance companies. The table will predict that he has an extra 44 to go. Next year, when he turns 41 (or, equivalently, if apply the reasoning today to another person currently 41), he will have a little more than 43 years to go. So every year that lapses reduces his life expectancy by about a year (actually, a little less than a year, so if his life expectancy at birth is 80, his life expectancy at 80 will not be zero, but another decade or so) .
The opposite applies to nonperishable items. I am simplifying numbers here for clarity. If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy . This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!
The physicist Richard Gott applied what seems to be a completely different reasoning to state that whatever we observe in a randomly selected way is likely to be neither in the beginning nor in the end of its life, most likely in its middle. But by testing his argument he tested the one I just outlined above, that the expected life of an item is proportional to its past life. Gott made a list of Broadway shows on a given day, May 17, 1993 and predicted that the longest running ones would last longest, and vice versa. He was proven right with a 95% accuracy. He had, as a child visited both the Great Pyramid (5700 years old), and the Berlin Wall (12 years old), and correctly guessed that the former would outlive the latter .
The proportionality of life expectancy does not need to be tested explicitly —it is the direct result of “winner-take-all” effects in longevity.
Two mistakes are commonly made when I present the idea —people have difficulties grasping probabilistic notions, particularly when they spent too much time on the internet (not that they need the internet to be confused; we are naturally probability-challenged). The first mistake is usually in the form of the presentation of the counterexample of a technology that we currently see as inefficient and dying, like, say, telephone land lines, print newspapers, and cabinets containing paper receipts for tax purposes. These arguments come with anger as many neomaniacs get offended by my point. But my argument is not about every technology, but about the life expectancy, which is simply a probabilistically derived average. If I know that a forty year old has terminal pancreatic cancer, I will no longer estimate his life expectancy using unconditional insurance tables; it would be a mistake to think that he has forty four more years to live, like others in his age group who are cancer-free. Likewise someone (a technology guru) interpreted my idea as suggesting that the world-wide web, being currently about less than twenty-years old, will only have another twenty to go — this is a noisy estimator that should work on average, not in every case. But in general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such statement.
Remember the following principle: I am not saying that all technologies do not age, only that those technologies that were prone to aging are already dead.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 3:48:48 PM UTC
George, you did not understand what I wrote.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 3:49:59 PM UTC
Rahul Bijlani effectively you have crossovers as filters make life expectancy increase. The property is asymptotic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 4:03:38 PM UTC
Justin Bronder then it is still invariant there. My determining effect is that there can only be 3 distribution for time: sub-exponential, exponential, super-exponential. Probabilities need to add to 1.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 4:17:34 PM UTC
Bassil, survival for companies increases with time. But for the property to hold the company needs to be doing the same thing... it is not the legal entity that matters, rather the informational content.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 4:26:47 PM UTC
No Bassil Alcheikh institutions are not perishable. But they tend to have a short life BECAUSE THEY TEND TO BE FRAGILE
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 4:28:13 PM UTC
Bassil "adapt to its new environment" is the kind of business school bullshit that does not have a scientific mapping.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 4:39:55 PM UTC
Pietro Bonavita right but I am not even specifying any evolutionary dynamics, just the distribution of time as revealing of fragility. If something does not have a natural upper bound then the distribution of any specified event time is necessarily constrained by fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 4:46:11 PM UTC
Rahul Bijlani nothing is truly imperishable. That's the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 5:00:49 PM UTC
Rahul, if people are necessarily exposed to bacteria during the first say 20 years of life, with close to certainty (a high probability) then conditional survival >age 20 means immunity to such bacteria. But as time lenghtens, the asymptotic property kicks in and dominates.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 5:01:19 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn i am impressed you explained it with clarity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 9:38:00 PM UTC
GOtt's math assumes no prior.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 12:22:06 PM UTC
any idea about translation?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 1:36:00 AM UTC
The Great Italo Calvino did a sort of literary compilation of fair tales... in the 80s I think. It was a delight to read.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/NEJM.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 7:07:35 PM UTC
Sebastian, just generate by Monte Carlo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 7:12:06 PM UTC
This is called the Wigner Effect in physics: a random matrix with orthogonal components will show a series of declining Principal components... In the Lebanese dialect, the more data, the more illusion of patterns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 7:12:58 PM UTC
Geert, the problem is that nobody corrects for multiple testing in social science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 7:13:07 PM UTC
and epidemiology.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 7:21:23 PM UTC
Geert Van Damme, furthermore the researcher is implicitly doing multiple testing throught his career even if he submits to Bonferoni adjustments within a single paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 8:36:29 PM UTC
Max, I debunked econometrics for another reason: embedded L2 Norm (Gaussian assumptions).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 8:40:56 PM UTC
look at my web site, technical papers, IJF 2009
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 7:25:08 PM UTC
both inaccurate, of course, but same principle
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:20:01 PM UTC
Arthur, stochastic vol is not calibratable. As a statistical result, it produces nonsense. All it means is that the data is not stable. The methods in both cases are not robust.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:24:12 PM UTC
Exact sciences don't use complicated statistics. They don't need it. Only social sciences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:28:29 PM UTC
But David by the same argument we should not pollute precisely because we don't have an idea of what's going on. Let's leave this to another post in a few weeks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:29:39 PM UTC
Arthur I know MCMC rather well ... a lot of bullshit. All these things work well on your computer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:51:43 PM UTC
Not true stat was invented for physics. It is largely a social science contraption. Look at the history.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:52:48 PM UTC
Britton T. Burdick, move to political philosophy, less pretentious, no scientific claims.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:58:36 PM UTC
Mark Weaver 85% of statistical epidemiology papers in medicine don't replicate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 1:59:05 PM UTC
...and 99.99% of econometrics papers don't replicate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 2:00:20 PM UTC
Alexey Debelov compare GARCH (only economics) to the papers in statistical physics. The latter have minimal comparative complexity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 2:05:48 PM UTC
Look here to see how you can play with statistics. David Freedman, RIP. Salt and blood pressure. And the way to view and debunk things is VISUALIZING the results http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/greengar/coursepages/salt_pubpolicy.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 2:12:18 PM UTC
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons brought to my attention in their book The Invisible Gorilla the evidence I had been looking for: whatever theory has a reference in it to the brain circuitry seems more “scientific” and more convincing, even when it is is randomized psycho-neuro-babble {BRAIN PORN}
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 2:15:51 PM UTC
(a lot of the results of psychology are simple statistics... straightforward)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 2:27:50 PM UTC
Bruce I've spent my adult life explaining that in Extremistan you need to make decisions that are independent of statistical methods (robust).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 2:28:08 PM UTC
(robust decisions not robust statistics)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 2:38:50 PM UTC
Bruce you are not getting the point... read the 4th quadrant paper. Some class of decisions are IMPERVIOUS to tail events.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 3:08:38 PM UTC
Galton went the other way. Rutherford was a real scientist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 3:32:50 PM UTC
The problem is naive empiricism/problem of induction. Statistics is fundamentally confirmatory.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 6:36:29 PM UTC
Coppula... was the intellectual fraud of the decade... still is largely.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 9:28:36 PM UTC
Khalil Antoine Dayri you studied too much finance the past 4 years. How much statistical backup did we use before endorsing Einstein's 2 models? The complexity is not in the statistical.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 9:45:15 PM UTC
Arthur I fail to see how you can make models robust with these latent variables. They work on paper, but so far have not in the real world.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 25, 2012 9:53:33 PM UTC
Joao, I don't . Statistical physics is physics with stochastic element; statistics is making data express somethign.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 12:21:52 AM UTC
Khalil Antoine Dayri you should spend more time in Amioun (BTW are you there now?). The point is that those with elaborate statistical "evidence" have less than a point than those with more vanilla proofs. Simple.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 24, 2012 1:16:30 PM UTC
bothers me is the news. There is no reason I should be exposed to so many things when I go to the gym.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 24, 2012 3:10:58 PM UTC
Less is more (an appliv
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2012 5:31:32 PM UTC
Friends, I have an MBA and would NEVER hire one. NO CONTRIBUTION to society. These become "managers" who rise up the ladders of corporations hence destroy them. I've only hired scientists and street kids.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2012 5:40:55 PM UTC
Of course not confirmation bias.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2012 11:20:18 AM UTC
Not Kant, Wittgenstein I thought in Tractatus (Unless he was citing him)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2012 11:56:24 AM UTC
Seneca...who else!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2012 2:47:49 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn your are translating תורה by theory?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2012 2:54:12 PM UTC
what is the semitic root? theory comes from "look", in the sense of having a view from above (nazhar in Arabic).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 22, 2012 3:09:07 PM UTC
Similar root in Arabic y-r-y leads to opinion ra2i and story riwaya..
I discovered that I had been intuitively using the less-is-more as aid in decision-making (contrary to the method of putting a series of pro-con side by side on a computer screen). For instance, if you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions require no more than a reason. Likewise the French army had a heuristic to suspect absenteeism explained by more than one reason, like death of grandmother, cold virus, and being bitten by a boar. If someone attacks a book or idea using more than one argument, you know it is not real: nobody says “he is a criminal, killed many people, and he also has bad table manner, bad breath and is also very poor at driving”.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 15, 2012 6:41:06 PM UTC
Michal Kolano Of course we know that less is more means "beyond a certain threshold", or rather, nonlinear dose-response with changing first derivative...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 15, 2012 6:48:48 PM UTC
Eleni you are good
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 15, 2012 7:27:12 PM UTC
Juan Ramón Guillamón Andreu it is BECAUSE the world is too complex.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 17, 2012 12:25:19 AM UTC
A digression. In Lebanon, some villages name people patrilinearly, others matrilinearly. In my mother's village (also Greek Orthodox, only 1 mile from my father's village of origin), my name is "Nassim Minerva". In Provence "Jean de Florette", son of Florette. But even when named after the mother, the links remain patrilinear. It looks like in Semitic and Mediterranean cultures the nominal designation was not stable. Jews and Arabs are patrilinear in tribal designations, from the texts, but modern Judaism seems to use the mother as a filter (a condition) rather than for lineage. When there is a tribal conflict, Arabs automatically side with the paternal side. Otherwise things would be too complicated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 17, 2012 12:52:32 AM UTC
True in Arabic we say "Umma" for nation (after mother)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 18, 2012 1:33:44 PM UTC
There is a statistical dimension: in a model, less-is-more as a decision-rule is not likely to overfit. It does not perform well in-sample, but is much more robust out of sample.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 18, 2012 1:35:12 PM UTC
...and I am not saying it is a "good" rule, I am saying it is "less bad" a method in general. Rules are bad.
Hear from students & others that there are no jobs waiting for them. Yet I keep also hearing that industry is having trouble finding people to replace retiring employees. Seems there is something that is not fitting. One clue is that the difficulty is transmititng the heuristic, experiential and acquired knowledge of older workers & managers. Anybody has any take on this?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 15, 2012 3:34:12 PM UTC
J-L, the industries you are noticing are the historical ones, hence the ones that are likely to have casualties. You should factor in the new business sectors, which are not naturally part of your "base rate".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 15, 2012 4:14:32 PM UTC
The point is that you study to specific skills, and the world changes so we see more mis-specialization and mistake it for unemployment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 15, 2012 4:19:12 PM UTC
People study for existing skills, then things change and they can be mis-specialized and we notice them.
TECHNICAL APPENDIX: HOW TO DETECT WHO WILL GO BUST
Next, let us examine a method of detection of fragility. We can illustrate it with the story of the giant government sponsored lending firm called Fannie Mae, a corporation that collapsed, leaving the United States Taxpayer with hundreds of billions of dollars of losses (and, alas, still counting).
One day in 2003, Alex Berenson, a New York Times journalist came into my office with the secret risk reports of Fannie Mae, given to him by a defector. It was the kind of report getting into the guts of the methodology for risk calculation that only an insider can see — Fannie Mae made its own risk calculations and disclosed what it wants to whomever, the public or someone else. But only a defector could show us the guts to see how the risk was calculated.
We looked at the report: simply, a move upward in an economic variable lead to massive losses, a move downward (in the opposite direction), to small profits. Further move upwards to even larger additional losses and further moves downwards to even smaller profits. It looked exactly like the story of the stone in Figure x. Acceleration of harm was obvious —in fact it was monstrous. So we immediately saw that their blow-up was inevitable: their exposures were severely “concave”, similar to graph of traffic in figure x: losses that accelerate as one deviates economic variables (I did not even need to understand which one, as fragility to one variable of this magnitude implies fragility to all others parameters). I worked with my emotions, not my brain, and I had a pang before even understanding what numbers I had been looking at. It was the mother of all fragilities and, thanks to Berenson, the New York Times presented my concern. A smear campaign ensued, but nothing too notable. For I had in the meanwhile called a few key people there charlatans and they were not too excited about it.
I kept telling anyone who would listen to me, including random taxi drivers (well, almost), that the company Fannie Mae was “sitting on a barrel of dynamite”. Of course, blowups don’t happen every day (just as poorly built bridges don’t collapse immediately) and people kept saying that such opinion was wrong and unfounded (using some argument that the stock was going up or something even more stupid). I also inferred that other institutions, almost all banks, were in the same situation. After checking similar institutions, and seeing that the problem was general, I realized that a total collapse of the banking system was a certainty. I was so certain I could not see straight and went back to the markets for a revenge against the turkeys. As in the scene from the Godfather (III) "I was trying to get out and they pulled me back in".
Things happened as if they were planned by destiny. Fannie Mae went bust, along with other banks. It just took a bit longer than expected, no big deal. But the stupid part of the story is that I still did not have a word for fragility. But thanks to the episode of attic I had a measure for it.
So it all boils down to the following: to figure out if our miscalculations or misforecasts are more harmful one way or the other than they are beneficial, and how accelerating the damage is. Exactly as in the story of the king, where the damage from a ten kilogram stone is more than twice the damage from a five kilogram one. Such accelerating damage means that a large stone would eventually kill the person. Likewise a large market deviation would eventually kill the company.
Once I figured out that fragility was directly from nonlinearity and convexity effects, and that convexity was measurable, I got all excited. The technique —detecting acceleration of harm —applies to anything that entails decision-making under uncertainty, and risk management. While it was the most interesting in medicine and technology, the immediate demand was in economics. So I suggested to the International Monetary Fund a measure of fragility to substitute for their measures of risk that they knew didn’t work. Most people in the risk business have been frustrated by the poor (rather, random) performance of their models but they didn’t like my earlier statements: “don’t use any model“. They wanted something. And a risk measure was there .
So here is something to use. And the technique, a simple heuristic, called fragility (and antifragility) detection heuristic works as follows. Let’s say you want to check if a town is overoptimized. Say you measure that when traffic increases by 10,000 cars, travel time to grows by ten minutes. But then if traffic increases by 10,000 more cars, travel time now extends by an extra thirty minutes. Such asymmetry shows that traffic is fragile and you have too many cars, and need to reduce traffic until the acceleration becomes mild (acceleration, I repeat, is acute concavity, or negative convexity effect).
Likewise government deficits are particularly concave to changes in economic conditions. Every additional deviation in, say, the unemployment rate—particularly when the government has debt —makes the deficits incrementally worse.
That was in a way the technique I used intuitively to declare that The Highly Respected Firm Fannie Mae was on its way to the cemetery. Now with the IMF we had a simple measure with a stamp. It looks simple, too simple, so initial reaction by “experts” was “trivial” (by people who visibly never detected these risks before, academics scorn what they can understand too easily and get ticked off by what they did not think about themselves).
According to the wonderful principle that one should use people’s stupidity to have fun, I enlisted my friend Raphael Douady to help me rewrite this simple idea it using the most opaque mathematical derivations, with incomprehensible theorems that would take half a day (for a professional) to understand. Remarkably —as it has been shown — if you can say something in a complicated manner with complex mathematics, people take it seriously. We got positive reactions, and we were now told that this simple detection heuristic was “intelligent” (by the same people).
FOOTNOTES
The method does not require a good model. Take a ruler. You know it is wrong. It will not be able to measure the height of the child. But it can certainly tell you if he is growing. In fact the error you get about the rate of growth of the child is much, much smaller than the error you would get measuring his height. The same with a scale: no matter how defective, it will almost always be able to tell you if you are gaining weight, so stop blaming it.
Convexity is about acceleration. The remarkable thing about measuring convexity effects to detect model errors is that even if the model is wrong it can tell you if an entity is fragile and by how much it is fragile. As with the defective scale we are only looking for second order effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 7:27:24 PM UTC
Other changes are just minor edits (tenses).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 7:53:46 PM UTC
Mark, assume you have a wrong ruler. We are talking about measuring --not maps.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 14, 2012 9:15:42 AM UTC
No, I explained that the reason academics missed the point is that narrative disciplines are made for complications--while nonnarrative ones are made for survival.
TECHNICAL APPENDIX: HOW TO DETECT WHO WILL GO BUST
Next, let us examine a method of detection of fragility. We can illustrate it with the story of the giant government sponsored lending firm called Fannie Mae, a corporation that collapsed, leaving the United States Taxpayer with hundreds of billions of dollars of losses (and, alas, still counting).
One day in 2003, Alex Berenson, a New York Times journalist came into my office with the secret risk reports of Fannie Mae, given to him by a defector. It was the kind of report getting into the guts of the methodology for risk calculation that only an insider can see — Fannie Mae makes its own risk calculations and disclosed what it wants to whomever, the public or someone else. But only a defector could show us the guts to see how the risk was calculated.
We looked at the report: simply, a move upward in an economic variable leads to massive losses, a move downward (in the opposite direction), to small profits. Further move upwards to even larger additional losses and further moves downwards to even smaller profits. It looked exactly like the story of the stone in Figure x. Acceleration of harm was obvious —in fact it was monstrous. So we immediately saw that their blow-up was inevitable: their exposures were severely “concave”, similar to graph of traffic in figure x: losses that accelerate as one deviates economic variables (I did not even need to understand which one, as fragility to one variable of this magnitude implies fragility to all others parameters). I worked with my emotions, not my brain, and I had a pang before even understanding what numbers I had been looking at. It was the mother of all fragilities and, thanks to Berenson, the New York Times presented my concern. A smear campaign ensued, but nothing too exciting. I had in the meanwhile called a few key people charlatans and they were not too excited about it.
I kept telling anyone who would listen to me, including random taxi drivers (well, almost), that the company Fannie Mae was “sitting on a barrel of dynamite”. Of course, blowups don’t happen every day (just as poorly built bridges don’t collapse immediately) and people kept saying that such opinion was wrong and unfounded (using some argument that the stock was going up or something even more stupid). I also inferred that other institutions, almost all banks, were in the same situation. After checking similar institutions, and seeing that the problem was general, I realized that a total collapse of the banking system was a certainty. I was so certain I could not see straight and went back to the markets for a revenge against the turkeys. As in the scene from the Godfather (III) "I was trying to get out and they pulled me back in".
Things happened as planned. Fannie Mae went bust, along with other banks. But the stupid part of the story is that I still did not have a word for fragility. But thanks to the episode of attic I had a measure for it.
So it all boils down to the following: to figure out if our miscalculations or misforecasts are more harmful one way or the other than they are beneficial, and how accelerating the damage is. Exactly as in the story of the king, where the damage from a ten kilogram stone is more than twice the damage from a five kilogram one. Such accelerating damage means that a large stone would eventually kill the person. Likewise a large market deviation would eventually kill the company.
Once I figured out that fragility was directly from nonlinearity and convexity effects, and that convexity was measurable, I got all excited. The technique —detecting acceleration of harm —applies to anything that entails decision-making under uncertainty, and risk management. While it was the most interesting in medicine and technology, the immediate demand was in economics. So I suggested to the International Monetary Fund a measure of fragility to substitute for their measures of risk that they knew didn’t work. Most people in the risk business have been frustrated by the poor (rather, random) performance of their models but they didn’t like my earlier statements: “don’t use any model“. They wanted something. And a risk measure was there .
So here is something to use. And the technique, a simple heuristic, called fragility (and antifragility) detection heuristic works as follows. Let’s say you want to check if a town is overoptimized. Say you measure that when traffic increases by 10,000 cars, travel time to grows by ten minutes. But then if traffic increases by 10,000 more cars, travel time now extends by an extra thirty minutes. Such asymmetry shows that traffic is fragile and you have too many cars, and need to reduce traffic until the acceleration becomes mild (acceleration, I repeat, is acute concavity, or negative convexity effect).
Likewise government deficits are particularly concave to changes in economic conditions. Every additional deviation in growth —particularly when the government has debt —makes the deficits incrementally worse.
That was in a way the technique I used intuitively to declare that The Highly Respected Firm Fannie Mae was on its way to the cemetery. Now with the IMF we had a simple measure with a stamp. It looks simple, too simple, so initial reaction by “experts” was “trivial” (by people who visibly never detected these risks before, academics scorn what they can understand too easily and get ticked off by what they did not think about themselves).
According to the wonderful principle that one should use people’s stupidity to have fun, I enlisted my friend Raphael Douady to help me rewrite this simple idea it using the most opaque mathematical derivations, with incomprehensible theorems that would take half a day (for a professional) to understand. Remarkably —as it has been shown — if you can say something in a complicated manner with complex mathematics, people take it seriously. We got positive reactions, and we were now told that this simple detection heuristic was “intelligent” (by the same people).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 6:23:33 PM UTC
Johan what makes you think I care about editors?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 6:37:04 PM UTC
i fixed a few tenses... small edits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 14, 2012 11:28:40 AM UTC
Max, in Lebanese Mar7aba not Salam. And it is PArt 3.
(based on comments by Y Zilber)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 1:45:20 PM UTC
instrumental vs epistemological narrative
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 13, 2012 2:30:23 PM UTC
added observational v/s prospective
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 9, 2012 1:33:01 AM UTC
We will try to compile your comments here and publish them in the "J-L Green Book".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 7, 2012 9:10:22 PM UTC
Depriving yourself of water is NOT a good via negativa. Adding vitamins artificially might be iatrogenic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 7, 2012 9:10:50 PM UTC
Via negativa is compared to a NORM, removal to reach the norm is good.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 8, 2012 12:42:14 AM UTC
bingo... now you define the norm by...HISTORY
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 8, 2012 12:42:59 AM UTC
The late David Freedman debunked the assumption that salt was bad
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 10:31:11 PM UTC
You need to read the mind of the examiners
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 10:36:57 PM UTC
Add you don't know the payoff, positive or negative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 1:01:55 PM UTC
At Courant I got in trouble when I told students that the test was NOT DEFINED, like a job interview. Some started crying... At Poly I apply something rather similar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 1:02:29 PM UTC
Whenever a student asks me "how are we graded", I force him to drop the class.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 3:26:22 PM UTC
The ONLY grade in life is survival (individual or collective).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 6:45:37 PM UTC
misfitness leads to extinction... something blows up somewhere... and by survival it is ergodic (long term property that averages out)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 7:41:53 PM UTC
Victoria Haddad you are getting my ideas BACKWARDS. Survival of the species or insuring self-survival is NOT advocacy or support for evolutionary selection. It is RISK MANAGEMENT. DOn't you want your progeny -or the human race -to survive?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 7, 2012 3:58:28 PM UTC
Artificial uncertainty: games. Hence the ludic fallacy. In the end, doing is learning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 7, 2012 5:27:46 PM UTC
just as we can't make life we can't make things look like life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 8, 2012 7:09:46 PM UTC
Hi, Dan Coman, looking at Rule 30 now. He claims it can work as "practical randomness generator"...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 8, 2012 7:12:33 PM UTC
Incidentally, Dan, Wolfram is the sharpest person I can think of still alive. The problem is that Mandelbrot hated him so much that I had to stop mentioning his name... now I can.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:16:43 AM UTC
no, Julian, "philosophy" does not make scientific claims, rather ethical, normative, or a priori statements.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:23:06 AM UTC
You should ONLY examine the value of anything adjusted for iatrogenic harm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:37:59 AM UTC
The problem is more severe. Things evolve heuristically, narrative-free, and these fields tend to want to fit us into their narrative...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:40:54 AM UTC
David, don't insult medicine by making it similar to social science. Medicine is a heuristic craft, an apprenticeship model ENTIRELY practical --no different from trade or accounting, with some biological theory as backup furniture not for decision-making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:44:00 AM UTC
Eleni, no need to delete an emotional response to a statement that goes against your profession.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:45:24 AM UTC
Didier Clement, try again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:48:12 AM UTC
Flyvbjerg is about practical tricks --phronesis, not theory for the sake of theory. And his work is mostly in project management, completely away from social science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:48:50 AM UTC
Mohammed don't insult law by comparing it to economics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:57:41 AM UTC
Actually, the problem is larger: ACADEMIA's contribution to knowledge is so grossly overstated, in about every field, as per the table I showed below.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:58:32 AM UTC
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150874989393375&set=a.10150109720973375.279515.13012333374&type=1
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 12:09:32 PM UTC
Didier Clement, you are repeating the logical flaws discussed in TBS about "skepticism about skepticism" or criticizing those who question "expert problems" on ground that are therefore no expert--this is the nihilistic approach except that here you compound the error. Try again. And, before you repeat another version of the recursion, read some stuff on asymmetry of evidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 12:36:59 PM UTC
Science, friends, is not about a narrative. It is about testability of claims outside the sample in which they were derived, highly asymmetric. Philosophy is about the logical quality of a claim. Practice is about survival.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 12:44:59 PM UTC
Jackson Howard Wagner, please please look at econometrics. It is an insult to science: L2 norm doesn't work + preasymptotics. Just a bullshit thing. I debunked it in the 4th Quadrant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 1:09:20 PM UTC
Friends, don't insult science calling econometrics science: physics predict to 10 decimal precision so many phenomena, econometrics is no different from random in out of sample tests... and the tragedy is that we KNOW why.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 1:19:24 PM UTC
No, Meterorology can predict short term because of satellite vision, not models. Long term, nonlinearities blow model ups. Economics predict neither short, nor long, nor medium, not semi-long, nor semi-short not semi-medium, not long-long, nor semi-short...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 1:38:56 PM UTC
Friends, we can see evidence of smoke at work: Didier Clement has been trying to say that the "narrative fallacy" is a false narrative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 1:48:27 PM UTC
Deepak Mohoni if you think that fortune tellers have done more harm than good, what do you suggest should replace them?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 1:53:22 PM UTC
Academia has been largely a way to exile a certain class of practice-challenged misfits. So it has its uses.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 2:00:17 PM UTC
Notice how Deepak Mohoni feels the necessity of "someone to look after the room" -> Interventionism -> Iatrogenics. This is a replay of the entire argument of the difference between organic (antifragile, autotelic) and engineered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 3:42:11 PM UTC
So Vishnu either delete your comment and address the specific point so far about arrow of knowledge rather than the "some models are useful" sophisty, or we can delete if for you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 4:15:00 PM UTC
The level of the discussion is getting low. Carla King-Molina I am not saying that ignorance is good, but that pseudoknowledge is harmful. Please do not set this discussion back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 4:59:29 PM UTC
J-L this reminds me of the Spartan who said about a rich man who wanted to marry his daughter "I'd rather have a man without the money than the money without a man".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 5:44:47 PM UTC
Noah, there are pockets of contribution in a sea of negative contributions: Skinner, the behaviorists, clinical psychology, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 6:43:46 PM UTC
Have been purging the Mark Doss ("trying to get attention on FB" is not acceptable).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 6:54:38 PM UTC
The other issue is that this site is NOT a democracy (the web, overall, is): if every time someone had to restart the old argument, we would go nowhere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 7:07:40 PM UTC
Killian, false logic; then why don't you let everyone in your living room? The purpose of this page is to move ahead in an argument, not restart every step --like a workshop you don't want people to bring you back to Chapter 1.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 7:08:51 PM UTC
Deepak Mohoni this is an old argument, and the problem is when a science tries to use "REASON". GO back and read the narrative problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 7:34:25 PM UTC
Skinner himself tried to mess with humans...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 8:10:13 PM UTC
IN SUM: The result of this exercise here is that aside from anger, accusation, confirmatory examples, nobody has produces a systematic study with evidence of a possible net contribution of social science academia; as people using our money and dependent on us, the burden of evidence is on them, not us.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 8:13:15 PM UTC
We have evidence that increase in education/academic budgets DO NOT lead to growth (rather the reverse arrow)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 9:31:51 PM UTC
Very Good Marco: computational complexity!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 9:32:31 PM UTC
Ban Kanj, translation: You are learned, but unread books are many more than the books you've read.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 9:52:37 PM UTC
Anne Helen Kennedy Someone applied Behavioral economics to make it irrational NOT to invest in stocks. Also consider the nudge effect. The balance sheet is not there yet!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 12:28:51 PM UTC
No, friends, at the core is the Green Lumber problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 1:34:46 PM UTC
Computer Engineering any minute!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 2:53:22 PM UTC
Exactly. That's the notion of opacity: we can access it by doing not thinking
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 7:43:01 PM UTC
We now have evidence that Alexander Hourani-Photography is right: it is the opposite, from the empirical record.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 7, 2012 12:38:09 PM UTC
Michal, what if one hated both the players and the notion of such a game? We need to distinguish between scholarship (free-form) and academia (organized) the same way we distinguish between homegrown and industrialized food.
Win-Win is antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 4, 2012 12:23:49 PM UTC
Win Lose is linear
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 11:12:43 AM UTC
By definition if upside>downside, antifragile, etc.
(Drawn by George Nasr, original source polyp.org.uk)
(additional comments: "he rocks the boat", "this is trivial"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 8:49:44 PM UTC
Stand on land and cash in...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 8:53:58 PM UTC
I can't get off the boat
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 9:12:23 PM UTC
Michal, tragic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 9:23:22 PM UTC
More: "He rocks the boat", "the idea is trivial"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 9:45:50 PM UTC
Of course, in the book. No better way to explain the Soviet-Harvard Problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 4, 2012 1:19:43 AM UTC
2nd version http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/stop-2.png
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 4, 2012 1:33:42 AM UTC
is 2nd version better? thx friends
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 4, 2012 2:37:22 PM UTC
Yes we were adding a lifejacket... thanks
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 4, 2012 4:19:41 PM UTC
This is great, Michal Kolano !
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 4:46:46 PM UTC
DISCUSSION OF COLLECTIVE v/s INDIVIDUAL: In the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, the designation “man of honor” (uomo d’onore) implies that the person caught by the police would remain silent and not rat on his friends, regardless the gain, and that life in prison is preferable to, say five years or so, if it entails hurting other members. The collective (Cosa Nostra) comes before the individual. And what broke the back of the mafia was the recent generation of plea bargainers. (Note the “honor” in the mafia is just limited to such in-group solidarity —they otherwise lie and there is nothing honorable about them in other domains. And they kill people in the back of the head, something in the East side of the Mediterranean is considered the purest of cowardice.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 4:48:02 PM UTC
(anyone knows much about "ghadr", killing someone by stabbing/shooting in the back)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 5:02:01 PM UTC
I wonder if there is a reference about "ghadr" somewhere ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 5:04:31 PM UTC
Brooke this is an extreme case. Nobody will disagree on "ethics" if you rip off someone or kill an innocent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 5:58:52 PM UTC
What about Samir Kassir?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 6:05:03 PM UTC
Indeed... he was a school friend ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 6:13:56 PM UTC
I am looking for ghadr people don't know that chivalry was born in the Levant with Saladin ... The crusaders massacred unarmed Jews and Mosllems
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 6:14:33 PM UTC
moslems (new iphone)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 6:54:58 PM UTC
ghadr is not treason
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 6:55:46 PM UTC
J L it is not a problem of degree rather domain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 7:26:45 PM UTC
Daniel Miles the author doesn't know what she is talking about making mistakes in either Arabic, English, or both. Ghadr is the act of "treachery" not "treason".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 8:35:26 PM UTC
Thanks David, you seem to be not just the Talmudic consultant but the overall Abrahamic one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 8:52:32 PM UTC
Jaffer, not ghadr.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 8:57:09 PM UTC
لَا تَغْدِرُوا وَلَا تُمَثِّلُوا وَلَا تَقْتُلُوا وَلِيدً
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 8:57:19 PM UTC
What I was looking for!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 9:21:58 PM UTC
that's the naturalistic fallacy guru. I believe in nature except for ethics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 1:18:11 AM UTC
one thing that makes us something and puts us above nature: honor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 1:29:37 AM UTC
alexander hourani your citations are out of sync and islamophobic. they are directed at pagans not others...can you delete them?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 1:30:49 AM UTC
you cant cherry pick 13 century old comments as descriptive of a culture
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 1:33:15 AM UTC
guru and others this is the problem of mistaking the ought for the is (hume, who else?)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 3, 2012 7:08:43 PM UTC
Alexander Hourani you were cherry picking pieces like Islamophobes. Please don't do it here. There are plenty of places you could do it on web.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/innovation.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 1, 2012 3:07:13 PM UTC
No Michal. You need RATIONALITY to see is A>B . Bounded rationality is in arbitrary delimiting the space of possibilities ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 1, 2012 3:21:43 PM UTC
Michal don't make things more complicated than needed for the argument. Optionality is an alternative to B R.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 1, 2012 4:13:50 PM UTC
Is the philosopher's stone getting clearer in this context?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 1, 2012 8:43:26 PM UTC
Halo effect is about the judgment of the skills of people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 1:19:32 PM UTC
Thanks Friends.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 2, 2012 6:17:30 PM UTC
chapter being revised. thx
THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE
The reader should skip this appendix as it is rather technical —though written in plain, equation-free, jargon-free English.
Recall from out traffic example that 90,000 cars for an hour, then 110,000 cars for an average of 100,000 and traffic will be horrendous. On the other hand, assume we have 100,000 cars for two hours, and traffic will be smooth and time in traffic short.
The number of cars is the something, a variable, traffic time is the function of something. The behavior of the function is such that it is, as we said, “not the same thing”. We can see here that the function of something divorces itself from the something under nonlinearities.
a- The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. It traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situations: 90,000 then 100,000 cars on one hand, or 110,000 cars on the other.
b- the more volatile the something the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade is there is evenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100,000 cars for both time periods. 80,000 then 120,000 are even worse than 90,000 and 110,000.
c- if the function is convex (antifragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. This is the philosopher’s stone. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).
As an example, assume that the function under question is the squaring function (multiply a number by itself). This is a convex function. Take a conventional die (six sides) and consider a payoff equal to the number it lands on, that is, you get paid a number equivalent to what the dice shows, 1 if it lands on 1, up to 6 if it lands on 6. The square of the expected (average) payoff is then (1+2+3+4+5+6 divided by 6)^, equals 3.52, here 12.25. The function of the average equals 12.25.
But the average of the function is as follows. Take the square of every payoff, 1^2+2^2+3^2+4^2+5^2+6^2 divided by 6, that is the average square payoff, and you get 15.67. So, since squaring is a convex function, the average of a square payoff is higher than the square of the average payoff. The difference, here between 15.67 and 12.25 is what I call the hidden benefit of antifragility —here 28 percent “edge”. The conflation problem (mistaking a property of a function of something for the function of the property of something) leads to severe misunderstanding of the process.
The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality —your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine —the more uncertainty , the better.
The hidden harm of fragility is that you need to be much, much better than random in your prediction and knowing where you are going, just to offset the negative effect.
The property is called Jensen’s inequality and I use a variant of it. This is what the common discourse on innovation is missing. If you ignore Jensen’s inequality, you are missing a chunk of makes the nonlinear world go round. And it is the fact that such idea s missing totally from the discourse. Sorry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:32:42 PM UTC
I replaced x with something, and f(x) with funtion of something. Italics don't show in this text.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:36:48 PM UTC
Alas, David, a function is not necessarily causal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:38:17 PM UTC
typo... interverted 110,000 and 100,000 in point a-
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:55:40 PM UTC
I know but I don't want to show mathematical functions in the text. The car example is easy (fragile) but I need an antifragile one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:04:14 PM UTC
Math is in the appendix
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:08:38 PM UTC
No, David, f(x) is the payoff from invention, x is the invention.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:11:55 PM UTC
No, David.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:29:57 PM UTC
No, david. n is the number of variables Xi, which counts in the summation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:30:40 PM UTC
MO Michal. The edge comes from the convexity (lose small, win big), NOT from number of people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 3:00:18 PM UTC
David, stop this number business it is confusing everyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 3:19:45 PM UTC
no, there is no size effect. f(x) is the financial return, x is the variation in something.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 3:21:43 PM UTC
x is the stock price, f(x) can be an option on that stock.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 5:03:28 PM UTC
marcos the grandmother s health is not increasing. brings complications
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:07:12 PM UTC
Daniel this is an excellent example except that I don't believe in IQ outside universities. It has been used unhappily by Larry Summers...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:40:38 PM UTC
Aaron, you give up too early
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 7:39:18 PM UTC
Aaron my entire point in life is to be robust, even antifragile to reviewers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 7:40:19 PM UTC
I ONLY care about those interested in my work, not in others (convex upper bound).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 8:09:38 PM UTC
Trial and error is convex
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 8:27:32 PM UTC
Friends, how about this. I play head/tails. But if I win, I win $2, if I lose, I pay $1. If the odds are 50-50, I win big. But even if I am a horrible guesser and the odds are only .333-.666 against me, I am still OK. KAPISH?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 8:50:45 PM UTC
No, a convex payoff has more upside than downside, and that's about it. Can you delete your comments as they are confusing people?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 31, 2012 9:59:10 PM UTC
michal got the double point if losses limited gains open you have epistemic nonlinearity
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 1, 2012 12:37:07 PM UTC
Ricardo Alonso you got the point, and realize how hard it is to communicate something so central.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 28, 2012 3:08:32 PM UTC
. A collection of hieratic persons from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds how to fly. For the vivid image imagine many of them bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports, stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution.
Mathematics → Ornithological navigation and wing-flapping technologies → (ungrateful) birds fly
It also happens that birds write no such papers and books, conceivably because they are just birds, so we never get their side of the story. Meanwhile, the priests keep broadcasting theirs to the new generation of humans who completely unaware of the conditions of the pre-Harvard lecturing days. Nobody discusses the possibility of the birds not needing lectures —and nobody has the incentive to look at the number of birds that fly without such help from the great scientific establishment.
The problem is that what I wrote above looks ridiculous but a change of domain makes it look common. Clearly, we never think that it is thanks to ornithologists that birds learn to fly –and if some people do hold such belief, it would be hard for them to convince the birds. But, why is it that when we anthropomorphize and replace “birds” with “men”, the idea that people learn to do things thanks to pompous lectures by a social parasite becomes plausible. When it comes to human agency, matters suddenly become confusing to us .
So the illusion grows and grows, with government funding, tax dollars, swelling (and self-feeding) bureaucracies in Washington all devoted to help birds fly better. Problems occur when people start cutting such funding —accusations of killing birds by not helping them fly. We will see later in the chapter the results of the wonderful controlled experiment showing that almost nothing of note came out of top-down, government-funded National Institute of Health driven cancer research, compared to the results of, say, the side effects of mustard gas.
As per the Yiddish saying: “if the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit”. These illusions of contribution result largely from the confirmation fallacies: in addition to the sad facts that history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or loser), a second bias appears as those who write the accounts can deliver confirmatory facts (what has worked) not a complete picture of what has worked and what has failed. For instance directed research would tell you what has worked from funding (like AIDS drugs or some modern designer drugs), not what has failed — so you have the impression that they fare better than random.
And of course iatrogenics are never part of the discourse.
So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process, or the role of such process, a loop:
Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (Technology) → Practice & Apprenticeship → Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (Technology)→ Practice & Apprenticeship...
In parallel to the above loop,
Practice → Academic theories → Academic theories → Academic theories → Academic theories ... (with of course some exceptions, some accidental leaks, though these are indeed rare and overhyped and grossly generalized.)
Now, crucially, one can detect the scam in the so-called Baconian model by looking at events in the days that preceded the Harvard lectures on flying and examining the birds. This is what I accidentally found (indeed, accidentally) in my own career of practitioner-turned-researcher in volatility and options, thanks to some lucky turn of events. But before that, let me explain epiphenomena and the arrow of education.
"Perhaps with toxins, as with sun exposure, our bodies can adapt to chronic threats but not to occasional ones."
From 'Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine", Randolph Nesse and George Williams
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 25, 2012 5:59:16 PM UTC
Why?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 25, 2012 1:34:48 PM UTC
You can't add them all. It is nonlinear. That's the entire point of the pebbles chapter.
"According to Edwin Hunt’s and James Murray’s history of business in medieval Europe, under a law passed in 1321 bankers who were in default were given only bread and water and had to settle their accounts within a year. In 1360 one banker, Francesc Castello, “was beheaded in front of his own bank.”"
http://www.economist.com/node/21555875 (see the last letter)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 25, 2012 4:21:12 PM UTC
ROberto Calvi was killed by the mafia after Banco Ambrosiano went bust.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pebbles.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 24, 2012 3:38:43 PM UTC
Eleni, where did you post the comment? If it is an orphan comment, it would be helpful if you could make it a separate post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 24, 2012 4:03:58 PM UTC
Read robust for now, Graeme Blake
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 24, 2012 5:07:47 PM UTC
Thanks Steven Dube and Ελένη...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 24, 2012 8:53:45 PM UTC
This is my most difficult chapter...Thanks a million, friends.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 25, 2012 3:31:21 AM UTC
after a glass breaks, there is no more harm...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 25, 2012 7:49:54 PM UTC
Somewhere in book. Can send PDF copy to the "close friends" when it is -sort of- ready.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 1:58:18 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn, not if you are barbelled (i.e. one-sided extremistan)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 10:53:09 PM UTC
This is not about the detection of signals and timescale, just an illustration of the notion that noise scales at about Sqrt[t] while signal scales at t. Just an illustration, no more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 12:48:05 AM UTC
Friends, you are fighting too much ... Some digressions are Ok, bring some charming mess... But I wonder why nobody thought of the aphorism as connected to 1) nonlinearity (dose response) , 2) noise-signal... Yet this is the same problem...
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF NEUROTICISM
Imagine someone of the type we call neurotic in common parlance. He is wiry, looks contorted, and speaks with an uneven voice. His necks moves around when he tries to express himseld. When he has a small pimple his first reaction is to assume that it is cancerous, that the cancer is of the lethal type, and that it has already spread. His hypochondria is not just in the medical department: he incurs a small setback in business and reacts as if bankruptcy were both near and certain. In the office, he is tuned to every single possible detail, systematically transforming every molehill into a mountain. The last thing you want in life is to be in the same car with him when stuck in traffic on your way to an important appointment. The expression overreact was designed with him in mind: he does not have reactions, just overreactions.
Compare him to someone with the opposite temperament, imperturbable, with the calm under fire that is considered necessary to become a leader, military commander or a mafia godfather. Usually unruffled and immune to small information —they can impress you with their self-control in difficult circumstances. For a sample of a composed, call and pondered voice, listen to interviews of “Sammy the Bull” Salvatore Gravano who was involved in the murder of nineteen people (all competing mobsters). He speaks with minimal effort. In the rare situations when he is angry, unlike with the neurotic fellow, everyone knows it and takes it seriously.
The supply of information to which we are exposed under modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow to the neurotic first. For the purpose of our discussion, the second fellow only reacts to real information, the first largely to noise. The difference between the two fellows will show us the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore; signal what you need to heed.
Indeed, we have been loosely mentioning “noise” earlier in the book; time to be precise about it. In science, noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless for any purpose, and that you need to clean up to make sense of what you are listening to. Consider, for examples, elements in an encrypted message that have absolutely no meaning, just randomized letters to confuse the spies, or the hiss you hear on a telephone line and that you try to ignore in order to just focus on the voice of your interlocutor.
Noise and Signal
If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor.
One can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention —as with neuroticism. Rory Sutherland signaled to me that those with a personal doctor on staff should be particularly vulnerable to naive interventionism, hence iatrogenics; doctors need to justify their salaries and prove to themselves that they have some work ethics, something “doing nothing” doesn’t satisfy. Indeed at the time of writing the personal doctor or the late singer Michael Jackson is being sued for something that is equivalent to overintervention-to-stifle-antifragility (but it will take the law courts a while before they become familiar with the concept). Conceivably, the same happened to Elvis Prestley. So with overmedicated politicians and heads of state.
Likewise those in corporations or in policymaking (like Fragilista Greenspan) endowed with a sophisticated statistics department and therefore getting a lot of “timely” data are capable of overreacting and mistaking noise for information —Greenspan kept an eye on such fluctuations as the sales of vacuum cleaners in Cleveland “to get a precise idea about where the economy is going”, and, of course micromanaged us into chaos.
In business and economic decision-making, data causes severe side effects —data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.
The previous two chapters showed how you can use and take advantage of noise and randomness; but noise and randomness can also use and take advantage of you, particularly when totally unnatural —the data you get on the web or thanks to the media.
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostock. Assume further that for what you are observing, at the yearly frequency the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) —it means that about half of changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and markets price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal —which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.
There is a biological story with information. I have been repeating that in a natural environment, a stressor is information. So too much information would be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility. In medicine, we are discovering the healing powers of fasting, as the avoidance of too much hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food. Hormones convey information to the different parts of our system and too much of it confuses our biology. Here again, as with the story of the news received at too high a frequency, too much information becomes harmful. And in Chapter x (on ethics) I will show how too much data (particularly when sterile) causes statistics to be completely meaningless.
Now let’s add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones.
Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational with a clear, uninfected mind, one who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise. Significant signals have a way to reach you. In the tonsillectomies, the best filter would have been to only consider the children who are very ill, those with periodically recurring throat inflammation.
There was even more noise coming from the media and its glorification of the anecdote. Thanks to it, we are living more and more in virtual reality, separated from the real world, a little bit more every day, while realizing it less and less. Consider that every day, 6,200 persons die in the United States, many of preventable causes. But the media only reports the most anecdotal and sensational cases (hurricanes, freak incidents, small plane crashes) giving us a more and more distorted map of real risks. In an ancestral environment, the anecdote, the “interesting” is information; no longer today. Likewise, by presenting us with explanations and theories the media induces an illusion of understanding the world.
And the understanding of events (and risks) on the part of members of the press is so retrospective that they would put the security checks after the plane ride, or what the ancients call post bellum auxilium, send troops after the battle . Owing to domain dependence, we forget the need to check our map of the world against reality. So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.
To conclude, the best way to is to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 21, 2012 2:43:57 PM UTC
I tend to remove noise (unrelated stuff), inelegant remarks, trolls, and leave the rest --reasoned critiques, etc. It is remarkable how the tone has changed as I'm now only removing less 1% of the remarks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 4:36:42 PM UTC
Not quite J-L, it is about how information links to energy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 1:36:51 PM UTC
tantalized is short volatility -concave
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 19, 2012 11:58:26 AM UTC
Bingo Fahad Hameed Ahmad I used it as an example!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 18, 2012 2:23:48 PM UTC
Translation: you can fool some of the people some of the time...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 18, 2012 4:32:28 PM UTC
Killian Denny this is what VOltaire called "dictatorship tempered by assassination"...
A heuristic to estimate the quality of research is the caliber of the highest detractor, or the caliber of the lowest detractor whom the author answers--whichever is lower.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:32:35 PM UTC
BTW I didn't read Bowersock's review. Just noticed it --sufficient. Also Martin Gardner was NOT a scientist so he doesn't count.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 17, 2012 2:15:25 AM UTC
The story is visibly apocryphal. But the only person I think could have done something of the sort was the great-greatest Sydney Morgenbesser.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 17, 2012 2:20:29 AM UTC
Morgenbesser was the only academic in generations who LIVED like a philosopher
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 17, 2012 2:28:03 AM UTC
How about his "yeah, yeah" to Austin's statement that while a double negative often means a positive, it is not the case with a double positive ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 18, 2012 11:47:27 AM UTC
If the situation guaranteed an A it could not be risk.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067820/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=test12-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1400067820
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 13, 2012 9:24:09 PM UTC
Thanks friends for this long journey.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 13, 2012 11:28:07 PM UTC
I will be including warm thanks in the ackwlgmt section.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 13, 2012 11:32:15 PM UTC
Book talk in NY B&N TBA
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 14, 2012 10:22:35 AM UTC
I still have 2 months of tinkering with the manuscript.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 14, 2012 1:26:36 PM UTC
Not over Ricardo. Still adding sections now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 16, 2012 3:00:33 AM UTC
the discussions will START after publication... freedom + so many topics
So far we argued that preventing randomness in an antifragile system is not always a good idea. Let us now look at the situation in which adding randomness has been a standard operating method, as the needed fuel for an antifragile system permanently hungry for it.
A donkey equally hungry and thirsty caught at equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of either hunger or thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge, one way or another. This metaphor is named Buridan’s donkey after the medieval philosopher Jean de Buridan who —among other, very complicated things —introduced the thought experiment. When some systems are caught in a dangerous impasse randomness and only randomness can unlock them away from it. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death.
The idea of injecting random noise in a system to improve its functioning is quite universal in science and has been applied across fields. By a mechanism called stochastic resonance adding stochastic noise to the background make you hear the sounds (say, music) with more accuracy. We saw earlier that the psychological effect of overcompensation helped us get signals in the midst of noise; here it is not psychological but a physical property of the system. Weak S.O.S. signals, too weak to get picked up by remote receptors, can become audible in the presence of background noise and random interference. The randomness allows the signal to rise enough above the threshold of detection and become audible —nothing in that situation does better than randomness.
Consider the method of annealing in metallurgy, a technique used to make metal stronger and more homogeneous. It involves heating and controlled cooling of a material, to increase the size of the crystals and reduce their defects. Just as with Buridan’s donkey, the heat causes the atoms to become unstuck from their initial positions and wander randomly through states of higher energy; the cooling gives them more chances of finding new, better configurations.
As a child I was exposed to a version of this annealing effect by watching my father, who was a man of habits, tap a wooden barometer every day upon coming home. He would gently strike the barometer, then get a reading for his homemade weather forecast. The stress on the barometer got the needle unstuck and allowed it to find its true equilibrium position. That’s a local brand of antifragility. Likewise, mathematicians use a method of computer simulation called simulated annealing to bring more general optimal solutions to problems and situations, solutions that only randomness can deliver.
And, ironically, the so-called chaotic systems, those experiencing a brand of variations called chaos, can be stabilized by adding randomness to them. I watched an eerie demonstration of the effects, presented by a doctoral student who first got balls to jump chaotically on a table, in response to steady vibrations on the surface. These steady shocks made the balls jump in a jumbled manner. Then, as by magic, he moved a switch and the jumps became orderly. The magic is that such change of regime, from chaos to order, did not take place by removing chaos, but by adding random, completely random but low-intensity shocks. I came out of the beautiful experiment with so much enthusiasm that I wanted to inform strangers on the street that “I love randomness!”
Political Annealing
It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty are good —so you can imagine what it would be to explain it to politicians. Yet this is where a certain dose of randomness is needed the most.
I was once asked to get involved in a film based on the following parable, a city completely ruled by randomness. Every period, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now become a baker, the baker would be assigned the job of a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right.
I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the job of rulers, naming rulers by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing —and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients —again, those ancients —were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.
Or sometime the system gets a different type of stressors. To paraphrase Voltaire, consider the best form of government as dictatorship tempered with political assassination. It is sort-of the equivalent of tapping on the barometer to make it work better. That too creates some often-needed reshuffling, and one that would have never been done voluntarily. The void created at the top allows the annealing effect, causing the new leader to emerge. The secular drop in premature deaths in society has been good for us —but it deprived us of naturalistic managerial turnover. The bosses now live longer, a fact that holds across domains: CEOs, tenured academics, politicians —and we need to offset it with random lotteries.
Unfortunately, you cannot randomize a political party — what is plaguing us in the United States is not the two party system, but having been stuck with the same two parties.
Finally the ancients perfected the method of random draw in more or less difficult situations —and integrated them into divinations. These draws were really meant to pick a random exit without having to take a decision, so one would not have to live with the burden of the consequences later. You go with what the Gods told you to do, so would not have to second guess yourself later. One of the methods called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil) involved opening Virgil’s Eneid at random and interpreting the line presented as direction for the course of action. I recommend such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancient evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For instance I actually practice such random heuristic in restaurants. Given the lengthening and complication of menus, subjecting me to what psychologists call the tyranny of choice, with the stinging feeling that I should have ordered something else, I blindly and systematically duplicate the selection by the most overweight male at the table; and when no such person is present, I randomly pick from the menu, under the peace of mind that Baal made the choice for me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 11, 2012 5:40:06 PM UTC
Apoorv what language is that? Sounds like Arabic with grammatical mistake. (Ar: Kana bihi).
... all manner of violations of humanism under the banner of secular humanism seemed to have an intellectual justification —the redoing of all the ills of religion without its tricks and heuristics. The state was now like a corporate balance sheet: one does not care of what happens outside of it, politicians are like corporate managers. Close to a decade ago, during the early 2000s, my eye caught at the health-club a TV advertisement by Democrats attacking George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq by stating that close to four thousand people died there. Was the number that low? Then I realized that they meant U.S. soldiers. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis –lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because the nation-state establishes clean income statements: countries are only responsible for their own citizens. For all the criticism one can levy at it, and all its denial of the “other”, the Catholic church would have never, done that –they believed in the fraternity of races. The state creates the “I and thou”, with a virtual redrawing of family trees.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 1:28:46 PM UTC
Neither, Will and Bea. A product of MODERNITY.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 1:30:02 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn : The historical process of “evolution” seemed to be the replacement of the Levantine religions by the religion of reason as proposed in the enlightenment, in other words the Soviet-Harvard illusion. There is nothing fundamentally harmful in the enlightenment except for the following.
First, the replacement of God with the state, the Sacrosanct state, in a way that maps one-to-one with religion. But not quite: we now had a tall order, we humans had to do the job that our ancestors believed was done by the orders above. Indeed, not thinking about antifragility and self-organization and spontaneous healing, we imparted improvements to the agency of god(s). This is naive interventionism —the denial that things can take of themselves without our agency— on which much in Book two.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 1:33:10 PM UTC
I am adding that our idea of Levantine God is something infallible. It has transferred to the Nation State.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 1:43:01 PM UTC
Justin Bonder, CH is not a standard Nation State but the equivalent of a collection of municipalities
(Chapter on Nation State)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 12:58:33 PM UTC
It was the World of Yesteryear. Correction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 6, 2012 9:31:44 PM UTC
Guru artists by definition have feedback similar to entrepreneurs: trial and error, writing and erasing, seeing effects, small errors all the time... But it is internal feedback...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 6, 2012 9:33:45 PM UTC
I deleted comments of someone who thought I was discussing/promoting royalism...one of those. King here should be interpreted as person of action.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 7, 2012 12:16:47 AM UTC
I confess I haven't read Ayn Rand but like the idea of John Galt.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 7, 2012 4:28:02 PM UTC
My idea Killian and others is: the Philosopher King is a King (or person of action) who does things (wars, coups, intrigues), develops intuitions FROM PRACTICE, then conveys them to others in the form of letters or conversation in a tapas bar. Not at all the Platonico-Socratic idea of using philosophy to enlighten practice. Practice has NOTHING to learn from philosophy, and it has been hard for me to swallow it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 7, 2012 7:29:33 PM UTC
J-L just saw your remark. If this site doesn't bring the worst in people, it is by artificial means, though VIA NEGATIVA. Post by troublemakers and those offensive to others "disappear" (along with their ability to post in the future). It is remarkable how effective it is: a very, very small number of people are responsible for most of the negativity. Same with life...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 4:51:55 AM UTC
Yes J-L I don't think her comment was very helpful. I don't like people who barge in and kill other people's conversations when they start getting interesting...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 4:55:10 AM UTC
There is the lecturing birds how to fly effect or arrow action->knowledge. Will post the chapter, along with Fat Tony's argument with Socrates...
Why? Because life and movement is not predictable, controlled, smooth.
It is chaotic, unexpected and complex.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 6, 2012 6:15:40 PM UTC
I wrote that the best idea is for the body to learn from small injuries. Like animals. I now have pain that will help me squat better in the future...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 6, 2012 9:44:26 PM UTC
"poor form" gives you so much strength in nonstandard places.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 5, 2012 1:17:33 AM UTC
Can someone explain the metaphorical logic in an aphorism to Apolinaras Bitardaitis ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 5, 2012 12:37:20 PM UTC
Again, no SOPHISTRY please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 9:58:37 PM UTC
No a footnote to Plato could be very insightful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 4, 2012 11:55:21 AM UTC
There is no problem when someone says the obvious. The problem is when someone says the obvious thinking it is conveying information rather than emotional bonding.
The same doctor might recommend exercise so you “get tougher”, and a few minutes later write a prescription for antibiotics in response to a trivial infection so you “don’t get sick”.
Imagine someone capable in learning languages, but unable to transfer concepts from one tongue to another, so he would need to relearn “chair” or “love”, or “apple pie” every time he acquires a new language. He would not recognize “house”(English) and “casa” (Spanish) or “beyt” (Semitic). We are all, in a way, handicapped in a similar way, unable to recognize ideas when presented in a different contexts. It is as if we were doomed to be fooled by the most possibly superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift-wrapping paper around the object. This is why we don’t see antifragility in places that are obvious, too obvious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 3:11:29 PM UTC
BTW The Wason selection task is in Fooled by Randomness (notes section).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 3:53:52 PM UTC
The flaw is measurable: you give (as in the Wason task) an identical problem wrapped differently...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 6:43:18 PM UTC
David, for Nietzsche, the Greeks were barbelled (Apollonian & Dionysian) pre-Euripides.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 6:43:49 PM UTC
And the golden mean is Aristotle...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 6:50:55 PM UTC
Eleni, missed your post on Apollonian/Dionysian. The ancient world had to rotate, and switch sequentially from one extreme to the other since they had Bacchanalia and sessions of total abandonment to the spirits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 7:12:11 PM UTC
Alvaro, please put fewer posts so others aren't overwhelmed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 9:40:19 PM UTC
Wrong teacher, Eleni. It started much earlier.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 3, 2012 10:00:00 PM UTC
Exactly. Philosopy itself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 4, 2012 2:55:17 PM UTC
Henry, the brain LOVES some stressors, provided there is recovery. Even lack of sleep is good. Any randomness.
There is another dimension to the need to focus on actions and avoid words: the health-eroding dependence on external recognition. People are cruel and unfair in the way they devolve recognition, so it is best to stay out of that game. Stay robust to the treatment by others. Nero at some stage befriended a scientist of legendary status, a giant for whom he had an immense respect. Although the fellow was about as prominent as one could get in his field (in the eye of others), he spent his time focused on what status he had that week in the scientific community. He would get enraged at authors “who did not cite” him or at some committee granting a medal he never received to someone else judged inferior, that impostor!
(Friends, I would love to hear your opinions; I made up my mind so far but this is an interesting ethical question, and one that would determine all my future decisions. ).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 4:49:02 PM UTC
No, an award is not the same as "like" or approval by readers that is genuine, direct, and personal. An award is an institutional label that people use to elevate their status.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 5:18:28 PM UTC
The whole idea is that awards are not the same thing as wealth. They imply dependence upon the opinion of others, and what's worse an INSULT to those who did not get it (unlike wealth it is a zero-sum game; unlike money it is subjective). And of course turning down awards needs to be DISCREET even secret (so it is not advertized) it would otherwise be even worse than acceptance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 5:25:45 PM UTC
Robert Smits Perelman is the real thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 5:34:24 PM UTC
The most respectable award is the one Sokrates got. Most genuine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 5:54:37 PM UTC
I am not against rewards, just against institutionalized awards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 6:20:32 PM UTC
This is not a one-off situation. Nobody knows what I am turning down.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 6:28:27 PM UTC
Lea Mackay, you are right. corrupting, eventually.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 29, 2012 7:09:39 PM UTC
Mark Miller, I posted above, "liking" is not a status good... An award is something for a resume, "liking" is for one's own intrinsic satisfction
For those of you who can make it to California Tuesday night.
http://www.ronpaul2012.com/dinner-with-ron-paul-in-manhattan-beach/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 28, 2012 8:43:26 PM UTC
An antifragile society.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 28, 2012 9:20:30 PM UTC
PRINCIPLES 1) skin in the game 2) anti-interventionism, 3) anti-militarism, 4) Decentralization, 5) Avoiding bureaucrats and empty suits having too much power, 6) anti-deficits, 7) some SCRUTINY of the Fed and its ability to play with money for the benefit of bankers, 8) LIBERTY. IN SHORT: an anti-fragile system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 28, 2012 10:31:37 AM UTC
Ban, jealousy or envy?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 28, 2012 11:24:05 AM UTC
I have by my desk a book called "Envy and the Greeks" (P Walcot). I haven't finished reading it but he talks about things we are familiar with in the levant, such as the evil eye.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 28, 2012 1:49:18 PM UTC
No conflation here. There are things you find harmful or outrageous and you have to speak out against them, expose them, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 4:34:33 PM UTC
David,it maps to it. The birth of labor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 25, 2012 3:19:48 PM UTC
Friends, let's move beyond diet (too mundane) into the more interesting aspects of life and decision-making with and without effort. Thanks.
US:ANTIFRAGILE: Things that Gain from Disorder
UK and rest of the world: ANTIFRAGILE: How To Live in a World We Don't Understand
Mediocristan = robust
Extremistan = fragile or antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 23, 2012 3:46:03 PM UTC
Right, David!
(Modernity)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 22, 2012 1:18:05 PM UTC
Pierre modernity IS the institutionalization of "rationalism" in place of more ancient (robust) belief systems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 22, 2012 1:19:43 PM UTC
Pain other words only doing things for an identifiable "reason"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 22, 2012 1:20:36 PM UTC
I meant in other words...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 22, 2012 3:10:49 PM UTC
I am not against having some form of direction and moral rules in life, but against commoditized life. Take ancient Mediterranean virtues: courage, generosity, etc. and see what replaced them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 22, 2012 3:11:00 PM UTC
Where is Elleni when we need her?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 22, 2012 8:57:56 PM UTC
not true, JL. People can see through things...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 22, 2012 9:00:56 PM UTC
J-L if you are doing things to impress others, nobody will be impressed too long.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 7:15:43 PM UTC
(From Brooklyn)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 7:54:40 PM UTC
Rani, Eastern Aramaic (syriac)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 8:02:24 PM UTC
In Amioun, we ude "o" in arabic. God is "alloh"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 8:03:53 PM UTC
My name is pr "tolib"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 8:30:04 PM UTC
Rani do you say "abra bi shmaya" or bi shmoyo?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 8:32:49 PM UTC
Eleni the discussion is abt linguistics not peace and brotherhood.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 8:35:44 PM UTC
Then eastern rani
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 9:04:13 PM UTC
I don't think Ostler talks about E-West. Ma3loula near Damascus speaks Western Aramaic (like the Jews at the time of the Christ). Syriac is split into many many branches...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 9:12:47 PM UTC
the switch is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanite_shift
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 9:15:27 PM UTC
note that all Levantines are Canaanites so Phoenician and Hebrew are identical. Aramaic is cloer to Arabic and reverted the "a".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 9:34:14 PM UTC
Ben Atlas what happened to your remarks?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 21, 2012 6:01:50 PM UTC
David, not really. Hebrew and Phoenician were no more different than variations of English accents (both would vary from town to town). As to others, much closer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 21, 2012 10:48:10 PM UTC
Sanscrit is not connected with Semitic languages, rather European ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 19, 2012 4:40:57 PM UTC
In other words, some people prefer to be lions in the wild than animals in the zoo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 19, 2012 4:44:58 PM UTC
David, this ludification was not fake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 19, 2012 4:48:31 PM UTC
No mitigation of risks, David. This was not a video-game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 19, 2012 4:59:32 PM UTC
David, this is an aspect of ludification not applicable to my point here. The gladiator knew he had a high chance of dying. You can't be more authentic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 19, 2012 5:01:31 PM UTC
Scott read the article and don't cite wiki here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 19, 2012 6:26:26 PM UTC
J-L the point is that there are people who put honorable or heroic death above mediocre living.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 2:14:02 PM UTC
U agree, Gladiators died for NO cause , which could be selfish or even foolish but it is their right and it is certainly superior (in their eyes) to a mediocre life. But this shows us the power of death FOR a cause over a mediocre life --any time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 20, 2012 6:52:20 PM UTC
People are heroes first; then they find a cause.
(Another argument in the Political Philosophy section)
If you ever have to chose between a mobster and a civil servant, go with the mobster. Any time. Institutions do not have a sense of honor, individuals do.
During the Great war, T.E. Lawrence, nicknamed Lawrence of Arabia struck a deal with the Arab desert tribes to help the British against the Ottoman empire, against his promise to deliver to them an Arab state. As they did not know better, they delivered on their side of the bargain. But, it turned out, the French and British governments had a secret agreement made in 1916, the Sikes–Picot agreement to divide the area between themselves. After the war, Lawrence went back to live in the U.K., supposedly in a state of frustration, but, of course, not much more. But it left us with a good lesson: never trust the words of a man who is not free.
Now on the other hand, a mobster greatest asset is the designation “his word is gold”. It was said that “A handshake from the famous mobster Meyer Lansky was worth more than the strongest contracts that a battery of lawyers could put together” In fact he held in his mind assets and liabilities of the Sicilian mafia, and was their bank account, without a single record. Just his honor.
As a trader I never trusted transactions with “representatives” of institutions; pit traders are bound by their bonds, and I’ve never known a single self-employed trader over a two-decades long career who did not live up to his handshake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 7:32:57 PM UTC
No, not exactly skin in the game. Sense of HONOR.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 7:41:12 PM UTC
The idea is more general: only a sense of honor can lead to commerce.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 8:13:24 PM UTC
J-L You ONLY become independent when you are of the type to say that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 8:31:59 PM UTC
Killian, this is true. But a detail. I was wondering why the Italian mafia murders their own people in the back as it violates the rules of chivalry. You invite someone to dinnet then whack him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 8:33:05 PM UTC
Ban Kanj EXACTLY. People get the causal arrow backwards. COURAGE -> KNOWLEDGE, HONOR-> FREEDOM, PROSPERITY, not the other way around,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 11:01:48 PM UTC
My point isn't so much that one is bad and the other one other good... They are both bad. Modern Bureaucrats are collectively more harmful than mobsters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 11:02:43 PM UTC
...and mobsters put their lives at risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 11:03:39 PM UTC
Guru, how abt Goldman Sachs or pharma? Better?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 11:54:22 PM UTC
The point of too big to fail.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 12:05:42 AM UTC
the difference between shame and honor has to do with whether other people know about it.
Ask a polyglot who knows Arabic who he considers the best poet —in any language— and odds are that he would answer Almutanabbi who lived about a thousand years ago; his poetry in the original has a hypnotic effect only rivaled by the grip of Pushkin on Russian speakers. The problem is that Almutanabbi knew it; his name was literally, “he who thinks about himself as a prophet”, on account of his perceived large ego. For a taste of his bombast, one of his poems informs us that his poetry is so potent “that blind people can read it” and “deaf people can listen to it”. Well, Almutanabbi walked the walk —a rare case of a poet with skin in the game, dying for his poetry.
For in the same egotistical poem, Almutanabbi boasts, in a breathtaking display of linguistic magic, that in addition to being the most imaginably potent poet —which I insist he was – he knew “the horse, the night, the desert, the pen, the book” —and thanks to his courage got respect from the lion.
Well, the poem cost him his life. For Almutanabbi had —characteristically— vilified a desert tribe in one of his poems and they were out to get him. They reached him as he was traveling. As he was outnumbered, he started to do the rational thing and run away, without shame, except that one of his companions started reciting “the horse, the night...” back at him. He turned around and confronted the tribe to his certain death. Thus Almutanabbi stays, a thousand years later, as the poet who died simply to avoid the dishonor of running away and when we recite his verses we know they are genuine.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 7:04:16 PM UTC
Incidentally in the poem in which he belittles the tribe, he says فلا بمن مات فخـرٌو لا بمن عاش رغبة meaning "not one of them did a proud death"
Happy Easter everyone!!!
In Byblos the death of Adonis was annually mourned, to the shrill wailing notes of the flute, with weeping, lamentation; but next day he was believed to come to life again and ascend up to heaven in the presence of his worshippers.
http://www.bartleby.com/196/79.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 8:51:06 PM UTC
Yes, Atheists have no clue about what religion means. An Lindy effects. What is not perishable and has been around for n years will be around for n more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 8:53:19 PM UTC
Justin I deleted because I don't find this application of the notion of "rationality" acceptable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 9:41:42 PM UTC
I'd rather spend time with any fundamentalist of ANY religion before having a meal with an atheist fundamentalist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 10:03:32 PM UTC
Wine? Find me an atheist who knows how to enjoy life!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 10:04:39 PM UTC
Eleni, you forget that Orthodox Christianity is a production of the Levant, not Byzantium. So we are less insecure about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 10:11:51 PM UTC
Thomas Bak-Pedersen I guess you fail the dinner test. And of your 4 horsemen only Hitchens was personable (when drunk). I debated 3 of the 4 and can safely say that, like you, they have no clue what religion means.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 10:35:34 PM UTC
I grew up in the Levant. Like other Orthodox Christians, I was bred to respect the other ancient religions. But I can't stomach Atheists. I just can't. I had an aversion to Dan Dennett's wife and could not stay at the table. I just couldn't. As to Sam Harris, I left the room when he walked in.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 10:42:53 PM UTC
Ktenneh you provide a good example of those who take things to literally. Sorry, but ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 15, 2012 12:48:06 PM UTC
Theology only entered religion recently. Mostly AFTER the enlightenment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 15, 2012 12:48:44 PM UTC
As Eleni detected, credo= pisteo = TRUST, not BELIEF in the modernistic sense
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 15, 2012 9:28:37 PM UTC
At no point was the notion of epistemic belief used; only pisteic (trust).
(Note: this is the holiest day of the year, and almost the only one I observe).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2012 10:31:20 PM UTC
Hello friends, slow down. This is NOT Easter, it is NOT a happy day. It is death, rebirth in 2 days. Off to the Epitaphion...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2012 10:47:37 PM UTC
No Hanna, it is not HAPPY good Friday. Services are lamentations. Just as you don't say happy yom kippur.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2012 11:02:15 PM UTC
For others think iof it as the Festival of Lamentations for the death of Adonis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 10:51:10 AM UTC
Life is death and rebirth... Here is what my ancestors did http://www.bartleby.com/196/79.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 12:03:42 PM UTC
AF is completely organized on the notion of death of individual and survival of populations -and ends with the ritual of Adonis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 12:19:35 PM UTC
It is so strange that atheists are seduced by the primitive pagan rituals but not the more elaborate later versions of (Orthodox) Christianity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 12:29:34 PM UTC
Then why do they accept pagan rituals?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 2:44:31 PM UTC
To repeat, what we call "belief" has always been irrelevant, particularly in Orthodoxy. It has NO meaning. "trust" has one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 14, 2012 4:00:20 PM UTC
(cont) AMEN (in Arabic and Semitic) means: "I trust"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 15, 2012 4:50:20 PM UTC
Even in the usual domain, real life, beliefs play a very very small role.
I'm an 18 years old student from Italy and for my last year exam I have to write and expose an essay about a topic of my choice. I decided to speak about randomness as explained in "The Black Swan", but I have to include as many subjects as possible and, as far as maths is concerned, I wanted to explain Mandelbrot's theories about randomness in finance. The problem is that I can't find any of his books here in Italy so.. Do you know how I can find something about his theories? Maybe a good site or something like that.. Thank you very much!!!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2012 5:36:22 PM UTC
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/mandelbrotwilmott.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 13, 2012 5:36:31 PM UTC
and good luck
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 10:36:24 AM UTC
I disagree with BOTH.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 7:08:52 PM UTC
He believes tha nonsense that govt deficit is an investment
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 7:13:14 PM UTC
BTW my studies were economics (+ econometrics)
from Midrash Tehillim 6:3 (my translation)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 9, 2012 9:11:42 PM UTC
Thanks! That's the one I used. But I was wondering if I could call it "Talmudic".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 9, 2012 9:13:19 PM UTC
Did you translate it from H or Aramaic?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 9, 2012 9:52:40 PM UTC
I wonder WHY it is in Hebrew, not Aramaic.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/prologue.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 8, 2012 8:59:05 PM UTC
Max I have deleted the discussion on randomness/nonrandomness. IN practice, randomness = incomplete knowledge. Please do not repost.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 8, 2012 9:03:27 PM UTC
There is something I did not say. A friend of mine, John Gray, had an office next to F. Hayek for years at LSE. He reports Hayek was boring as hell.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 8, 2012 9:21:35 PM UTC
no, David. This is not a sequel to TBS. read on, you will see.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 8, 2012 9:26:47 PM UTC
Yes David Boxenhorn but the book was not written to answer such question. Incidentally I have a Talmudic question: Midrash Tehillim is not exactly part of the Talmud, but can we call it "Talmudic"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 8, 2012 10:15:51 PM UTC
So David, it is not Talmudic?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 8, 2012 11:03:33 PM UTC
Thanks David Boxenhorn.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 9, 2012 3:11:05 PM UTC
Thanks friends for the comments. The idea of the Prologue is mostly to stimulate further reading. Some have missed the point of this exercise. I am not looking to figure out why those who don't like it don't like it (it is binary), rather if those who like it like it. It is like my idea of optionality: you don't care about the average, just the upside, and how strong the upside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 5, 2012 1:54:20 AM UTC
up to a point, it NEEDS small fires.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 5, 2012 8:36:32 PM UTC
Georgi, I wrote a chapter on that. meanwhile I am trying to simulate fat tailed variable with feedback loops
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 9:10:41 PM UTC
My MS is at 190,000 words. Heading south to 140K WITHOUT losing anything, any substance. Just removing every word that I can remove...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 9:34:44 PM UTC
KIllian, nothing wrong with meandering provided you do it with fewer words.
Re: the fragility induced by the widespread use of the Just-In-Time supply chain management and minimalist inventory strategy
Just-in-Time has been the pet system since engineers and other doers were replaced mostly by accountants, MBAs and other beancounters as decision makers of corporations.
Engineer's training is heavily guided by the recognition of unpleasant realities, i.e. the analysis of possible failure modes.
I doubt beancounters have the same training and ethics.
In a non-hunter-gatherer's, non self-reliant society, interrupting the availability of goods is a death sentence on individuals.
I'd really like to read your thoughts on the topic one of these days...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 8:07:11 PM UTC
Thanks Frank!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 1:15:58 PM UTC
Feedback ->no independence -> fat tails
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 2:10:50 PM UTC
it means that EVERYTHING with interdependence tends to develop some type of tails. Hence COMPLEX systems have fat tails. Plus some type of nonlinearity in response, f(x) more convex than x.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 2:51:08 PM UTC
NO, Michal. Fat tails BOTH ways (in almost all cases), as negative feedback induces low volatility, so the tails are thinner but the volatility is even lower.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 8:08:56 PM UTC
Michal let me work on a derivation on the plane back Friday. Since the tails are x^4, they are so convex that they will decline less than x^2 ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 5, 2012 12:37:13 PM UTC
Lookup Maxwell's governor. There is a paper on the Wweb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 5, 2012 1:35:44 PM UTC
no, that tight governors makes them explode
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 5:19:16 PM UTC
Eleni Nero is not into health and athletic things. He just wants power & to look like a bodyguard to physically intimidate people ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 10:23:55 PM UTC
clean and press
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 11:50:47 AM UTC
Not true guru. What jazz is referring to is studies ant pecking order, subliminal
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 12:01:11 PM UTC
Vimarsha it is largely genetics
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 8:30:05 PM UTC
I found them in a Guide for Fictional Characters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 8:58:52 PM UTC
Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.
One large gap seemed to be the absence of a funding liquidity test. Given $2.7 T in outstanding repo, and the dependency the large banks have on it and other forms of short-term debt, this seems troublesome. The Fed wrote: "The stress scenario projections do not make explicit behavioral assumptions about the possible actions of a BHCs’ creditors and counter parties." (In a proposed rule, they are suggesting liquidity testing, however.)
In addition, a minimum 5% tier 1 common to risk-weighted seems awfully low given mistrust of asset values, such as 2nd liens on mortgages. (And of course, Lehman 2 weeks before bankruptcy claimed 11%) These are my observations, without even thinking about whether the "stress" assumptions (13% unemployment, 50% decline in equity prices, 21 % decline home prices etc) were tough enough.
Thanks,
Jennifer Taub
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 1, 2012 11:42:33 AM UTC
You should write to me directly. I have a paper on that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 30, 2012 4:04:39 PM UTC
John the subtitle and contents ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 31, 2012 5:12:11 PM UTC
Tor Münkov this is hilarious! Are you in the book cover design business?
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/sais.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 26, 2012 4:55:31 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou I am in Paris I can walk and get a copy across the street but what is it exactly to look for?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 25, 2012 1:54:23 PM UTC
Religion without tolerance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 25, 2012 6:58:00 PM UTC
Tamer Khraisha, excellent!
The Wind and The Fire
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 9:19:22 PM UTC
(AF stays in the subtitle)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 7:29:28 PM UTC
Apoorv, deleted all comments on religion. Please keep such discussion out of this forum...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 8:53:35 PM UTC
I actually have statistics in a few domains... For instance, the number of Phds who blew up like Long Term Capital Management is way nonrandom. Intellectuals tend to go for Soviet-HArvard solutions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 9:16:10 PM UTC
Jack Keevill how could the returns of PhD traders v/s non PhD traders be a biased sample?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 9:17:02 PM UTC
Youcef Maouchi indeed Hayek's studies in the misuse of reason is scathing ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 9:22:10 PM UTC
Intellectuals run the swelling bureaucracies in Washington, Brussels + Policy makers PhDs, etc... Come on.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 9:25:56 PM UTC
My point is that DESIGNED systems have huge errors, natural and organically grown systems have small ones...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 9:50:52 PM UTC
Regular people are OK with hidden logics...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 10:16:41 PM UTC
Matthew Stern true, it is interesting how the most credible proponent of ecological intelligence is himself Asperger... So this Asperger goes both way. (The Post-Autistic economics group changed their name to something like Heterodox economics). Smith's Nobel lecture is wonderful... He is just an immensely honest man who has no biases.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 10:28:51 PM UTC
I was enthralled by his papers (compiled/summarized in his book-length expansion of the Nobel lecture)... He proved so many things, showed them empirically, something Austrian economists had been reluctant to do. Among other things he showed that Adam's Smith's invisible hand did not require selfishness, rather, did not require benevolence, something different from the Aynrandists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 11:01:42 PM UTC
MY approach as you know is about size and fragility, entirely different
It need not be anything fancy. Some small simulations only. The assignment in set up in such a way so that all students are encouraged to contribute to all projects. A project is a wiki page with whatever you want. I just need to start, I will ask Prof. Sornette, but I also though about asking here for some ideas... Thank you!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 10:35:32 AM UTC
Hi, perturbing parameters in higher dimensional matters (like covariance matrices for portfolios) can pose challenges... But it can (and should) be done.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 4:47:04 PM UTC
Arnie, perturbate (up and down) by units of 2 mean deviations to see the asymmetry. It may start somewhere. If it doesn't you may be OK.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTony-oil.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 18, 2012 7:52:16 PM UTC
Sorry, problem fixed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 18, 2012 8:30:10 PM UTC
Hammad what nudge in volatility?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 18, 2012 8:53:50 PM UTC
Ben Campion, right on! it is a double conflation problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 18, 2012 10:45:41 PM UTC
CONFLATION
The reader should note for now the following. All these analyses of world events are like virtual reality, an intellectualization of things that is parallel to real life. They are not real life. The translation mechanism seems broken.
There are two conflations here. First, the mistake that understanding events that people grasp intellectually could correctly translate into other events in practice. So understand geopolitical affairs does not necessarily means understanding oil prices, yet the two are mixed in people’s minds. We see it all the time: people think that understanding economics allows to predict commodities and currencies and other markets —it never does.
The second conflation is more severe. It assumes that profiting from the decline of oil came from knowledge when in fact Fat Tony had a cheap asymmetric bet. He was not making a prediction, just a bet that would pay off big if he is right, and lose small if he is not. So in the long run his understanding of oil prices would not be relevant.
In both cases what we have is an overestimation of knowledge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 18, 2012 10:50:56 PM UTC
(updated file, changed end)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 18, 2012 11:44:36 PM UTC
What this leads us to is a solution to the puzzle that the increase in the understanding of biology did not lead to a higher rate of cures... They are two different things.
People don't become academics because of intelligence, but rather because of a mental defect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 11:46:59 AM UTC
Michal, you are exempted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 11:49:45 AM UTC
Apoorv Bajpai I can promise you firecrackers. I had some very very strong reactions from the "Soviet-Harvard" crowds... And they are pissed off that I have a mathematical formulation...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 11:58:31 AM UTC
Jayson Elliot you do not seem trained at proper argumentation: bringing Sarah Palin... Go read a simple book on logical errors, then come back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 12:01:41 PM UTC
Another fallacy, Jayson. Read my statements above, read yours, and if you can't find the flaw, go buy a book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 12:03:24 PM UTC
No, it is not. It is an expression of empirical regularity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 12:10:03 PM UTC
Visibly Jayson you are NOT even a proper academic. An acdemic bound by the ethics of the system would first read the book, then respond to the arguments, not to the abstract of the idea. Come back then
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 12:13:56 PM UTC
David, I agree.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 12:21:24 PM UTC
The proportion of academics who support Ron Paul is pitifully small compared to those who support statist solutions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 12:49:55 PM UTC
Thanks Jazi Zilber This means an academic social scientist is 172 times more likely to vote for statist solution than a nonacademic!!!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 12:56:14 PM UTC
So people like Hayek are truly of a special variety.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 1:02:50 PM UTC
Except Milton Friedman and a few U Chicago fellows, all the others are outside mainstream economics: the Austrians, notably can hardly get posts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 1:12:58 PM UTC
Peter Boettke has a new book in which he proposes that the subject economics should be abt teaching people how to work with spontaneous processes (he uses "order", I prefer "process").
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 1:31:16 PM UTC
I read the book. There is a problem with the distinction in that theory: you need to test outside academia, by occupation. People who are self employed, artisans, etc. hate the state.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 1:31:58 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn bingo: that was my Fat Tony v/s Socrates
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 4:32:00 PM UTC
The biggest problem is that decentralization/antimilitarism/economic freedom/ as a mode is not necessarily on the spectrum. the left-right is nonsense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 4:50:04 PM UTC
Look how people have a knewe-jerk reaction to science cuts when we have EVIDENCE that state funded science has done NOTHING in history except create parasites and bureaucrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 4:50:08 PM UTC
http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-decry-spanish-cutbacks-1.10242
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 8:10:22 PM UTC
David, one reason I don't call myself libertarian is that I don't see the difference between large corporations and governments. But libertarians hold that big corporations are the product of large govenments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 10:17:23 PM UTC
Bingo Graeme, these are the exceptions... plenty of data...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 16, 2012 10:44:49 PM UTC
J-L scientists don't think like that. This only applies to the small mediocre people ....
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 14, 2012 7:14:31 PM UTC
Hi, I know who Amitav Ghosh is but did not know he reviewed my work... To tell you I got cured of keeping track of the reviews of my books...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 11, 2012 11:15:02 AM UTC
If we dislike change, it is not without a reason.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 11, 2012 3:43:53 PM UTC
We are getting rid of neomania when it comes to food and exercise. People accept the need to return to paleo... But I fail to understand why people agree to eat like our ancestors, but not to *think* like them, by endorsing similar and more naturalistic systems of belief...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 11, 2012 7:33:23 PM UTC
Good idea. It's the initiator's spread. I won't interfere. The only problem is the occasional wierdo. You don't notice them because they get rapidly blocked.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 11, 2012 11:10:37 PM UTC
No, please Karen. Explain the idea. Links are the death of communication.
Two events, then back to the silence of the library.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 7:17:34 PM UTC
REASON: 90% of our problems are dealt by simplification (via negativa): metastatic government with self-feeding rules and massive warped incentives -> deficits -> debasement of currency. So we need to clean shop. Just that would be sufficient to get results. My idea is that in a complex system we need to reduce multiplicative side effects of interventions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 7:19:08 PM UTC
And 2) I trust the man. I don't share all his ideas, but I trust him. The gvt job is to prevent bad things, not to do good things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 7:20:15 PM UTC
(cont) when gvts try to do good things, as with GReenspan, they cause blowups.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 7:41:13 PM UTC
Finally, some people value freedom and emancipation above many other things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 8:29:48 PM UTC
Brian, the Scandinavian model is entirely municipal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 8:57:40 PM UTC
In my BOOK III of antifragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 9:01:03 PM UTC
Calling Ron Paul a "loon" is not rational discussion of socio-economic policy (in fact quite obscurantist a method). So if someone please use more intelligent terms in discussion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 9:09:02 PM UTC
Osvaldo I hesitated a lot before jumping in about a month ago. And his campaign has been delaying the fundraiser for a month. But this is beyond a simple election, it is about breaking this Left-Right journalistic fake dichotomy as Robert Smits wrote above
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 9:33:57 PM UTC
Marc, think of labor! Cameron came on a platform of anti-large corporations, anti-government, unlike the non-Paul republicans who love large corporations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 9:45:44 PM UTC
Let us leave Cameron aside from now. I am not responsible for his policies: I just suggested to his administration what to do in order to make the place more robust.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 9:53:43 PM UTC
I couldn't care less.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 10:04:03 PM UTC
What I want is eliminate deficits. Central banks can't mess things up if there is no deficit, and if they don't tinker with interest rates as Greenspan/Bernanke did to cause transfer of loans to the class of bankers who took the upside and stuck taxpayers with the bill. Is that what the purpose of a central bank?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 10:22:20 PM UTC
The "less is more" solutions are just not good for bureaucrats and vested interests. And idiotic voters pretend that they "have no choice"... thus condone the practices...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 11:06:28 PM UTC
Aitor, not true. If I borrow from you, privately, I, sort of, created money.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 9, 2012 11:58:01 PM UTC
Chris liberty means you can't force others to share your opinions and prejudices. His personal taste should not matter . That's the central idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 10, 2012 1:44:18 AM UTC
Chris, what "free" world?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 10, 2012 12:03:57 PM UTC
What most of these critics are missing is that Ron Paul's ideas on religion and other things are private. If he had he had the exact opposite ideas his public policies --and their result on society -- would be totally invariant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 10, 2012 1:30:58 PM UTC
Why should we care about the media?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 10, 2012 2:41:38 PM UTC
Raed please do not butcher the notion of "evidence" as you don't seem to know what it means.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 10, 2012 2:47:43 PM UTC
Guru the abhorrent is the iatrogenic -other candidates - dressed in the garb of the "measured" and "helpfu;" to get votes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 10, 2012 4:52:49 PM UTC
Guru I don't buy the AynRandist selfish stuff. But I buy the liberty thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 11, 2012 7:53:16 PM UTC
governments sustain large corporations. they die otherwise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 11, 2012 8:45:44 PM UTC
yes EXCEPT as a barbell to protect the VERY weak.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 14, 2012 12:23:48 PM UTC
Obama is an actor not a president, just an image. He is scared of bankers, the Fed, etc. The empty suit:talk, image, and doesn't deliver.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 15, 2012 10:39:18 AM UTC
NErtila, classic liberalism needs some updating for nonlinear effects of size... hence decentralization.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/prologue.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 8, 2012 11:24:35 AM UTC
please, no copyedits and similar suggestions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 8, 2012 11:51:34 AM UTC
David,I said "will eventually break"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 8, 2012 12:33:49 PM UTC
Yes chiara but plasticity lacks the notion of "improvement", as it resembles "resilience" and "pliability".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 8, 2012 1:18:09 PM UTC
No Siefgfried, the wisdom of the ancients was about calling a fraudster a fraudster and ostracizing him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 11:54:37 AM UTC
Haroun, in Greek mustakim Tarik= Ortho- Doxy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 6:57:00 PM UTC
In Arabic (classic) iza akramamta'l karima malaktahu wa in akramta 'illa2ima tamarrada
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 7:16:29 PM UTC
Yes but in the mutanabbi it is the same treatment that results in two outcomes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 27, 2012 10:55:42 AM UTC
Indeed... but the best is to ban bonuses for bailable-out companies...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 27, 2012 11:46:38 AM UTC
David, skin in the game. The risks can remain hidden.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 9:12:40 PM UTC
This is about statements.(ignore the case when the because is in an answer).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 27, 2012 11:46:07 AM UTC
When someone starts with the narrative BEFORE telling you what he is doing (say leaving, etc.) then you know that it is backfit.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/book2.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 3:38:40 PM UTC
Mihaly Book 1 is not finished. I am still tinkering with it. This is done, plus or minus edits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 3:50:38 PM UTC
The feedback I usually solicit is the clarity and readability of the technical sections.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 5:58:26 PM UTC
Su thanks but since you got the point it did the job. I am mostly interested in things hard to read.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 6:05:04 PM UTC
Yes I was pleased that you only noticed the awkwardness of the two men... via negativa, what people don't say.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 7:36:33 PM UTC
Thanks Kent, I was not looking for compliments or edits, only for general comments on whether the reader sticks and if the message goes through in some manner. This is a very, very, very hard chapter. BTW added a section at the end.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 9:04:07 PM UTC
Somehow I only like to work on my typos when I am in an airport or on a plane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 7:14:37 PM UTC
It costs more and more to bring a new drug largely BECAUSE of the swelling interractions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 7:19:59 PM UTC
Marcelo we can measure the fraud at the difference between DSM-V and DSM-IV. Do you have the data?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 7:54:16 PM UTC
The process is slower, as they don't need to do full testing of interractions for variations of existing drugs, but the hidden risks of lawsuits from interraction are swelling by the minute.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 9:08:14 PM UTC
Killiam you are engaging in sophistry. Of course it is not DETERMINISTIC, but random, with a probability rising with the number of interractions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 9:32:27 PM UTC
The way I handle it Josh is in limiting drug consumption to SEVERE cases only, where the payoff is so large that these side effects are made irrelevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 11:01:34 PM UTC
I went after bankers and quants and economists, got smear campaign after smear campaign, so by now I need a big fight so pharma is there. I am attacking them on risk-based grounds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 11:19:12 PM UTC
(cont) Now also we forget nonlinearities, meaning Drugs A +B + C interract, but we only tested for A+B
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 25, 2012 11:48:26 PM UTC
Killian Denny, right for an author or political thinker, but not always for a scientist. I am lucky to be both, but I have been greatly delayed by a smearer who wrote 100,000 words against me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 26, 2012 1:39:46 PM UTC
David, medicine is no longer advancing so fast, even against diseases of civilization; the rate of "cures" slowed down big time int he past 60 years, and the rise of life expectancy is due to social elements.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:39:48 PM UTC
Robust is, alas, boring.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:43:03 PM UTC
David, this is part of the conclusion that I have not written yet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:50:38 PM UTC
I finished polishing this morning
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:51:12 PM UTC
A RETURN TO THE ATTIC
Time for an autobiographical vignette. As Charles Darwin wrote in a section of his On The Origin of Species historical presenting a sketch of the progress of opinion: “I hope I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision”. For it is not quite true that there is no word for antifragility. I had one without knowing it. And I had it for a long, very long time. So I have been thinking about the problem most of my life without knowing —like many readers, I am sure.
Not only I have in the past used some expressions related to antifragility but it was a central aspect of my career. What makes this book the convergence of everything I’ve done, studied, and worked before, from my practical profession to a certain scientific map of reality, particularly complex systems, is that I had a long professional career specializing in nonlinearities. And what I had is perhaps the only possible career that specializes in nonlinearities .
In the mid 1990s, I took a few years off and locked myself in the attic, trying to express what was coming out of my guts, trying to frame what I called “hidden nonlinearities” and their effects. Alone, in my attic, about two years, reading and writing, though what I was reading had no effect on my writing. Until that happy day, when I quietly deposited my necktie in the trash can at the corner of forty-fifth street and Park Avenue in New York, I had been working for a decade, partly self-employed. There were things in my guts that wanted out to sort of close that side of the business —and enter the blue period of unadulterated philosophical and scientific reflection, so to speak (I had a relapse and went back into business a few years later for another six years, before I completely entered the blue period, in which I now have been safely for seven years).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:51:40 PM UTC
What I had wasn’t quite an idea, rather, just a method, for the deeper central idea eluded me. And it is the exact method I used early in the chapter, with the size of the stone. But using this method, I produced close to a 600 (printed) page long discussion of managing nonlinear effects, with graphs and tables. Scratching under the surface of things, I found hidden nonlinearities that seemed ignored (then, and, to some extent, still at the time of writing). The book that came out of this solitary investigation in the attic, finally called Dynamic Hedging, contained ideas and concepts (at the time) that fell completely outside the discourse, both practice and academia. It was a technical document that was completely ab ovo (from the egg), and as I was going, I knew in my guts that the point had vastly more scientific import than the limited cases I was using in my profession but it had been the perfect platform to start thinking about these issue. The book is still is by far my favorite works and I fondly remember the two harsh New York winters in the complete silence of the attic.
The spiral bound manuscript (three thick volumes) started spreading in pirated versions, allowing me to make friends with immensely intelligent researchers —such friends as Marco Avellaneda, Raphael Douady and Bruno Dupire and start the equivalent of a decades-long conversation. It was presented as a manual on “how to work complicated nonlinear securities”. For the career was (to reveal it now) in the trading of financial instruments called options—but the reader should for now avoid associating the idea with finance, only with the notion of nonlinearity as it is the technical aspect, the tools, not the business that matters here. (I usually go ballistic when I use technical insights derived from options and people mistake it for a financial discussion –these are only techniques, portable techniques, very portable techniques, for Baal’s sake!) The only interesting aspect is that an option has nonlinear attributes, an asymmetry between upside and downside —it benefits more when an event happens than it is hurt when the opposite takes place, or vice versa (again, just like the harm from the size of the stone, it is not a straight line on a graph).
The notion of asymmetry between upside and downside was as we saw used by the stoics. It takes an option person to recognize another options person, which as we said is why my colleagues could immediately connect with Seneca . And we knew that much academic scholarship on the stoics was bogus —it missed the asymmetry.
The tools of analysis of nonlinear effects are quite universal. Worse, I specialized in complex varieties of these options that were extremely nonlinear.
The book talked about exposure, not events —in other words, not what can happen, but how a given event affects the entity (that is, the individual agent, firm or decision maker) if it happens —the function of x instead of x. So the Dynamic Hedging enterprise was limited to mapping vulnerabilities to events and shocks (or absence of shocks), without specifying their possibility. And I did not realize the importance of such method. Events are random, what they can affect you is less random —or can be made to be less random. I later moved to discussion of random events with the other works.
I said that the techniques presented in the book could detect hidden financial and economic fragilities —but, alas, I did not use the word fragility then, which set me back more than a decade and a half. As we said, fragility is the new blue, and naming makes things explicit, just as what we said happened with the color blue and allows the portability of concepts from one subject to another. Unfortunately I was already employing the notion of antifragility but, not using the term fragility, did not know it consciously.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:51:44 PM UTC
For the precursor name for antifragility was “long volatility” used in the jargon to describe an exposure, even anything that gains from volatility, turmoil and increase in randomness (“long” in the lingo simply meant “benefits from increases”). The lingo also included the expressions “convex” (a special case of nonlinear response) or other more obscure words (such as “long gamma”, “long second derivative”) completely meaningless to the outside world —and there were about a dozen varieties of such “long volatility”. So Dynamic Hedging went deeper and deeper, and uncovered more nonlinearities . I also characterized every possible form of nonlinear response —remarkable all of them portable to this book, and applicable, to, say the human body’s reaction to radiation therapy. But, without going into the next step, I had also been casually generalizing to real life, applying these words to every object around me that gained more from turmoil than was harmed from it. Activities like tinkering and trial and error were “long volatility” or “long randomness”, while those of central planning were “short volatility” or “short randomness” (“long” means benefits from a rise in what one is expose to, “short” means the opposite). Something harmed by potential war was “short volatility”. An employee with potential reputational damage was “short volatility” and had to play it safe.
One day, my friend Anthony Glickman the rabbi and Talmudic scholar, turned option trader, then turned again Rabbi and Talmudic scholar (so far), after one of these conversations about how this applies to everything around us, perhaps after one of my tirades on stoicism, calmly announced: “life is long gamma” (in the jargon, a variety of long volatility, that is, benefiting from volatility increase. Anthony even had his mail address “@longgamma.com”). But nobody else outside this narrow pursuit of option traders understood what I and my friends meant, cared about these concepts or connected to them. Even academics and the rocket scientists around me missed the point as they seemed to want to have more complicated and less relevant things on their minds —and from the comments of the professors who refereed the draft of Dynamic Hedging, I can safely saw that they weren’t even close.
So, clearly, I had a word for antifragility and a precise mapping of the concept but did not take it to its natural conclusion. For instance, one day, in the early 2000s, after watching the James Bond movie in which a Hamburg based media magnate fomented wars so he could sell more newspapers, I quietly described the film to a friend, another option trader as follows: “some fellow is long volatility” and the trader did not have to make any effort to understand why. Quiet days without turmoil would not have been good for the Hamburg magnate’s newspaper business. Today I would say: “some fellow is antifragile to wars”.
As I wrote in Chapter x, I also felt frustrated because while the true message of The Black Swan was about fragility to extreme events (I had by then adopted the notion of fragility) but in the first edition, I only focused on the event itself and everyone was talking about Black Swans not fragility.
I had lost more than a decade, but I felt the serenity of having closed the loop and completed unfinished business.
First, the central feature of an option contract, (again, more in the next section), is that it is a contingent claim between two parties who have a mirror image of outcomes; one person, the holder, makes all the gains, the other, the seller eats all the losses. It is hence asymmetric (in fact, as we will see, nonlinearity arises from asymmetry). One person can afford to be wrong, the other cannot and needs to be extremely careful. It turned out at the center of The Black Swan is a very, very similar epistemological asymmetry (hence nonlinearity): mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence –a elementary mistake made by very smart people, or people called “smart”. It was the same mistake typical “smart” people made with the misunderstanding of the symmetry of option contracts. One’s exposure to the error from absence of evidence is completely different from that to the error from evidence of absence. So I realized that the epistemological asymmetry is similar to the asymmetry within the option contract, if not exactly the same on some map that started forming in my head. I had closed the loop from nonlinearity to epistemology, the only business I felt worth being in. (Somehow this makes Fat Tony and Thales of Miletus much smarter in some things than Socrates and Aristotle. I know it is not clear for now as I have skipped many, many intermediary steps; but it will all be explained to the reader in later chapters).
The second, a bigger aha, came as follows. I decided to write a follow up to The Black Swan on the notion of fragility, which I eventually did as a postscript to the book. In my mind it was very vaguely linked to “short volatility” (negative exposure to volatility, in the lingo I used at the time), until trying to map it the way I had done in Dynamic Hedging, I realized that fragility was exactly that, short volatility, nothing else. I looked at a porcelain cup full of coffee, almost spilled it on my shirt, and saw that fragility was necessarily in the nonlinearity of things. If I drop if once from 10 centimeters, it would break. But if I dropped it twice from 5 centimeters, it would not. The increase in harm was nonlinear. Excitement: all fragilities (hence antifragilities) reside in the nonlinear, and I had already mapped which ones.
Now everything became one piece. Nobody had managed to provide a definition of risk so far, because risk the way they viewed it is subjective (the latest paper was by Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz, in 1971, and another one by Marc Machina and the same Rothschild announced the tautology: ”risk is what risk averse people don’t like”). Further, even if risk was objective, it would not be measurable because of Black Swan effects. My excitement is that fragility had a straightforward definition! And it was measurable!
So I hit my aha when I figured out that fragility in any domain, from a coffee cup to an organism, to a political system, to the size of a firm, to the health of a grandmother, is exactly what does not like randomness. I can even measure it. I called my friend Bruno Dupire with whom I have had a continuous conversation during the episode of the attic —the most intuitive mathematician, and non selfpromoter (he writes no papers), he can grasp things in seconds. He confirmed that I could express everything nonlinear with the same tools (combination of contingent claims) that I used before when he pored over my manuscript. I could express antifragility in medicine, sociology, life, economics, and coffee cups in graphs, variations around a single theme, close to {x forty} of them in this book, everything using the same series of options. And the epistemological issue can also fit on the same graphical representation —the exposure to the unknown.
Here was the definition of fragility and one that can lead to antifragility. as we will see with some depth in the next section.
The only bad news is that I no longer have that attic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 3:56:16 PM UTC
aha v/s eureka?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 5:57:45 PM UTC
David, we MEditerraneans have never ceased to be pagan. Pagan gods are antifragile, The Monotheistic Semitic G..D is robust.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 12:25:15 PM UTC
Jeremy it is central banks that CREATE inflation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 1:08:01 PM UTC
Khurram, this is no place for direct insults.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 2:37:00 PM UTC
The point is DOMAIN DEPENDENCE, not political arguments; let us not bring the 99% business here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 6:33:45 PM UTC
How about interest rates v/s currency rates?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 7:02:33 PM UTC
Matthew forget these complications. Just focus on NOT messing with interest rates.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 23, 2012 7:00:25 PM UTC
Hello, sorry friends, but this is not a place for the debate on the global crisis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2012 10:17:28 AM UTC
John Aziz, please stop the debate here. Or write shorter harangues.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 24, 2012 11:23:10 AM UTC
I am not for abolishing the Fed, only constraining its powers.
The same with psychological classifications such as "type A personality", "left brain", "passive-aggressive" & other TED-style stereotypes). Actually I would go further: if it is not in Montaigne, it is neofake, neomania, and will go away replaced with another such classifiction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 11:46:19 AM UTC
Paul Montaigne was summarizing the classics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 12:00:10 PM UTC
There were plenty of mental illnesses in antiquity. all the serious ones were identified then.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 7:53:24 PM UTC
Oliver in antiquity nerds were limited to working in small artisanal jobs that did little harm.
(Chapter 2, overcompensation from stressors)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 4:12:22 PM UTC
nothing to do with what I wrote Pietro Bonavita
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 4:15:36 PM UTC
Nothing to do with good deeds, it is just that what we lack is stressors and harm and in MODERNITY we only get it from enemies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 5:13:46 PM UTC
David, you got it right -conditional on surviving. But the good thing about these stressors is that we survive them. Someone attacking you verbally on the web is not going to harm you --but in an ancestral environment, someone hitting you with a big wooden stick would maim you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 5:17:17 PM UTC
Exactly Tim, our loss aversion is acting out of control, since we no longer have the same stressors. It is the EXACT SAME mechanism as hunger: we are made to eat everything in sight, and this is no longer helping us.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 5:38:56 PM UTC
NIETZSCHE What Does Not Kill Me Kills Others
Time to debunk a myth.
As an advocate of antifragility I need to warn about illusions of seeing it when it is not really there. We can mistake the antifragility of the system for that of the individual, when in fact it takes place at the expense of the individual (the difference between hormesis and selection). Nietzsche’s famous expression “what does not kill me makes me stronger” can be often misinterpreted as meaning Mithridatization or hormesis. It may be one of these two phenomena, very possible, but it could as well be a “what did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because I am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone”. In other words, I passed an exit exam. I’ve discussed the problem in earlier writings with the false illusion of causality, with a newspaper article saying that the new mafia members, former Soviet exiles, had been “hardened by a visit to Gulag” (the Soviet concentration camps). Since the sojourn in the Gulag killed the weakest, one had the illusion of strengthening. Sometimes we see people having survived trials and imagine that, given the surviving population is sturdier than the original one, that these trials are good for them. In other words the trial can just be an exit exam. All we may be witnessing is the transfer of fragility (rather, antifragility) from the individual to the system. Let me present it in a different way. The surviving cohort, clearly, is stronger than the initial one —but not quite the individuals since the weaker ones died.
Someone paid a price for the system to improve.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 5:55:40 PM UTC
Is is emergent since it comes from nonlinearity...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 6:17:59 PM UTC
JUST WROTE IN CHAPTER 2 -It looks like it is the same mechanism of overcompensation makes us concentrate better in the presence of a modicum of background random noise as if the act of countering such noise helps us hone our mental focus. Consider this remarkable ability humans have to be able to filter out all this noise at happy hour in some bar and distinguish the signal among so many other conversations with background noise. So not only we are made to overcompensate, but we sometimes need the noise. Like many writers, I do best writing in a café, working, as they say, against resistance. They sell electric contraptions that produce “white noise” that allows people to sleep better. Also consider our bedtime predilection for the rustle of the tree leaves or the ocean. Now these small distractions, like hormetic responses, act up to a point. It would be hard to write a novel in the middle of a rock concert. Note that National Public Radio “professionalism” or misplaced sense of perfectionism prevents them from interviewing people on a telephone line. So instead of giving interviews in their pajamas or sweat pants, authors are forced to go to studios for the interviews, with bad coffee, and a huge apparatus. Yet there is not a shade of evidence that people understand things better with a sterilized silence in the background —silence hurts. This useless perfectionistic technologizing is another manifestation of the denial of antifragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 7:02:50 PM UTC
Friends, this is where the barbell ideas applies. Protect from extremes. Only extremes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 1:18:14 AM UTC
JL he never tells the truth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 1:19:12 AM UTC
I thought you guys were into via negativa...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 1:22:18 AM UTC
He is telling you what is NOT the truth (via negativa)
(revised aphorism)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 1:13:45 AM UTC
Weightlifting is not boring (no machines) and lasts twenty minutes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 19, 2012 1:20:40 AM UTC
You forget you are in a gym. But do natural, standing up exercises.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 20, 2012 2:36:04 PM UTC
You forget kettlebells (throwing stones)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 16, 2012 7:58:04 PM UTC
William what is this business "absolute terms"? 1 million, 100 trillion? there is NO absolute definition of success.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 16, 2012 8:18:57 PM UTC
No, Danilo, No. You are not a failure if you don't FEEL it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 17, 2012 12:51:19 PM UTC
no Iveta.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 16, 2012 7:11:49 PM UTC
I was born Sept 12 1924, as per the info on this site.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 16, 2012 8:29:13 PM UTC
Also please tell them that I "feel" younger,thanks to weightlifting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 16, 2012 8:34:13 PM UTC
What is this standardized nonsense Karen?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 17, 2012 3:59:58 PM UTC
Karen, this is the kind of nonsense I despise. One should bring a particular statement under scrutiny, not make bland idiotic generalizations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:38:17 PM UTC
Ok, OK, a couple of hints: boredom as a naturalistic b**t detector. If something is boring, it is therefore nonrelevant and alienating. Many who don't get it are trapped into modernism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:32:10 PM UTC
SIMULATED ANNEALING
I was asked to get involved in a film based on the following parable, a city completely ruled by randomness. Every period, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now be a baker, the baker would be a prisoner, etc. At the end, people ended up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their right.
I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the job of rulers, naming rulers randomly and removing them at random as well. Well, it turns out, the ancients were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation by Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues, with a paper called “How randomly selected legislators can improve parliament efficiency”, they showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the system.
Scientists are often aware that only randomness can unlock some systems caught in a dangerous impasse. For instance, a donkey equally hungry and thirsty caught at equal distance between food and water can be saved thanks to a random push one way or another (a metaphor named Buridan’s donkey after the medieval philosopher Jean de Buridan). So beyond the point of municipal noise, democracy is even more antifragile than we tend to think —it naturally craves some amount of randomness and disorder at all levels. We saw earlier in the chapter the example of “noise traders” bringing some stability thanks to the noise. The idea of injecting random noise in a system to improve its functioning is quite universal in science and has been applied across fields —by a mechanism called stochastic resonance adding random noise to the background make you hear the sounds (say, music) with more accuracy. And, ironically, the so-called chaotic systems can be stabilized by adding randomness.
Mathematicians use a method of computer simulation called simulated annealing to bring more general optimal solutions to problems and situations, solutions that only randomness can deliver. Actually, the Athenian practice of random replacement of rulers is in the same vein. The idea is inspired of annealing in metallurgy, a technique involving heating and controlled cooling of a material to increase the size of its crystals and reduce their defects. Just as with Buridan’s donkey, the heat causes the atoms to become unstuck from their initial positions and wander randomly through states of higher energy; the cooling gives them more chances of finding new, better configurations.
The lesson from these scientific examples is the existence of class of systems that cannot improve without randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:32:30 PM UTC
Also information travels better with noise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 16, 2012 8:17:43 PM UTC
Thx. It remains that Alex Pouget, in neuroscience fits the Poisson , not realizing that what fit a Poisson often comes from a power law. They are way behind in probabilistic neuroscience
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 3:52:00 PM UTC
Excellent, David.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 4:45:50 PM UTC
But there may be side effects, of course.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 13, 2012 8:10:54 AM UTC
Availability bias
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 2:39:47 PM UTC
Camille Chamoun Jr the secret of democracy is an incompetent government.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 11, 2012 11:28:19 AM UTC
This is part of the chapter on HORMESIS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 9, 2012 5:43:22 PM UTC
The only journalist I've recently met who escape such classification are John Horgan and Gary Taubes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 9, 2012 5:45:18 PM UTC
There are fewer and fewer who would stick their neck out to represent reality and do the real journalist's job
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 7:54:16 PM UTC
No, David, just increase in fragility. On that, much evidence later (heading to the airport).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 9:59:09 AM UTC
no David. Consider island effects. you need isolated sytems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 10:04:59 AM UTC
yes, but there are many + diversity. Otherwise winner-take all effects. On that, later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 5:17:25 PM UTC
David, antifragility requires thin left-tails. We now have thick left-tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 6:00:56 PM UTC
fragile. It is not symmetric.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 6:01:19 PM UTC
the left tail is necessary for survival. No matter what right tail is there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 6, 2012 1:18:43 PM UTC
(sorry delete previous iterations along with comments - this is final)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 6, 2012 1:22:42 PM UTC
Paul, via positiva is not ZERO. So please resist looking for exceptions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 6, 2012 2:14:10 PM UTC
Vaccinations are also a (weak) response to correct diseases of civilization (if you want to provide a real example, use peniccilin). And there is some BS written above concerning the role of these things. We can easily empirically compute: diabetes, alzheimer, cancer, CVD are nonexistent (even adjusting for age) in H-G populations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 6, 2012 2:26:48 PM UTC
Before getting into confirmatory sophistry one needs to plot vaccination (as part of benefit) against, say, carbs, transfats, taxominofen, hospital fevers, smoking, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 6, 2012 3:07:30 PM UTC
Thomas, if you got the point, the chart is not confusing. And the text shows context.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 6, 2012 3:28:51 PM UTC
David, H-G diseases were part of their ecology.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 6, 2012 5:23:34 PM UTC
Vaccine is compensation for absence of mithridatization. It is not hormesis as there are no benefits imparted outside the narrow resistance to a specific germ.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 12:14:38 AM UTC
Randy the problem with naive interventionism is that we end up underintervening when truly urgent and necessary.\
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 1:21:23 AM UTC
Hunter Gatherer
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 9, 2012 8:20:18 AM UTC
It is the graph in note 146 http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
(Continuing penultimate)
(Explains partly why business is purer than academia.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 5, 2012 9:06:18 PM UTC
What many commentators here fail to get is that a businessman is not dressing up his ideas in loft aims: he tells you what he is doing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 5, 2012 9:25:27 PM UTC
Daniel Miles you are right. Prostitutes are honorable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 5, 2012 10:28:15 PM UTC
J-L we are not commenting on the activity of prostitution, but on how ethical the person is in NOT hiding her aims.
(Stoic ethics)
A Guide to a World We Don't Understand
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 2, 2012 7:04:03 PM UTC
Alexander, A Guide to the Perplexed is not Zagat
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 2, 2012 7:28:44 PM UTC
Guru, pls stop. One post, wait for 3-4 replies, then post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 2, 2012 7:44:41 PM UTC
You guys forget I already have a title. I want a subtitle that does minimal ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 2, 2012 10:43:48 PM UTC
Vergil writing the book was NOT painful. Only the subtitle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 3, 2012 12:19:53 AM UTC
There is no option to choose from. Not so far...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 3, 2012 12:57:17 AM UTC
So far, looks good. ANtifragility is what we use to live in the world we don't understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 3, 2012 7:45:30 PM UTC
Friends, the title thingy is settled. Guide (not map or how to live, in the sense of Maimonides's Guide), and Don't understand (more of a pure skeptic position than can't understand). The book is about the TRIAD, not just ANTIFRAGILITY, which is a subplot.
It is remarkable how gratitute works as a stabilizer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 4:39:08 PM UTC
Friends, not the point. The idea is that one should feel the urge to help those who would in turn help others.
A man taking the upside from a “soul-in-the-game” player is, by definition, a “no-skin-in-the-game” player. Therefore “soul-in-the-game” players only help immoral players and are immoral themselves.
Where am I wrong?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 29, 2012 2:42:41 PM UTC
You are using a special case. Someone who died fighting hitler was not in that category. Revolution for independence, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 29, 2012 4:44:10 PM UTC
Not at all. The problem is deeper, at the level of the decision. The idea of the rule The text addresses the point that a moral action is not defined as such ex post but ex ante.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 29, 2012 4:53:24 PM UTC
Uzi, assume that I try to help an old lady cross the street and by doing so cause her to die. Did I impair my moral rule?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 29, 2012 5:46:21 PM UTC
Abhi, a soldier involved in an army such as the German one AND aware of such atrocities is not on the right moral side.
(via negativa).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 29, 2012 10:36:20 AM UTC
Especially ONESELF.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 29, 2012 5:51:06 PM UTC
The problem of democracy: it needs to be via negativa, meaning provide the ability to REMOVE bad rulers rather than patronize us into something supposedly smart. It often doesn't
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 27, 2012 12:56:45 PM UTC
I don't go to Davos. All fake empty-suit name droppers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 27, 2012 2:05:20 PM UTC
Gemma, Davos once per lifetime for me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 27, 2012 12:11:22 AM UTC
Do you have multiplicative links during a conversation? You make the point the best you can. Same here. If one wants to communicate with others, one shd bother & make the effort to say it himself. Further, these videos...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 27, 2012 12:04:07 PM UTC
Not the point. It is as if someone in the middle of a conversation gave you a magazine article to read without explaining what it was about, "read this"' or, worse, gave you a movie to watch, it would not be very food for the interaction ... He should make effort to summarize the point himself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 27, 2012 12:17:56 PM UTC
Nothing wrong with a link that backs up an argument (what Max R does with biblical references).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 26, 2012 9:18:12 PM UTC
Karen, Please, please stop putting links.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 26, 2012 11:31:06 PM UTC
Su Lizhen, "evidence" from cognitive psychology is BS experiments done on students...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 26, 2012 11:56:54 PM UTC
The only way to use wealth is by controlling it, which is close to impossible for many. Impossible, except for very few.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 27, 2012 2:39:07 AM UTC
Yes Seneca understood.
The notion of "achievement" *devalues* life into a tournament.
(Modernity)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 2:04:46 PM UTC
Odette Kalimari the whole point is that we as a human race are capable of being above lowly competition.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 4:40:34 PM UTC
The opposite of tournament is selflessness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 4:40:58 PM UTC
Eleni selflessness was not high on Nietzsche's agenda.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 5:13:09 PM UTC
Jason, again, too many posts. Just one to make the point.
(Modernity)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 1:48:51 PM UTC
Michal, he is no nihilist. He said "most" and he was making a statement about noise/signal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 2:02:41 PM UTC
Michal, your statement seems to have logical flaws. Either you are both condemning filtering and accepting it or you seem to be saying that noise=signal, both logically incoherent. You do not seem to understand that Osvaldo Pereira's statement is about FILTERING not the rejection of signal. Accepting every bit of information is what is NIHILIST because it is mathematically equivalent to rejecting every bit of information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 2:09:54 PM UTC
Samrat, don't make it complicated. It is simply as follows: 1) when the deviation is large, it comes from information, when small, it is sigma. 2) volatility scales here at SQRT[t], noise at T.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 2:11:09 PM UTC
CHAPTER 5
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 2:11:13 PM UTC
But in economics a worse effect is caused by data —looking at daily data causes intervention, and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. The more data, the more noise, and the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at data on a yearly basis, say a stock price or the fertilizer sales, or inflation numbers and the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) —it means that about half of changes are real, the other half comes from randomness. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the markets do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal.
Now let’s add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to these variations. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 2:31:25 PM UTC
footnote to chapter 5, To finish the point: just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible to mistake a signal for noise. Signals have a way to reach you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 3:35:38 PM UTC
Thanks Peter I will try to book there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 28, 2012 8:29:21 PM UTC
Hi Peter are you there?
x...x Class: An economic condition of making more than minimum wage and wishing for more wealth. Workers, monks, hippies, some artists, and English aristocrats escape it. The middle class tends to fall into it; so do Russian billionaires, lobbyists, most bankers, and bureaucrats. Members are bribable provided given an adequate narrative, mostly with use of casuistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 1:02:18 AM UTC
Christopher, there is a rest to the story. They harm others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 2:49:22 PM UTC
BINGO! Conrad Young you got it! I am now looking some something similar in Mediterranean mythology.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 3:23:07 PM UTC
Eleni Panagiotarakou, I owe you big!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 3:25:29 PM UTC
Eleni, the tantalized class!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 3:39:29 PM UTC
Thanks Eleni Panagiotarakou and Conrad Young. Now we have the treadmill class = tantalized class. tantalized is so much more elegant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 6:21:42 PM UTC
Ban, I was using "3ayno ji3aneh"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 6:25:13 PM UTC
and the opposite shib3an.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 12:57:15 AM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault I think I can do much better: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/IMG00092-20110226-0921.jpeg
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 1:21:21 AM UTC
Yes but only natural exercises...mimic lifting stones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 1:35:57 AM UTC
Jean-Louis Rheault flaneur 99.9% of hours, .1% doing deadlifts (for 30 min ).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 1:36:40 AM UTC
no, sorry, I sometimes cheat.
Recall from Chapter x that I believe that education is mostly what make individuals more polished dinner partners. The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, present another aim for education than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and “the intrinsic value of learning”, not economic growth. Likewise in ancient times, learning was for learning’s sake, to make someone a good person, worthy talking to; it was not for the vulgar aim to enhance the stock of gold in the city’s coffers. I will say it bluntly: entrepreneurs, particularly those in technical jobs are not necessarily the best people to have dinner with —the better at they are doing, the worst they tend to be (with some exceptions, of course). I recall a heuristic I used in my previous profession when hiring people (called in Fooled by Randomness “separate those who when they go to a museum look at the Cézanne on the wall from those who focus on the contents of the trash can”): the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they were, the more we are trapped at thinking that they are effective at what they were doing (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake in thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department). Clearly, it is unrigorous to judge the skills at doing from the skills at the talking (the same conflation of event and exposure, or knowing with doing, or, more mathematically, mistaking the x for f(x)), good traders can be totally incomprehensible —they do not put much energy in turning their insights and internal coherence into elegant style. Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them at the talk department. The same with artisans: the quality lies in their product, not their conversation —in fact they can easily have false beliefs that lead them to make better products, so what? But we should avoid the mental leap of going from the idea that making people interesting dinner partners to the notion that it creates economics growth, or that we should increase the stock of bureaucrats for that. Bureaucrats on the other hand, because of the lack of objective metric of success and absence of market forces, are selected on “hallo effects” of shallow looks and elegance —just say that a dinner with empty suits working for the World Bank would be more interesting than one with some of Fat Tony’s cousins.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 22, 2012 1:20:12 PM UTC
Michal "selected" implies NOT all of them
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 22, 2012 1:41:05 PM UTC
Jeff training is on the job heuristics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 22, 2012 10:55:59 AM UTC
The only person I trust is Ron Paul.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 22, 2012 4:36:37 PM UTC
Yes, go ahead. What I write is what I think . "The Only Candidate I Trust is Ron Paul"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 23, 2012 12:21:27 PM UTC
I do not wish to be dragged into politics beyond my statement of trusting one, and only one canditate in this primary. Conversation ended.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 19, 2012 2:27:48 PM UTC
This context thing is pure BS.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 20, 2012 5:06:55 PM UTC
J-L you are mild. You should never have to explain the difference between science and pseudoscience to someone who does not detect it spontaneously.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 20, 2012 5:12:48 PM UTC
In other words one should not have to explain why stereotypes are bad.
(Collectively, weak dwarfs are stronger than a giant -collaboration. Yet a single brave is worth more than an entire crowd.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 11:22:16 AM UTC
Jason, references please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 3:43:18 PM UTC
touristification, of course, and rationalism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2012 5:14:22 PM UTC
So David blue kahol comes from Aramaic? BTW it is at the root of alcohol (via Arabic).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2012 6:13:46 PM UTC
Thanks David. Looks like the Arabic route is from special eyelash coloring (kihl).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2012 9:11:14 PM UTC
David, this is very interesting. k-h-l is eye coloring in Semitic bases, later to become a color. Even in Arabic it was not quite a color (Azrak=blue, root for Azure). But in Levantine, it usually means dark-blue.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2012 9:14:12 PM UTC
Phillp, there are very few names for colors that transited from ancient to modern Greek. Leukos, Melanos, Erythreo ->Aspro, Mavro, Kokino, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2012 9:19:49 PM UTC
David B., let me do a quick check (checking Z-R-K or K-H-L in original Arabic Koran & preIslamic poetry. I will revert in a while as I will be on the road.) But I guarantee that K-H-L is in Aramaic texts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 16, 2012 9:21:50 PM UTC
David, I am pretty convinced that it is a substance. Just as North-West , etc., polar coordinates were locations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2012 3:41:40 PM UTC
J-L I write angry. Then I edit a little when becalmed but anger will always show behind the page.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2012 5:02:26 PM UTC
J-L your marshall guy may be empirically false. I have this You-Tube (pre-paleo days) where I am angry. Look at the remarks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABXPICWjFIo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 5:42:25 AM UTC
Jason I don't care about the feedback of those outside certain circles...
CONFLATION OF EVENT AND EXPOSURE. This conflation of event and exposure is what I call the confusion between X and F(X), also expressed in Chapter x as the Aristotelian v/s the Thalesian. The error consists on focusing on knowledge about a variable, say X when we should be dealing with a function of that variable F(X) (here, the effect of X on you, the exposure to X). We may never understand X, or be marred with perceptual errors, but we can control F(X). The fool thinks the Black Swan problem resides in better prediction of X, rather than the much simpler problem of mitigation by controlling F(X). Sometimes scholars make the distinction then go on conflating the two. Focusing on F(X) is not predictive, focusing on X is necessarily so. And the connection to antifragility is as follows: F(X) can be antifragile.
more technically explained in the Section II of this document:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/probability.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 8, 2012 11:54:55 PM UTC
Jennifer Taub I have a paper "We Don't Know What We Are Talking About When We Talk ABout Volatility".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 8, 2012 11:55:43 PM UTC
I wonder if the message is clear enough
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 9, 2012 1:58:21 AM UTC
No luciano, they do the right computations then forget.
(New entry in Glossary)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 4:39:33 PM UTC
"this is trivial"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 5:12:56 PM UTC
"DON'T PANIC"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 10:28:41 PM UTC
"No hard feelings"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 10:28:52 PM UTC
"I like you a lot, but"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 11:59:41 PM UTC
"I am easy"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 8, 2012 6:01:34 PM UTC
knowledge worker
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 1:02:25 AM UTC
These debates are not good enough a distraction. It still feels sad about Fat Tony.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 1:07:09 AM UTC
It is not in my control.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 1:07:58 AM UTC
You cannot be overweight and not end up compounding genetic problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 12:25:06 PM UTC
Ankur, ethics are very very stable across cultures. Golden rule for instance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 7, 2012 3:33:01 PM UTC
Nero's mission is lofty, not a personal one. And of course it entails dangers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 5, 2012 12:27:17 PM UTC
I was afraid myself .... but his estate was clean, near perfect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 5, 2012 12:27:37 PM UTC
No, beginning of a secret mission.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 5, 2012 3:10:35 PM UTC
Fat Tony does great work from the other side... The mission is much, much more complicated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 5, 2012 9:40:02 PM UTC
You guys don't realize how stuck Nero is with this money to spend on something useful
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 6, 2012 1:32:10 PM UTC
GUnter, you forget. Nero was out of the adventure business.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af-glossary.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 9:47:08 PM UTC
Thanks Leandro just added.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 9:58:09 PM UTC
ricardo medina, what do you mean?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 11:54:26 PM UTC
I had actually Ludic fallacy (or uncertainty of the nerd): Manifestation of the Platonic fallacy in the study of uncertainty; basing studies of chance on the narrow world of games and dice. Aplatonic randomness has an additional layer of uncertainty concerning the rules.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 5, 2012 1:45:54 AM UTC
I am going to bed early to prepare for tomorrow: the epilogue. You guys won't like it. Fat Tony...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 5, 2012 11:03:15 AM UTC
Bingo, constructivist instead of naturalistic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 12:10:54 PM UTC
condoning arrogance is not a virtue
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 2:49:43 PM UTC
This "nice" business is criminal when you are facing frauds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 7:28:14 PM UTC
Daria, please read the aphorism before replying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 2, 2012 12:55:22 AM UTC
So is this easy to read (compared to my other material)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 2, 2012 3:30:02 PM UTC
So it looks like it is readable for most of you, friends... This is the last chapter before the CONCLUSION and a half-page EPILOGUE. So I am done! and the book will come out in September.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 2, 2012 3:41:45 PM UTC
David Boxenhorn we oppose "naturalistic" or "ecological" to "constructivist" rationality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 2, 2012 8:47:33 PM UTC
"We"... I use we in place of "I" in scientific papers and was just writing one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 2, 2012 11:42:34 PM UTC
Killian, nobody is saying kill intellect. Please reread: APOLLONIAN (intellect) + DIONISIAN (hidden)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 12:38:14 PM UTC
Something was deleted by mistake. Sorry, please repost if you wish.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 7:14:58 PM UTC
Jason, he keeps stalking and contacting people here. I keep blocking anyone new who smells like it could be him.
From the GLOSSARY [CORRECTED]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 1:38:28 PM UTC
(thanks for detecting the triple negative)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 3:15:11 PM UTC
David, this is just financial. Avoid ethical problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 4:31:51 PM UTC
My idea is = ethically free with their opinion. No matter how they got there, they have no ethical rules to change, no casuistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 7:58:10 PM UTC
Friends this has nothing to do with New age spiritualism but merely a discussion about robustness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 9:06:58 PM UTC
barbell class: either makes minimum wage or does not want to earn more. Includes hippies and aristocrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 10:04:23 PM UTC
Gemma Mastroianni Carroll your story was in ...Montaigne. (my transl.) when King Pyrrhus tried to cross into Italy, Cynéas, his wise adviser, tried to make him feel the vanity of such action. "To what end are you going into such enterprise?", he asked. Pyrrhus answered:" to make myself the master of Italy". Cynéas: " and so?". Pyrrhus: "to get to Gaul, then Spain". Cynéas: "Then?" Pyrrhus: " To conquer Africa, then ... come rest at ease". Cynéas:" but you are already there; why take more risks"? Montaigne then cites the well known Lucretius (V, 1431) on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 10:04:52 PM UTC
all the same class
In other words, anti fragility.
And my gratitude for the comments over the past year.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 31, 2011 8:02:55 PM UTC
Nick, no book ever gets there. I just stop when it "feels" OK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 1, 2012 12:09:41 AM UTC
Jean-Louis, I thought it was the opposite. NYE is when party experts stay home with a book and let the amateurs get drunk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 30, 2011 10:11:40 PM UTC
Hint: when presented with cancer patients, oncologists recommend chemotherapy, radition oncologists radiotherapy, and surgeons surgery. And they genuinely do so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 30, 2011 10:12:15 PM UTC
A specialty becomes an intellectual prison.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 31, 2011 1:17:50 PM UTC
Yad el7urr mizan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 31, 2011 1:16:30 PM UTC
Yad el7urr mizan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 31, 2011 2:12:07 PM UTC
The hand of the free person is a scale.
http://www.lesbelleslettres.com/livre/?GCOI=22510100184530
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2011 8:43:45 PM UTC
Huet and Scaliger.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:08:31 PM UTC
The reason I publish with them is to help with these new books
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:08:33 PM UTC
http://www.lesbelleslettres.com/livre/?GCOI=22510100772920
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2011 10:09:42 PM UTC
The full text is here: http://sites.univ-lyon2.fr/lesmondeshumanistes/wp-content/uploads/Adages.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 30, 2011 3:50:56 PM UTC
I removed the Nietzsche quote as it may be misunderstood... Meanwhile spend all this time swimming in Erasmus' compilation. Nothing like it except perhaps the Suda (or suidas) which it also distills. Remarkably Erasmus skipped the entire corpus that was not pagan as "mediocre thinkers". I see where Nietzsche is coming from.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2011 12:58:01 PM UTC
Daniel, friendship does not survive envy, betrayal, etc.
(For instance, when someone asks you why you are wearing dark glasses at night, you might answer "Mi7in")
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 1:35:44 PM UTC
Tinmir has a French equivalent "la frime". Mi7n I can't find
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 1:45:50 PM UTC
Mohammad, Levantine has different meaning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 1:57:16 PM UTC
Saifedean, in Northern Levantine, it is not the same. More like "gratuitous flamboyance".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 2:08:02 PM UTC
Saifedean you are in the wrong North. To me that is South. Looking for "consciously aggressive but harmless acts of irrationality, with attitude, done without any rational explanation in sight, but feel good."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 2:09:29 PM UTC
I am spending ten days in January in Norhern and Middle Levantania.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 2:51:20 PM UTC
Looks like khaled is right; "keke"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 5:50:01 PM UTC
I think the term has evolved in the Levant. The best is the "you got a problem with that" or badass, or brega.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 10:52:25 PM UTC
Exactly, but the Levantine version is smoother, more gentle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 29, 2011 12:38:39 AM UTC
Thanks Pierre. I am switching into araq until my visit to levantania.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 10:15:56 PM UTC
Modernism in the sense of modernity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 10:25:16 PM UTC
No, see pinker s book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 10:27:43 PM UTC
Crime rate came down with modernity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 11:07:18 PM UTC
Yes Ryan, we were very close with the Bay of Pigs...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 11:44:12 PM UTC
Hume figured out that small states are not tempted by war.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 10:54:18 AM UTC
I have an entire chapter on this ... complicated ... but we switched from Mediocristan noise to Extremistan. Less street violence, more state/war destruction.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 7:38:48 PM UTC
Ottavio you did not get it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 11:45:30 PM UTC
You don't realize that I can't both WRITE books and impersonate a writer. It is hard to be both.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 28, 2011 1:27:22 AM UTC
Write, Max, of course.
Incidentally, for those who think that academia is “quieter” and a emotionally soothing transition after the volatile risk-taking business life, a surprise: when in action, new problems and scares emerge every day to displace and eliminate the previous day’s headaches, resentments, and conflicts. A nail displaces another nail. But academics seem to hate each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen... Contact with the brutish world of words on PDF pages reignited my love of the transactional : commerce, business, markets, Levantine souks (though not large-scale markets), activities and places that bring their best in people, makes them forgiving, honest, loving, trusting, and open-minded. I want to be happy to be human and be in an environment in which other people are in love of their fate —and never thought that it was a certain form of commerce. Matt Ridley made me feel that it was truly the Phoenician in me that was the intellectual.
[Barbell]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 1:19:00 PM UTC
please stop playing with words.
My takeaways:
1) When doing things for rational reasons, you can usually also later rationalize your way out of them. Much easier to stick to a regime just because that's what the regime is, for reasons you don't fully understand.
2) Total bans are easier to follow than merely reducing consumption. Once you start it can be hard to stop, a little turns into a lot (how much is "a little" anyway? The answer comes more often from my stomach than my head)
3) Food tastes so much better after deprivation. Yes, I fasted partly for hedonistic benefits :)
4) Hard circumstances create adventure. It's healthy to shake things up a little from time to time.
A belated Merry Christmas to you all
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 26, 2011 8:39:51 PM UTC
Very, very good, ben
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 26, 2011 6:12:06 PM UTC
to things, to people, you can interpret...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 10:20:23 AM UTC
Jason, Socrates the Athenian brought philosophy from the heavens down to earth. Let us keep it there for a while.
Incidentally, for those who think that academia is “quieter” and a soothing transition after the volatile risk-taking business life, a surprise: when in action, new problems and scares emerge every day to displace and eliminate the previous day’s headaches, resentments, and conflicts. A nail displaces another nail. But academics seem to hate each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2011 5:00:10 PM UTC
Jennifer, I hope so. But people say that when they are new to a group. After a while...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2011 6:46:51 PM UTC
Jennifer he is a mensch! Left when he left. Did we overlap.
The first is "1491" http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059 which chronicles, I think, the greatest example of fragility in human history: after America was discovered ~95% of its human population died of disease.
The second is "Guns, Germ, and Steel" http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310 which I don't necessarily recommend as reading material, since I can sum it up in one sentence: The bigger the ecosystem, the more antifragile it is. If you want, you can look at the book for reams of boring examples.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 25, 2011 2:34:33 PM UTC
Thanks David, I've read both.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 24, 2011 6:19:52 PM UTC
Peace ... too much peace makes the world fragile... then danger!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 24, 2011 9:05:11 PM UTC
Thanks a million jean-Louis for the list as I will use it in the acknowledgments. And all of them will get the book (the official pub date is 4 months after the book is in hard copy to leave time for reviewers).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 24, 2011 9:09:07 PM UTC
Here is an autobiographical vignetter www.fooledbyrandomness.com/education.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 23, 2011 7:41:14 PM UTC
Joao, what kind of question?
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/prologue.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2011 12:59:33 PM UTC
ADDED:When I walked into the office of my editor, Will Murphy, with the manuscript of this book, he was dreaminglylooking at the computer screen and informed me that “they discovered two new planets”. I felt a bit of my usual tension. “What will this do for you tomorrow morning?”, I asked.
Cicero said about Socrates that he was the first to bring philosophy (that is, knowledge) down from the heavens into earth. The mysteries lie in front of you, here, in the daily life, in the matrix of reality, in front of your eyes. They do not require a telescope.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2011 1:28:58 PM UTC
Writing books (or here) is always pleasurable. This one even more. Articles and emails are horribly unpleasant to write.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2011 10:33:19 PM UTC
Justin, I hate autographs except with friends.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 22, 2011 10:43:07 PM UTC
Marc, makes no difference to the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 19, 2011 12:01:46 PM UTC
Sunil, Asad (meaning "lion" in Arabic) is nicknamed "rabbit" in Lebanon. He only attacks disarmed civilians and cannot confront dissent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 19, 2011 2:09:27 PM UTC
Karen, please NO sophistry here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 19, 2011 8:07:56 PM UTC
John Aziz what's this total nonsense of comparing pepper spraying protesters to butchering thousands of protesters, not counting torture?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 8:04:27 PM UTC
Added: Further, the notion of heroism has evolved through history as one can see from classical literature. Initially, in pre-classical times, the Homeric hero was someone principally endowed with martial courage: physical, since everything was physical. Even in classical times, to the great Lacedaemonian king Agiselaus, a truly happy life is one crowned by the privilege of death in battle, little else. This should give us a little pause when we hear talk about happiness defined as an economic or otherwise puny materialistic condition: to the petty unheroic modern, by comparison, the fear of inglorious death has been replaced by the fear of death, and we know how the fear of death can poison people in their lives, that is the period during which they are not officially dead. Then the notion of courage evolved further in Eastern Mediterranean cultures. Already by the time of Agiselaus, that is, classical times, courage was often seen in acts of renunciation, as when you are ready to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others, of the collective, something altruistic.
But the crowning came as a new form of courage was born, that of the Socratic Plato, which is the very definition of the modern man: the courage to stand up for an idea, and enjoy death in a state of thrill, simply because of the privilege of dying for one's ideas, or to stand up for one’s values, is the highest form of honor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 8:20:44 PM UTC
Courage is essential. But Aristotle's definition of courage is something in the middle between recklessness and cowardice. I think he takes it from Plato (Latches).
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/protagoras.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 17, 2011 11:10:09 AM UTC
Problem fixed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 17, 2011 12:22:29 PM UTC
Arnie, you do not seem to understand stoicism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 17, 2011 3:01:00 PM UTC
Lorenzo check the chapter...conflicts of interests were less acute. (chapter in link below last post).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 17, 2011 3:20:06 PM UTC
Martin Lind you are right as Chrisippus created propositional logic, modus ponens, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 17, 2011 3:46:17 PM UTC
Lorenzo, the ancients did not have the press, delocalized politics, and academic terror.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 18, 2011 12:40:43 PM UTC
I agree...talking about truth is masturbation. People who make decisions talk about risk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 18, 2011 5:31:00 PM UTC
I agree. I am adding that thought experiments are different forms of conditionals.
(First in 99 heuristics)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2011 10:29:09 AM UTC
(Corrollary: there is a big difference between giving advice or saying "what you do"). On that, later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2011 10:41:56 AM UTC
Jonathan, stop the BS/sophistry here and read the aphorism before making idiotic statements. It does not tell you to not LISTEN politely to people, only that I work by imitation not advice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2011 10:53:55 AM UTC
MArco I am stealing the citation for my chapter: The formation of a flaneur.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2011 4:19:52 PM UTC
Pablo buying a book is solliciting advice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2011 4:26:26 PM UTC
Jason, back in NY
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 16, 2011 10:33:41 PM UTC
Jason can you limit the number of posts (not to monopolize here)? They are off-topic and may disturb others who are part of the conversation. Thanks.
(In a Swiss grocery store)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 15, 2011 10:59:44 PM UTC
Laverne sorry, but your posts are too long.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ethics.pdf
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ethics.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 12, 2011 1:41:46 PM UTC
Alexander, this is being added ...
[modernity... chapter coming]
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ethics1.pdf
http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/2/4/998/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 8, 2011 11:23:29 AM UTC
The paper does not embed it into convexity effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 10, 2011 1:35:57 AM UTC
Casey, sorry, wrong book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 8, 2011 10:26:59 AM UTC
Max being a sucker is not sacrifice. Sacrifice (from "sacred") is willful act
Success brings psychological and economic fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 1:24:09 PM UTC
Ben you seem to have social difficulties.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 2:21:21 PM UTC
Ben has the bad habit of gratuitously insulting people in a salon...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 7, 2011 10:21:50 AM UTC
Thank you all for coming and for the nice comments..
[Procrustean bed]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 20, 2011 12:02:28 PM UTC
Ben who said the world will survive as is?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 19, 2011 11:32:51 PM UTC
Hi, no because it is probabilistic.
[Two centuries of commentators have failed to understand the point.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 18, 2011 1:15:53 PM UTC
David, you are using גיבור old Semitic root GBR in Arabic "Jabbar", "powerful". and it is the act of dominating the emotion that makes it interesting, rather than absence of emotion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 18, 2011 1:39:40 PM UTC
Thanks David. Stoicism was truly of Semitic origin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 18, 2011 7:45:13 PM UTC
This interview was before my weightlifting days.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 19, 2011 12:44:50 PM UTC
Nice superposition gibran/nietzsche showing the contrast. I am allergic to gibran.
[In my modernized version, Chapter x ]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 18, 2011 9:41:23 PM UTC
Jim, the problem may be a bad translation. I only read him in dual-language texts and believe me he is more varied, full of nuances that what you tend to read elsewhere. It takes a while to learn to read him.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Seneca.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 13, 2011 6:43:33 PM UTC
Elsewhere (Prologue) I talk about the dialectic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 13, 2011 6:44:25 PM UTC
David what's your profession/specialty?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 14, 2011 1:44:21 AM UTC
Nobody saw the link with this? https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=467743428374&set=pt.13012333374&type=1&theater
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 14, 2011 3:04:58 AM UTC
This is the generator. I suggest you look at the other graphs In the album.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 16, 2011 9:34:57 PM UTC
Thanks Techwyn
[Chapter on Political Volatility]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 4:59:22 PM UTC
The point is that "dissipative" systems have different attributes, a different kind of "equilibrium" so to speak that does not imply stillness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 5:14:12 PM UTC
Ben, please stop nitpicking aggressively and enjoy a nice weekend.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 5:16:29 PM UTC
Consider a vortex. It is a form of equilibrium: once it starts it keeps going.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 5:23:17 PM UTC
Ben it was your comment about dissipative system that was deleted (sophistry). And slow down your aggressive stuff. (I didn't read your comments on religion but yes, they are ...)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 5:43:22 PM UTC
Fahad, that's exactly the Prigonine idea of dissipative systems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 5:44:40 PM UTC
J-L not true, I've never deleted any of your remarks. I always delete the same persons.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 7:54:15 PM UTC
David, Stuart KAufman showed that cells obey such equilibrium...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:22:55 PM UTC
The notion of equilibrium is not very rigorous. It can confuse and divert. The stuff has been abandoned for a while. This remark is not even going to make it to the book.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/fragility-blue.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 3:10:33 PM UTC
Marco, Hokusai has been used by the fractal crowd because of the self-affinity in the shapes...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:23:24 PM UTC
Look for Chapter 1 further down here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:52:36 PM UTC
David, right, but I started to use fragility in place of risk ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:53:14 PM UTC
And words crossed domains...
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Seneca.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 11, 2011 10:34:42 PM UTC
Yes James I have been trying to hide it and sneak it in in a disguized way.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 11, 2011 10:35:58 PM UTC
Lazlo, I disagree about Seneca's brand of stoicism: his literature is extremely rich in direct applications. Another section discusses the notion of sage and summum bonum.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 11, 2011 11:04:18 PM UTC
Is the notion of "via negativa" apparent here with respect to harm?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 11, 2011 11:30:38 PM UTC
Alexander it will come later, after the evil technical chapter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 12:12:36 AM UTC
Journalism not journalists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 12, 2011 1:29:50 AM UTC
David Snyder, what you are saying applies to the Romans not the Greeks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 11:41:31 AM UTC
Mike Rea seems to work for pharma. Ben Goldacre is showing EMPIRICAL evidence form MAIN PEER_REVIEWED journals, and you seem to call him "conspiracy theorist"- just show counter evidence. Are you a charlatan?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 11:46:05 AM UTC
Of course Mike Rea you are a charlatan --technique to demonize a scientist. Of course big pharma DID NOT invent cures (rather marketed cures). Big pharma put 1 in 10 Americans on antidepressants, not counting the other sucker-drugs. Bullying doctors into prescribing is what you do. But you will be thrown out for lying and demonizing a scientist by calling him "conspiracy theorist". You charlatan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 11:49:10 AM UTC
He is using tricks to demonize Ben Goldacre http://www.badscience.net/category/big-pharma/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 11:54:06 AM UTC
Mike Rea, how about "sales reps"? trying to cure by selling more? How about the ads? You guys are DISGUSTING -you make bankers look good. At least they are not hurting the health of people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:03:31 PM UTC
The charlatan comes in the 1) demonizing of goldacre using standard techniques, 2) self-serving dressing up of the contributions, pushing rather than pulling... [He represents the charlatan's "look what I did for you"]. Much on that in my medical chapter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:15:54 PM UTC
Take for instance REVESTRATOL which supposedly makes people more insulin sensitive, may extend lifespan, etc. They spend all this money looking to put it in a pill (one needs very very doses, the equivalent hundreds of bottles of wine) when the same, very same effect (upregulation of SIRT) comes from INTERMITTENT FASTING or caloric restriction. But these charlatans can't make money by making people fast.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:18:27 PM UTC
Ben Goldacre is citing PEER-REVIEWED research. You are trying to demonizing more with your "attractive seductive story". Again, why don't you either shut up or provide counter-evidence using statistical rigor? Charlatan, again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:39:13 PM UTC
Mike Rea you are saying nothing, trying to impress us with a database. There are many people here who don't know statistics and might be fooled by you. Show me a statistical argument debunking Goldacre or, even better, Ioannidis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:55:55 PM UTC
Here is the confabulation in Mike Rea's statement: "[Pharma] has no mechanism to make a physician prescribe a drug, a payer to pay for it, or a regulator to allow its prescription." Bogus, bogus. Pharma is a machine to finance clinical trials, a very connected system to get through the regulatory process AND an army of salespersons to bully doctors. And of course you end up creating diseases, medicating people , and "curing". the 10% of population on Prozac-style drugs and soon a large portion on Lipitor is pretty much what your business is about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 1:10:18 PM UTC
Prostate cancer.... pharma has been already debunked. "working on new medicines for lung cancer"? Are you looking for ways to make people stop smoking instead or your shareholders won't like it at all... Charlatan, indeed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 1:13:12 PM UTC
Expurgate the agency problem from everything.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 2:22:31 PM UTC
Now you visibly can see an illustration of the agency problem that the only person here posting who is an advocate of pharma works for pharma.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 2:24:50 PM UTC
In my section on ethics, I go back to the roots of the agency problem as dealt with by the Greeks: no funeral goods merchant can be trusted with wishes of health of his fellow citizens. Not one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 10:42:56 PM UTC
Karen: evil should be called evil. Duty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 10, 2011 11:39:36 PM UTC
Avi, this is the "fooled by randomness effect", the Bonferoni problem. Ioannides, for example, has been saying it for a long time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 11, 2011 1:12:07 PM UTC
Friends, the most dangerous person is the nice guy looking like an accountant and perpetuating evil by showing up to work to satisfy his "work ethics".
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/end-bonuses-for-bankers.html?hp
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 8, 2011 3:14:38 PM UTC
Thanks Carlos and nice meeting you and your mother.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/chapter1.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 5, 2011 12:25:28 PM UTC
The footnotes for JL and Frano are endnotes. But i kept them as footnotes so you can see them.
The systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make things highly predictable in their smallest details, with a precise itinerary to follow —and a known teleology (that is, aims at a visible, known, and certain goal). It is like putting people in prison. What a tourist would be in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur, touristification consists in transforming anything, not just travel, like an actor following a script. We will see how systems and organisms that like uncertainty get castrated by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop, through the process of touristification. The guilty parties are soccer moms, the education system, planning, funding teleological scientific research, etc.
But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to have in captivity, even during our leisure hours: opera, scheduled parties, jobs. Jail.
This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply into my existential self.
I’ve always wondered if a lion or a carnivore would find the flesh of free-range humans of better taste –and pay more for it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2011 5:51:43 PM UTC
Christopher you mean Europeanization?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2011 6:45:04 PM UTC
Randy, Venice at night is a different place. Do you live there?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:33:39 PM UTC
TOURISTIFICATION is a variant of LUDIFICATION, NERDIFICATION
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2011 2:20:56 PM UTC
Please ignore the courtier, focus on the shape.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 4, 2011 4:11:18 PM UTC
Zhiwen, convex means f(x+dx)+f(x-dx)>2 f(x). This is exactly the second courtier.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/chapter2.pdf
(Fat Tony is back)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 6:52:46 PM UTC
(Also re-wrote Chapter 1... simpler, much simpler now)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 7:22:22 PM UTC
Christopher, word for Mac with my own template imitating the paperback setup.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2011 11:14:31 AM UTC
J-L and Leandro, this Stanley seems to be a hoax, random postmodern generator like "intellectual impostures". He might be using google translate on top...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 3, 2011 2:22:02 PM UTC
And the two of you fell for it!
(Aphorism 33)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 31, 2011 9:03:54 PM UTC
Ben, logical error: if envy causes criticism, all criticism is not caused by envy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 12:52:22 PM UTC
J-L got it. The mere fact that I criticize A rather than B is an expression of envy - selection.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 6:02:51 PM UTC
What are you smoking Ben?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 7:16:33 PM UTC
John you are not criticizing your younger self...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 31, 2011 2:17:29 PM UTC
Thanks. It is the best one.
(Aphorism 32)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 30, 2011 3:57:08 PM UTC
How are you today?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 30, 2011 8:45:40 PM UTC
JL what makes you think that questions are the way to get answers?
(not final, of course so this is not about typos, just if the concepts are clear enough to you).
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/chapter1.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 27, 2011 9:45:19 PM UTC
Same book, Antifragility, now close to 400 pages.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 27, 2011 10:03:29 PM UTC
James, it is in the prologue...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 2:24:32 AM UTC
Ben I took the details of the TBS paperback (font, page size, number of characters per line) and set is exactly on Word for Mac (of course, Mac). But you can do the same on any WP.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 2:25:05 AM UTC
I prefer to write the final product, I hate the unaesthetic computer drafts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 12:42:18 PM UTC
400 pages with notes, etc., and a technical appendix. (also please do not make copyedit suggestions. I only do so -myself- at the end, when I finish the book).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 1:22:54 PM UTC
Yes, if you print it in landscape double-sided, with SHORT EDGE BINDING, and you staple the left side, you have a book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 1:35:38 PM UTC
Kimo, I disagree. Tex looks great on page but you do not type it as you see it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 7:02:02 PM UTC
J-L this is the toughest chapter because it summarizes everything. All other chapters are easier narratives. As to ductility, etc., all these are part of robustness. Stanley you seem to be stuck in an old discussion and this salon has exhausted the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 7:56:23 PM UTC
Stanley, try to put everything in one post, please. It prevents others from participating.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 28, 2011 10:07:41 PM UTC
Ricardo, which sections are less understandable?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 30, 2011 5:18:37 PM UTC
Thanks friends... rewrote and constructed a narrative... will post
Where K is the strike, K1
+1 C(K1) - 1.6 C(K2) +.6 C(K3)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 27, 2011 8:26:03 PM UTC
Everything can be rebuilt using the basic digital option...
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/options.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 11:10:09 PM UTC
Thanks friends... there is more later, but I wondered this makes things clear at the very beginning of the book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 11:23:18 PM UTC
Thanks Giuseppe and Jim. just fixed
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 12:16:58 PM UTC
Ben and J-L, one has to read remarks in context. Further, people are seeing a passage, not the whole book. The only things I've expurgated in this site is side conversation outside the antifragility agenda, or purely logical flaws.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 5:00:52 PM UTC
no no no derivatives. this is only to make a transition into antifragility in life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 5:39:49 PM UTC
John please no finance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 8:06:50 PM UTC
I made it even less technical. Reposted
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 8:08:33 PM UTC
Sinisa Marx has an entire chapter on alienation in Das Kapital that you would think was written yesterday morning...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 10:59:26 PM UTC
Sinisa, read the footnotes.
Hormesis in the lit. seems to lack in rigor as a phen (2nd mistake, aside from missing local convexity). It is defined by a compensatory reaction, which conflicts with evolutionary filtering (antibiotic resistance works by destroying the weak faster than the strong). So there are:
1) hormetic antifragility,
2) evolutionary antifragility (often mistaken for hormesis),
3) payoff antifragility (say, financial options).
All three like increase in randomness, but function different ways.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 3:19:24 PM UTC
I will be back with the pdf of a text. Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 7:35:44 PM UTC
renaming 3) into "general philostochasticity"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2011 12:36:58 PM UTC
STRESSORS ARE INFORMATIONTHE NATURAL AND THE ENGINEERED
My bold conjecture in this book is that everything that has life in it is antifragile; but not the reverse. It looks like the secret of life is antifragility.
Typically, the natural —the biological— presents both antifragility and fragility, depends on the source of variation (and the range of variation). A human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), as we said, up to a point of course. For instance, your bones will get stronger when episodic stress is applied to them, a mechanism formalized under the name Wolf’s law after an 1892 article by a German surgeon . But a dish, a car, an inanimate object will not —it may be robust but will not be intrinsically antifragile.
For inanimate and nonliving, material, typically, when subjected to stress, either undergoes material fatigue, or shows outright breakage. The only exception I’ve seen is in the report of a 2011 experiment by Brent Cary, a graduate student, in which he shows that composite material of carbon nanotubes arranged in a certain manner produces a self-strengthening response previously unseen in synthetic materials, “similar to the localized self- strengthening that occurs in biological structures” . This crosses the boundary between the living and the inanimate as it can lead to the development of adaptable load-bearing material.
A lot of the idea of the book stems from such distinction.
The fact that the artificial needs to be antifragile for us to be able to use it as tissue is quite telling a difference between the biological and the synthetic. Your house, your car, your computer desk eventually wear down and don’t self repair. They can look better with age (when artisanal), but eventually time will catch up with them and the hardest material will eventually look like Roman ruins —but think of a material that would make them stronger with time, self-heal and improve.
So the artificial —the engineered— does not self heal. Not only that, but the more modern—hence complex— the artificial object, the more fragile it becomes and harder and harder to repair. This is the exact opposite of the human body and natural complexity that, as we saw, tend to self-repair, and even get stronger .
...Or Rather the Linear and the Complex
Tthe organic-engineered dichotomy is a good starter distinction, but it may not be it. Many things such as society , economic activities and markets, are manmade but grow on their on to reach selforganization. So I’d rather generalize into the linear-complex. More generally, instead of the discussion of antifragility along the biological-nonbiological classification, I find the distinction linear system-complex system more enlightening .
The human body, the economy, and nature are what we call complex systems, full or visible and invisible feedback loops and cascading responses. Responses are rarely linear, in the sense that two teaspoons of coffee aren’t twice as sweet to the taste as one teaspoon.
Everything alive is a complex system of sorts. Artificial engineering contraptions, with simple responses are complicated, but not “complex”, with interdependencies. You push a button, say a light switch, and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences. But, with complex systems, you need to think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain: its predators will starve and its victims (say what it eats) will grow unchecked, causing complications and series of cascading side effects. Lions are exterminated by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, leading to the proliferation of goats who crave roots of trees, contributing to the deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that were hard to see ahead of time. Likewise you shut down a bank in New York, it causes ripple effects from Iceland to Mongolia.
Note that complex systems, or, to be specific, those with interdependencies between their elements, tend, under some conditions, to deliver extreme events, while simpler systems, usually, are quite unable to do so. Not just that, but in the long run complex systems are dominated by these large events, as we shall see with Black Swans in a few pages down. And human intervention, by disrupting their self-regulation, causes these extreme events to become even more extreme.
Stressors are Information
Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors: my body gets information about the environment not through my logical apparatus an my intelligence and my ability to reason, compute and calculate, but through stress, via hormonal or other messengers. As we saw, my bones will get stronger when subjected to gravity, say, after my (short) employment with a piano moving company. They will become weaker after I spend the next Christmas vacation in a space station with zero gravity or (as few people realize) if I spend a lot of time swimming. The skin on the back of my hands will get callous if I spend a summer on a Soviet cooperative farm. My skin lightens in the winter and tans in the summer.
Further, errors and their consequences are information —for children, pain is the only information.
But complex systems are, well, complex. There are many more conveyors of information than meets the eye. This is what I call causal opacity: hard to see the arrow cause-consequence, making much of conventional methods of analysis, in addition to standard logic, inapplicable. Predictability of specific events is low.
One way to bust the one-sided simplified mindset that fails us with complex systems lies in the following example, and one that also illustrates the role of antifragility. Let us consider bones again. The tradition has been to think that aging causes bone weakness (they lose in density, become more brittle), as if there was one way relationship possibly brought by hormones (what happens to females after menopause). Well, it turns out, as was shown by Gerard Karsenty and his colleagues, that the reverse is largely true: loss of bone density also causes aging, diabetes, and loss of sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system laden with a great deal of interdependencies. And the story of the bones and the misunderstanding of interconnectedness also illustrates, as we will see at length in Chapter 3, by showing how lack of stress (here bones under weight-bearing load) can cause aging, and how depriving stress hungry antifragile systems of stressors brings a great deal of fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2011 1:27:22 PM UTC
Helen your statement has a severe logical flaw. If disuse causes aging, all aging does not come from disuse. (consider senescence).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2011 4:42:49 PM UTC
Better Failing, in the text I moved the distinction into: noncomplex/complex
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2011 9:08:55 PM UTC
Bingo Ben. Excess information is destructive
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2011 9:37:56 PM UTC
Not true, CHarles. Bad dogma. The brain loves ketones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 24, 2011 10:48:06 PM UTC
Someone mentioned Varella and Maturella's autopoesis... The idea of self-replication sort of died down ... I am discussing briefly but will not go that route. The book focuses on social systems, economic structures, and decision making for humans.
[Chapter 5]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 1:57:58 PM UTC
Hi Chap, which Boyd?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 3:13:48 PM UTC
Don't mix conservative in the modern political sense (which means nothing) and conservationism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 3:16:08 PM UTC
Bingo. The crowd does not like selfpromoters. And so does history (to wit, Kafka, Wittgenstein).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 3:17:36 PM UTC
J-L: inflexible, confident, obsessed with an idea, intolerant, crazy, but not selfpromoting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 3:19:53 PM UTC
Oakeshott, who is called "conservative", said to be conservative, i.e., compatible with history, is to ground one's policy in the invariability of change. So it is the matter of small, incremental change, or refusal of the past that makes the difference.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 3:41:32 PM UTC
Jordan, is it Arabic? (no "im" in Arabic plural forms, rather in ) can you spell in Hebrew?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 4:30:05 PM UTC
Craig, I will soon post about the difference between live experiments (tinkering) and observational studies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 6:28:55 PM UTC
Jordan, nothing Arabic in the word. Not sure if it has another name in Arabic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 22, 2011 10:20:03 PM UTC
(I apologize for the comments by Craig. He is permanently gone now).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 23, 2011 12:17:25 PM UTC
There is a difference between saying we are social animals embedded in a collective, and encouraging selfpromotion. Everyone wants some form of respect and artists want some recognition. But we detect those who just want that without paying us back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 23, 2011 2:34:39 PM UTC
One thing I have to say in CONTRA section to what I wrote before. Some geniuses were insecure selfpromoters. Maybe we despise those who are both selfpromoters and untalented.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 23, 2011 2:38:43 PM UTC
Or maybe not too many geniuses were so... it takes time to promote, away from production etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 23, 2011 2:43:26 PM UTC
The other thing: the French have more literary prizes than others: Goncourt, Renaudot, Femina, Médicis, Interallié, Académie Française, etc., yet are no longer able produce anything that stands the test of time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 21, 2011 2:10:25 PM UTC
Survival of the fittest was Herbert Spencer, if I recall. Why is why economic Darwinism is nonsense (companies don't reproduce).
[INTRODUCTION]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 21, 2011 1:25:16 PM UTC
David, right on. We are antifragile to some not all stressors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 21, 2011 1:36:02 PM UTC
No, JL, the readers only enjoy them if you tell them they are optional.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 21, 2011 1:02:07 PM UTC
Ya Elie, we don't allow finance here so no finance links. Shkran
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/chapter4.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:13:34 PM UTC
Marco Alves, thanks a million! What did you use for it?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 7:50:26 PM UTC
Hormesis
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 7:54:11 PM UTC
Thanks Greg. Every organism needs stressors and overcompensates. Sometimes the threshold comes early, very early.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 7:58:14 PM UTC
Whatever we are doing we are harming the environment --too much CO2. On that, later. The more I formalized the idea, the more obsessively Green I become.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 8:03:44 PM UTC
Of course Carl. As usual, 3 or 4 rules will help immensely.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 7:50:58 PM UTC
explained in graph above.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 7:51:54 PM UTC
If humans did not have hormesis they wouldn't need to go to the gym.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 7:58:48 PM UTC
Nikhil, spend six months in bed and you will understand hormesis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 20, 2011 11:09:14 AM UTC
(there is a small element of "breaking in" but beyond that objects experience material fatigue...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, October 20, 2011 2:09:15 PM UTC
Mattehw these UNEP FI are incompetent. I cancelled my lecture for severe breach of contract, and that that wasvery costly to me.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 3:13:59 PM UTC
The signal resides principally is in what people call noise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 5:14:45 PM UTC
No, I mean HONOR them as it is a collective process.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 5:17:37 PM UTC
Antifragility in biology works by layers. The cell has a population of intercellular molecules; in turn the organism has a population of cells; and the species has a population of organisms. A strengthening mechanism for the species comes at the expense of some organisms; in turn the organisms strengthens at the expense of some cells, all the way down and all the way up as well.
Consider traditional societies. We have individuals, families, tribes, ethnicities, groups. And the economy has individuals, artisans, corporations, industries, and the general economy —one can even have thinner slicing with more layers.
The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility —and sacrifice— of the lower one. This is obvious with ant colonies but I am certain that individual businessmen are not overly interested in hara-kiri suicide; they are therefore necessarily concerned in seeking antifragility or, at least, some level of robustness for themselves. That’s not necessarily compatible with the interest of the collective, that is the economy.
So there is a problem in which the property of the sum (the aggregate) varies from that of each one of the parts. It is called a problem of aggregation.
... [THEN I EXPLAIN HOW ANCIENT SOCIETIES DEALT WITH IT]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 5:18:29 PM UTC
Now what is the solution? There is none, alas, that can please everyone —but there are ways to mitigate. People often come to me for advice that is local to them, that is their own career; they go to business school to learn how to survive while taking minimal risks for that purpose —but what the economy, as a collective, wants them to do is take a lot, a lot of foolish risks themselves and be blinded by the odds. Natural systems want some overconfidence on the part of individual economic agents, the overestimation of their chances of success and underestimation of risks of failure in their businesses, provided their failure does not impact others. The restaurant business is wonderfully efficient precisely because restaurants, being vulnerable, go bankrupt every minute, and entrepreneurs ignore such possibility as they think that they will beat the odds. In other words, some class of foolish, even suicidal, risk taking is healthy for the economy —under the condition that all people don't take the same risks and that these risks remain small and localized at the individual business. By disrupting the model, as we will see, with bailouts, government typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to be needed to save in order to avoid contagion to other business; by doing so, they transfer fragility from the collective to the unfit, and suck up forces from the weak whose does not threaten the system. People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others.
The tension between individual interests and the collective is new in history: in the past it was dealt away by the near-irrelevance of individuals. Sacrifice for the collective shows, for instance, in the notion of heroism: it is good for the tribe, bad for those who perish under the fever of war. This instinct for heroism and the collective has to become aberrant with suicide bombers. These pre-death terrorists get into a mood similar to an ecstatic trance in which their emotions drive them to ignore their own death. (It is completely wrong to believe that suicide bombers act because of the reward of some Islamic paradise with virgins and other entertainment, for, as Scott Atran has signaled before, the first suicide bombers in the Levant were Greek-Orthodox revolutionaries —my tribe. Again, I despise modern journalism).
There is like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective, when people get into communal dances, mass riots, or engage in war. I felt that when performing the Levantine folk dance dabke, when, dressed in Lebanese ancestral clothes, similar to Balkan and Greek clothing, a certain number of people hold themselves by the shoulders as a chain, and rhythmically pound the floor with the feet. You become part of a beast of, say, thirty or forty feet; your mood is that of the collective. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd. I have also felt a different variety of crowd experience as a rioter, when fear of authorities vanishes completely under collective fever.
Let us now generalize the point to life in general. Looking at the world from a certain distance, I see a total tension between man and nature —a tension in the tradeoff of fragilities. Nature wants herself, the aggregate, to survive —not every species. Just as, in turn, every single species wants its individuals to be fragile (particularly after reproduction), for evolutionary selection to take place. In fact, such transfer of fragility from individuals to species is necessary for its overall survival: species are potentially antifragile, given that DNA is information, but members of the species are perishable hence ready to sacrifice and designed to do so for the benefit of the collective.
Now, some of the ideas of antifragility here are not very comfortable to this author, which makes the writings of some sections rather painful — I detest the ruthlessness of mother nature. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans are individually irrelevant. The great benefit of the enlightenment has been to bring the individual to the fore, with his rights, his freedom, his independence, his “pursuit of happiness” (whatever that “happiness” means), and his privacy.
So, with all my criticism of scientism and the the illusion of understanding the world that came from the movements bundled together under “enlightenment”, I will subscribe to the fight in favor of the individual and his protection against the interests of the group. For, as we saw, the enlightenment and the political systems that emerged from it freed us (somewhat) from the interests of society, the tribe, or the family which had dominated throughout history. The unit had been the collective; and it could be perceived to be harmed by the behavior of an individual —the honor of the family is sullied when, say, a daughter becomes pregnant, a member of the family engages in large scale financial swindles and Ponzi schemes, or, worst, may even teach the immoral subject of college economics. And the mores persisted way beyond the enlightenment. Even as recently as the late nineteen century, it was common in, say, rural France, for someone to spend all his saving to sponge out the debts of a remote cousin (called “passer l’éponge”, literarily use a sponge to erase the liability on the chalkboard); and do so in order to preserve the dignity and good name of the extended family. It was perceived as a duty. (I reckon having done some of that myself in the twenty first century!)
Clearly the system needs to be there for the individual to survive. So one needs to be careful in glorifying one interest against others in the presence of interdependence and complexity.
For many persons on the reactionary “right”, particularly in the United States, even what one does in the privacy of his bedroom vitiates the purity of the collective air. You represent that metaphorical dabke chain, even when you are alone.
Likewise, we humans may have to be self-centered at the expense of other species, even if it leads to more fragility on the part of nature, if it insures our survival. Our interests —as a human race —prime over that of nature; and we can tolerate some inefficiency, some fragility, in order to protect individuals although sacrificing nature too much may lead to hurting ourselves.
We saw the a trade-off between the interests of the collective and those of the individual. An economy cannot survive without breaking individual eggs; protection is harmful, and constraining the forces of evolution to benefit individuals does not seem required. But we can protect individuals from starvation, provide some social net. And give them respect.
Meanwhile, as a utopist, I hate what I am figuring out. But there is hope. To progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs the same way humanity has been honoring dead soldiers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 5:20:39 PM UTC
Bingo, Jean-L got it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 7:07:40 PM UTC
Thanks Ben for the citation! Marco, you are right about people not wanting to take personal risks --but someone has to start a corporation, and it's not the state.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 8:58:47 PM UTC
Caleb you are using dishonest sophistry. I am not asking you to treat them with equal respect, only to grant sacrifice some honor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 1:17:09 PM UTC
The sage needs to be both.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 4:18:49 PM UTC
Excellent, Nikhil. One is prospective, the other retrospective.
[corrected aphorism]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 16, 2011 2:56:02 PM UTC
No Chomsky, Ayn Rand, Zizek, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman ... please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 17, 2011 12:07:55 PM UTC
I did not add Hitchens to the list because of his current condition (I had an unpleasant debate with him on religion )
[ visit to Beijing]
(example: "creative destruction", not Schumpeter but Nietzsche, etc.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 4:41:19 PM UTC
Comparative advantage DOES NOT make sense. It fragilises.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 5:43:36 PM UTC
Bravo Stergios! This is my chapter on fragility. Specialization only works at the level of an individual...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 7:54:43 PM UTC
He writes book reviews of books that don't exist?
(Added a comment about Steve Jobs to my chapter on how not to be a prophet).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 3:07:38 PM UTC
Yes, the rod->stick of course. But why did prophets carry sticks?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 3:19:21 PM UTC
Where is Bublick when you need him? Where are the biblical scholars?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 4:19:40 PM UTC
http://www.prayertoday.org/2009/Walking-Sticks.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 9:35:58 PM UTC
I am very puzzled about the stick business. Jean-Louis beards are associated with intellectual independence why is why lawyers have the heuristic to reject them as jurors. In Rome it was a sign of being a philosopher (Greeks had beards). Politicians and corporate executives (and other hookers) don't dare having facial hair, in about every country (look at France).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 10:22:42 PM UTC
J-L the Byzantines had beards. The story is apocryphal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 11:03:17 PM UTC
J-L, it is NOT a walking stick. It is more like a scepter (comme le sceptre d'Ottocar).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 9:06:39 AM UTC
The Greek bishops and archbishops carry a staff.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 3:10:02 PM UTC
Garbuz your attempts to desacralize things (as economists do) is pretty shabby. It did not hit you that the symbol preceded Moses?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 3:11:27 PM UTC
(even Hammurabi carried a sceptre)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 3:27:56 PM UTC
Michael, Dawkins and other autistic journalists would not be allowed in this salon. This of course includes Dennet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 4:00:44 PM UTC
Explaining the sacred by the profane .... or explaining the unknown by the known
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 8:56:56 PM UTC
I discovered that most Business School professors were charlatans, and had no choice because that was their job and they were in it. It made me think of the ethics of fitting one's ethics and beliefs to one's current profession.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 8:57:40 PM UTC
Lloyd, air conditioning is the reason I can't work in corporate offices.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 9:00:54 PM UTC
Nezdad Red wine came from the Levant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 9:15:43 PM UTC
I have until Tuesday morning to decide whether to join protesters (hoping to move them in the right direction away from Sovietization), help break the back of the banks or stay outside the movement and continue what I am doing. I think that banks are mafia-style organizations that need breaking and the legal system is too weak for them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 9:33:41 PM UTC
Blankfein... I actually know him. When he was a commodity salesman at J.Aron (then Goldman Sachs) he tried to cover me and I did not want him to call me. I met him at a dinner in London in Nov 2007 and had a personal allergy for him...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 9:36:33 PM UTC
Barbell training makes you weaker... I lifted weights yesterday which probably precipitated the flu. But then I left my Kiev hotel at 430 AM so was sleep deprived, spent hours in planes which made me vulnerable ... But a bout of flu is good for...FB
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 9:40:19 PM UTC
Actually I am enjoying really having nothing to do.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 9:40:40 PM UTC
Pablo the agency problem is a source of fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 9:55:57 PM UTC
Don't know Marco... we already have venture capital and hedge funds... banks are utilities hence no bonus, period.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 10:00:38 PM UTC
A technology is antifragile, a machine itself is not. If I stress the bone, it gets better. If I stress a car, if gets old. Actually many humans are aging faster BECAUSE they don't stress their bones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 10:07:06 PM UTC
COnvexity effect means SMALL is better than BIG. Hence the problem is not government or not, rather decentralized-municipal rather than otherwise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 10:18:54 PM UTC
I wrote about my own education: shoot for erudition. What is good is what lies outside the corpus. here it is
The Education of an Antistudent
An autobiographical digression is worthwhile here. Another effect has cured me of the effect of education, and made me very skeptical of the very notion of standardized learning. My father was known in Lebanon as the “Intelligent Student Student Intelligent”, after a pun as intelligent student (or scholar) meant “Taleb Nagib” and his name was Nagib Taleb, as the newspaper published his name for having the highest grade in the Lebanese baccalaureate, the high school exit exam. He was a sort of national valedictorian and the national newspaper announced his death in 2002 with a front page headline “The Intelligent Student Student Intelligent is No Longer”. His school education was harrying though, as he had attended the elite Jesuit school. The Jesuits had for missions to produce mandarins who run the place, by filtering and filtering students after every year, and they were successful beyond their aim, as besides having the highest success rate in the world in the French baccalaureate (in spite of the war),—one single class for those born around 1948, produced Carlos Ghosn chairman of Renault, the writer Amin Maalouf who became member of the French Academy (“fifty immortals”), the musician Gabriel Yared, and another bunch of CEOs in Europe, in addition to my private banker Joe Audi the chairman of a New York private bank. They also deprived pupils of free time, with a harrying schedule and many gave up voluntarily. So one can surmise that having a father as national valedictorian would definitely provide me with a cure against school, which it did. And my father himself did not seem to overvalue school education, since, instead, he did not put me in the Jesuit school to spare me what he went through. But this clearly left me to seek ego fulfillment elsewhere.
So observing my father made me realize what being a valedictorian meant, what being an Intelligent Student meant. First, he had a systematic way of viewing things, so I immediately realized, when I was about ten, that school grades weren’t as good outside school as they carried some side effect with them. And it made me focus on what an intelligent but antistudent was going to be: an autodidact. The edge, I realized, isn’t in the package of what was on the official program of the baccalaureate, but exactly what lied outside of it. I wasn’t an exact autodidact, since I got degrees, but I can safely say that I studied the exact minimum necessary to pass any exam, overshooting accidentally once in a while. But I read voraciously, wholesale, initially in the humanities. My parents had an account with a bookstore and I would go pick up books and not pay for them, in what seemed to me unlimited amounts. Actually I realized that school was a plot designed to deprive people of erudition by squeezing their knowledge into a narrow set of authors. So when in high school, around the age of thirteen, I started keeping a log of the number of hours I read, shooting for sixty hours a week, and read the likes of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, bishop Bossuet, Stendhal, Dante, Proust, Henry Miller, and Malraux in literature, and Hegel, Marx, Husserl, in philosophy because they weren’t on the school program and managed to read nothing that was prescribed by school so to this day I haven’t read Racine, Moliere, Descartes, Anatole France, Romain Roland or other (then) standard ones and don’t believe I ever will. One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Emile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense. I realized that when one could write essays French or Arabic with a complicated and rich vocabulary (though not inadequate to the topic at hand), what one writes about becomes secondary. And my father gave me a complete break after I got published as a teenager in the local paper —just “don’t flunk” was his condition.
So to this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession is necessarily what lies outside the corpus.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 10:20:54 PM UTC
School is just certification. NOTHING good comes out of it except for a degree. NOTHING (except very rare classes). I am writing that and I am a professor.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 10:26:31 PM UTC
Right, Aitor, but as you age if you are healthy you get less and less of these as your immune system has a good memory. The problem of aging is in the inflammatory diseases from bad diet, chronic stress & mismatch with environment...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 10:33:39 PM UTC
Wiley the publisher are looking for someone to write my bio (these idiots) so to preempt them I have written my own and am incorporating it into Antifragility. The segment above comes from it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 7:59:11 AM UTC
Thanks a million, friends. All, OK, after 36 hours no more flu! Lucy I NEVER take artificial "vitamins" (I don't have scurvy). Michael Garbuz you ask way too many questions, or versions of the same questions that I've answered in the writings and I hate repeating things. Fouzia I (and the other readers) have no interest in Finance questions . George Gecewicz my favorite novel changes every few months (it is of course mood dependent) but certainly not modern.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 8:20:20 AM UTC
The problem is that I am going to Beijing tomorrow (Tuesday) for a short trip and will have to spend >30h in insalubrious airline air.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 10:09:46 AM UTC
Fouzia, finance is a hideous subject that makes me tense and I don't like to talk about it but, in principle, Islamic finance should be more noble as it has no debt. But modern days bankers have corrupted practice by arbitraging around the letter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 10:32:22 AM UTC
Fahad, it is not the money. It is the blindness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 1:30:33 PM UTC
I did not break my rule... Was in the same time zone but had to come back here ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 2:17:01 PM UTC
Vergil on that later (now, next week to decide). For your question: the human body takes a long time to heal and move up to the next level of resistance. So you need recovery from stressors. Chronic stress doesn't give you a chance to recover, as it keeps injuring and harming.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 2:24:46 PM UTC
Pierre have you read Phil Mansel's book "Levant"?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 2:28:32 PM UTC
Vergil, that would be robust, not antifragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 2:39:00 PM UTC
Pierre, excellent. But I am Levantedout and into fragility...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 12:05:21 PM UTC
The answer is no....
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 12:05:36 PM UTC
not possible: scale is bad.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/chapter4.pdf
Please let me know if this works with you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 6:24:10 PM UTC
Chris can you say more about the connection to military logistics? Thanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 7:05:31 PM UTC
No, Christian, this is exactly the same fragility rephrased since breaking is proportional to the damage. But you got the second part right, bingo: the epistemic problem is there, you got it: speed increases the error nonlinearly when you don't know the relationship.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 7:20:15 PM UTC
Linear regression works here (deviations are Gaussian) but model error carries disproportionate effect, nonlinearly ->Fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 7:23:42 PM UTC
As you said first, I am ANALYTICAL but not in 2d, 3d. I do not deny the existence of truth, do not believe in relativity, only in epistemic opacity solved by convexity effects and decision with limited downside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 7:46:29 PM UTC
I need to write it. Waiting to see if people get the main point first.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 8:13:56 PM UTC
Yes Steve.If you then use the probability distribution of the commodity under convex response, you get very fat tails, which is what the literature omits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 8:26:09 PM UTC
Hi, Michael. For convexity effects , locally (i.e. between 2 points) , antifragility is EXACTLY the opposite of fragility. In distribution space,it is not (one requires 2 tails, the other, one). See my technical paper for that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 8:31:29 PM UTC
(In bed with the flu, second time in 2 decades, and enjoying FB which explains why I can answer any question for entertainment).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 8:54:22 AM UTC
All insurrections feed on efforts to squash them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 1:41:53 PM UTC
Hendrik, the problem is backwards. Only get involved in things that are bounded. you don't buy the house, then consider insurance
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 2:30:22 PM UTC
Hendrik, I can solve economic problems by robustification, as you can see. Alas, you are right, not those related to terrorism. Terrorism is antifragile to force, needs to be manipulated and eliminated by friendship.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 2:35:31 PM UTC
The only thing Steve Jobs got from the region was his genes, nothing else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 2:37:44 PM UTC
Nobody is talking here about evolution, David, so stop the theorizing and discuss a simple empirical fact.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 2:41:37 PM UTC
The strange thing about it is that Levant equivalent of Polish jokes (or the Belgian for the French) are the Homsi ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 2:56:33 PM UTC
The strange thing it that I had noticed this BEFORE I knew Jobs's father originates from there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 2:56:56 PM UTC
Serge is your mother from Homs?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 3:21:40 PM UTC
Serge and Pierre,It looks like I am closer than the two of you... Homs has been traditionally coupled with Tripoli (its port), not Lattakia. It is only an hour drive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 3:23:23 PM UTC
Let us stay away from genetic theories, so far the facts seem worthy ...to make us look at more facts...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 3:39:33 PM UTC
It is only 20 miles from the Lebanese border I will go on the pilgrimage from Amioun (another 15-20 miles). (google maps doesn't cut-paste)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 5:28:02 PM UTC
Killian you mean robustness, that is, avoidance of fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 5:56:26 PM UTC
Not a very intelligent remark, Osvaldo. Incidentally Elagabalus wasn't the most savory person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 6:16:04 PM UTC
Osvaldo, think of your statement. Which other small city has produced so many prominent persons, particularly OUTSIDE what we believe is the cultural/ethnic context, and in completely fields and unrelated phases of history (ROMAN Emperors, Popes, and Silicon Valley)? And the data mining is not there since I wasn't aware of Steve Jobs in the first draft of Antifragility. It is an outlier, and one needs to accept it as such --much like the Bernouilli family performance is an outlier (though much milder one). Now what to do with the outlier is another problem and one I do not want to raise yet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 6:39:03 PM UTC
Osvaldo, the second point is irrelevant to this discussion. The first is weak and I will use it to explain what I find abnormal: Athens, Bagdad, Babylon, etc. produced an active dynamic local culture, like Paris etc. with a collective effort and a golden period. That is not abnormal. What I find strange about Emesa is the sheer export of unrelated talent through >2000 years of history.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 6:58:39 PM UTC
I am not theorizing about genes: this is a fact and you do not seem to undertand what an outlier is in relation to a base rate of equivalent population. Your comments about Genghis Khan etc. are confusion readers here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 7:34:23 PM UTC
Iambiclus (Jamblique) also an Emesan. Plus (unsure) Zenobia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 9, 2011 7:41:14 PM UTC
Machines are not antifragile - only organism can be.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 8:03:50 AM UTC
A lot of things, Zachary. The Homsites ran sections of Spain (it was the Omayad Dynasty from Syria that contolled Spain).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 10, 2011 1:33:11 PM UTC
agree, lucio.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 8, 2011 7:03:59 PM UTC
Kiran, you have no clue about this page, you are interrupting the conversation about fragility and virtue ethics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 8, 2011 10:24:59 PM UTC
There is a Lebanese (and Mediterranean) expression: The worth of a man only shows at the number of volunteers fighting to carry his coffin,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 8, 2011 2:41:05 PM UTC
The point is AGENCY PROBLEM. No diversion from topic, please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 8, 2011 2:58:53 PM UTC
My point is that a system that does not have these attributes will explode.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 8, 2011 6:54:45 PM UTC
Guru, you are not getting the point. It is not marketing, but satisfaction and gratitude -the exact opposite. Now you may not like technology, but at least someone was delivering something he believed in. I am myself grateful as I am using a Mac, not some junk PC.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 7, 2011 12:17:10 PM UTC
Please no comments.
( The rest is academic, journalistic, empty words.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 3, 2011 12:50:32 PM UTC
Have you ever heard anybody say that water is useful?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 3, 2011 12:52:11 PM UTC
Christopher and Karina you don't belong here. People don't tell you their job is useful when it is useful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 3, 2011 1:14:53 PM UTC
JL aphorisms are not for nerds. You should know that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 3, 2011 1:24:53 PM UTC
J-L repress the tendency to go for immediate interpretation, wait for second order, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 3, 2011 1:31:40 PM UTC
I am trying to get rid of readers who are mistaking me for the other Lebanese writer, Khalil Gibran who caters to the platitude-hungry motivational readers, a sort of Paolo Coelho with a poetic bent. I tend to ban them (and delete their comments) as they degrade the conversation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:10:35 PM UTC
I repeat: this is not about whether we should tax or not, but about a lopsided tax policy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:11:52 PM UTC
Pierre, accumulated profits are/have been taxed at a high rate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 4:03:01 PM UTC
Michael, nonsense because you are taxed on the dividends and salary the same way.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 4:44:49 PM UTC
This double taxation is not the issue here. Nor is the notion of whether people should be taxed or not (rather the issue is "which tax?")Many remarks seem to veer the subject into some political mold.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 10:24:42 PM UTC
nonsense Dan entrepreneurs do not rely on capital gains but aim at generating revenues. What you are writing Dan is total nonsense. And in the long run profits and capital gains should converge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 1:08:12 AM UTC
lower income tax, raise capital gains.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 10:08:48 AM UTC
Some serious confusion about my statement. By current income I don't mean salary but revenues minus costs for corporations (and dentists). It can be negative.
(This is completely incompatible with modernism [Part IV, Ethics])
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:25:54 AM UTC
Please don't use "Pareto", "business model" and other corporate BS . This is not about "winning". Phillip, Vergil, Zachary, Michael G and others got it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:45:48 AM UTC
Forget Rawls. Still grounded in the lottery/probability ( hence modernity). The ancients, particularly the Stoics, were far more sophisticated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:47:27 AM UTC
Think of being above all the crap.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 2, 2011 12:55:49 AM UTC
Lilia stop using buzzwords from pop-psychology. Classics, please.
Note that he is one who wrote The Incoherence of Philosophers in an attack on rationalism (Aristotelian-Averroan) --still unsurpassed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 7:48:19 PM UTC
Stanley, no, he is discussing the number of people involved in manufacturing the needle (25, Adam Smith used 15 or 18 ).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 7:53:02 PM UTC
Algazel (like so many great skeptics like Pierre Bayle, Bishop Huet, etc.) was a fideist, that is someone who is skeptical of empirical derivations and the powers of human logic, hence defers to the meta, higher level of logic of a deity... in other words, God for him was eliminative, based on what we don't know (beyond the Mosaic God, He takes an epistemic dimension). Also if you replace "will of God" by "opaque logic of nature" you get some results. So he rigorously mapped everything in sight using the idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 8:02:34 PM UTC
No, he meant that by some effect 25 people coordinate spontaneously to manufacture the needle. What Adam Smith wrote.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 8:03:45 PM UTC
In other words, what Hayek would call: absence of human controller.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 8:06:18 PM UTC
Yes, the INVISIBLE HAND.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 8:29:48 PM UTC
Robert Smits, strangely Aquinas cites his rival Averroes (Ibn Rushd) more than almost anyone else. I will look to see if he cites Algazel but eveyone has obviously been under his influence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, September 29, 2011 10:00:53 AM UTC
Michael Garbuz, in my pdf (original, complete, without partitions) it is page 1474 out of 1912. it is signed www.al-mostafa.com but I don't know where to get it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 30, 2011 8:57:26 PM UTC
Michael this is the kind of nonsense schools of thought produce to distinguish themselves of their predecessors... Functionally, saying that humans can't forecast and run systems because they are not God, or because perfect knowledge is the province of God not men, is the same --and vastly more effective than the approach used by the Austrians. I also had the same problem with the Austrians when I presented my ideas they countered that "fat tails" had been invented by Austrian economics without directing me to who wrote about them (Hayek never thought of fat tails).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 5:21:52 PM UTC
Vergil, bang on! I explained in TBS the asymmetry and using it now for convexity effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 12:05:33 PM UTC
Answering J-L
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 10:22:03 AM UTC
Bingo, Frano. You can only truly trust the humility of a successful person.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 10:24:21 AM UTC
Karen, some people do not have external success by choice, and these are the greatest. But what is sad is that many are not so -and they don't know it. I've seen so many nice guys turn into assholes...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 11:11:43 AM UTC
Aditya, this is the root of Stoic thought. It seems to me that it was part of the Levantine culture, and moved to Athens with Easterners (like Zeno of Kition). Like golden rules, etc. In other words, it came from India...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 25, 2011 9:23:58 PM UTC
Friends, after 5 days, I am back in NY.
Can a friend and I just show up to the lecture at Columbia on Monday?
Cameron Williams
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 24, 2011 5:13:10 PM UTC
Open to the public. All Welcome.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 3:20:16 PM UTC
The summary on the back is meant to intrigue you.
Roman jurists avoiding fragility of law?
Roman law has indeed avoided definitions whenever it could, and roman law is a significant influence on the contiental European legal systems to this day; that is, many of it's principles and institutions have survived.
Now, I've read enough of Nassim's work not to call causation, but I still find it interesting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 9:27:41 PM UTC
Common law is even more robust as it is judge-dependent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 1:10:00 PM UTC
No Mihaly I am at a panel there now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 4:43:51 PM UTC
Hi Mihaly...Thanks! I am now at the airport heading to ... a place further South (good, very good for long walks).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 5:40:42 PM UTC
Between knowledge and academia.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 5:54:41 PM UTC
Sports and work
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 6:58:12 PM UTC
Nietzsche has a saying to the effect that virtue goes to sleep then wakes up with a revenge... But I can't remember where I saw it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 7:35:26 PM UTC
...between the legal and the ethical
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 10:19:43 PM UTC
Thanks Igor!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:38:40 PM UTC
Please stop the wrong focus: this is an illustration of negative convexity effects (fragility).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 2:30:56 PM UTC
Nobody is making the connection to the too-big-to-fail ? The connection is right there: the large when it falls causes more damage/impact than a lot of small ones...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 10:04:35 PM UTC
Are you the Cameron Williams who was my student?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 10:05:05 PM UTC
(a good student)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 12:02:20 PM UTC
Interestingly, Shmuel, Midrash comes from the Semitic root DRS "to grind", meaning studying is "grinding". Madrasah in Arabic and Midrash in Aramaic and Hebrew mean the same thing: school or study.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 10:24:19 PM UTC
Amir I can't find ya3rafun or it in http://hadith.arej.net/Search/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 10:33:56 PM UTC
Thanks Pakhtarya I was looking for the Arabic original to translate it myself. Thanks Amir but it looks like it is Hadith but not in the exact wordings هؤلاء الذين يمارسون ما يعرفونه.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 10:56:15 PM UTC
Pakhtarya 266 doesn't match
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 10:56:18 PM UTC
http://hadith.al-islam.com/Page.aspx?pageid=192&BookID=26&PID=246
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 12:39:41 PM UTC
Thanks Haroun!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 12:42:30 PM UTC
من عمل بما يعلم ورثه الله علم ما لم يعلم
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 12:44:17 PM UTC
He who does what he knows / he who knows and doesn't do. In arabic there is a nice play on the interchange of one consonant 3lm and 3ml (know and do)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 12:47:28 PM UTC
In Xenophon's memorabilia a more interesting -and different - version of Socrates than Plato's: there are those who waste knowledge of the stars, and those who use them for navigation. But the Hadith is much more powerful as knowledge and practice, 3ml and 3lm are to be united ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:27:20 PM UTC
Thanks a million again Haroun. Where are you from?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:30:24 PM UTC
Haroun, no I cut and paste from the Hadith link علم ما لم يعلم
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:34:51 PM UTC
Also كان حقاً على الله أن يعلمه علماً لم يكن يعلمه
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:39:37 PM UTC
Looks like it is even more subtle: "He who does what he knows will be rewarded with knowledge about what he doesn't know".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:46:43 PM UTC
اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ عِلْمٍ لا يَنْفَعُ ، وَدُعَاءٍ لا يُسْمَعُ ، وَقَلْبٍ لا يَخْشَعُ ، وَنَفْسٍ لا تَشْبَعُ ، اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ هَؤُلاءِ الأَرْبَعِ "
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:50:58 PM UTC
Beware these four: Knowledge that isn't beneficial; prayer that is not heard; a heart that is not sensitive; and a self that is not sated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 4:38:39 PM UTC
J-L incentives are necessary but not sufficient. That is the problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 4:45:37 PM UTC
Incentives is what you give the weak to make them operate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 4:48:06 PM UTC
Petar you seem to engage in sophistry. Read your statements and realize they lack content.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 5:07:47 PM UTC
Many of us live in the "good" society (less and less, though). But only few spend time in the "great" one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 5:22:02 PM UTC
Killian you are right! the main difference is that entrepreneurship was shifted to the state.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 16, 2011 9:47:55 PM UTC
Charles, this is called "warm glow", a form of incentive, though not material. It is not what I mean by absence of incentive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 1:29:02 AM UTC
Jl and Alexander this is a re-discovery of ancient ethics: you do things for their own sake and THAT makes you a "good" person (in the eudamonic sense). Now some may say that there is some form of altruism that results from it that brings some equilibrium or other post-darwinian nonsense. Forget it --it is not relevant at the micro scale. I think altruism is a side effect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 18, 2011 2:11:53 AM UTC
Thanks Curtis and J-L. I find Ayn Rand an abomination.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 11:03:44 PM UTC
Thanks all I am heading to Narita.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 12, 2011 9:10:51 PM UTC
Paul, do the following exercise: try to rewrite your sentence in light of the aphorism and make sure you don't get it backwards again.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 5, 2011 1:03:18 AM UTC
Bravo J-L. But the convexity effects are the central point, and make the link to epistemology --what we know, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 5, 2011 1:03:55 AM UTC
You see when you are fragile you are afraid of errors. not when you are antifragile...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 28, 2011 3:37:26 PM UTC
They could have prevented a million times more deaths had they done the same warning against corn fructose...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 28, 2011 3:59:13 PM UTC
(I have been purging people with comments using the sensationalization of deaths --irresponsible masking of the vastly more relevant: many many more lives lost outside the sensationalized and neglected).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 28, 2011 4:00:49 PM UTC
People's lives only seem to matter when they lose it to a media-hyped event.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 28, 2011 4:25:53 PM UTC
Andrew Purker, a thousand people have died today of non-advertized effects precisely because dangerous idiots like you only focus on the sensational.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 28, 2011 4:51:00 PM UTC
(Incidentally I was in the eye of the hurricane trying the barefoot exercise shoes)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 28, 2011 5:20:08 PM UTC
Marco they should treat less sensational matters in the same way.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Procruste.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2011 6:08:04 PM UTC
Chers amis, des commentaires?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2011 8:11:51 PM UTC
the straightjacket of aristotelian logic. Il semble que ca ne marche pas. "enfermé dans la camisole de la logique" semble mieux
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2011 8:13:01 PM UTC
Il ne faut pas confondre l’enfermement dans la logique stricte et la volonté d’éviter les inconséquences fatales.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2011 8:36:24 PM UTC
don't know yet...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 25, 2011 9:06:07 PM UTC
Danielle, c'est l'emploi...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 26, 2011 4:47:27 PM UTC
J-L, les facs sont beaucoup plus compétitives aux E.U. Pour le reste, pas de difference.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 26, 2011 6:25:35 PM UTC
For me "belief" in the modern sense has nothing to do with piteuo or credo (more like "trust"). I am writing on that ... "belief" in religion means commitment; it is not epistemic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 26, 2011 6:42:54 PM UTC
J-L et Nicolas Pujol, j'ai ajouté un merci dans le texte.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 26, 2011 6:43:06 PM UTC
(telechargez le nouveau)
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/birds.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 18, 2011 8:47:10 PM UTC
John you should read before you comment. Did you read 26 pages in 2 minutes?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, August 18, 2011 8:54:31 PM UTC
It's OK, John, vent all you want. It is good for the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 19, 2011 5:17:55 PM UTC
Sorry George I can't get printout in one-page since it was written in 2 pages (landscape).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 24, 2011 1:12:55 AM UTC
Avi there are mistakes in the translation of publilius ( a v. bad one). "Confidence" should be "trust".
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Aphorismes.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 14, 2011 5:37:06 PM UTC
It so happens that I am the translator (main translator) of the French edition and do not want to upset the author.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 15, 2011 1:03:17 AM UTC
Merci J-L.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 15, 2011 11:12:34 AM UTC
JAson, it is raining in NY
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 15, 2011 10:53:25 PM UTC
J-L j'ai nettoyé tout ca. Elle ne reviendra plus.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 15, 2011 11:08:21 PM UTC
Yes, the less people respond, the more noise they make. IN BoP "the web is not a healthy place for someone seeking attention".
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/souk.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 10:20:48 PM UTC
true. I will mention the Greeks getting a nation-state. But the Nation state of Turkey was particularly murderous with the Armenians and the Syriac christians.
Everything in past 100 years has been to shield managers from liabilities. Think of Fukushima.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 23, 2011 2:02:41 PM UTC
Stefan was setting the debate back. The discussion is about using punishment against agency problem, as a deterrent, not the very notion of punishment (which exists independently, say, since we punish people for crimes).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, August 2, 2011 2:53:19 PM UTC
Life, liberty and free options for some, Paul; for some.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 1:57:50 PM UTC
ROger can you try to make single posts? Thanks
Κύριε Νασίμ σας ευχαριστούμε για όλα όσα μας μεταδίδετε.
Τολμώ και γράφω στη σελίδα σας στα Ελληνικά γνωρίζοντας ότι είστε γνώστης των Ελληνικών.
Σας ευχαριστώ
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 11:32:46 PM UTC
Κυριε Μηνα, λiγο Eλληνας, σας ευχαριστω
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 2:19:08 PM UTC
That's not the point, Daniel. The idea is to discourage cowardice, not to punish.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 3:33:12 PM UTC
JEan-Louis, cowards are fragile, very fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 22, 2011 6:58:12 PM UTC
My friends, this conversation is drifting away from the central point. It is not about random decimation, but the removal of an agency problem in a set contract with explicitly pre-stated conditions. The Roman decimation was contractual with the sacramentum: the soldier engaged himself to not endanger the lives of other soldiers by being a coward, as part of being a soldier.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 22, 2011 7:17:03 PM UTC
No problem, drift all you want (this can be fun) but let me remark here that the decimation I am suggesting is simply part of a contract preventing the endangering of other's lives, not some euthanasia driven craze.
A simple heuristic to solve current problems.
We should force tobacco lobbyists to smoke, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 18, 2011 9:25:44 PM UTC
...the few occasional heroes.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityJuly2011-4.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 16, 2011 4:50:52 PM UTC
Stefan you (and someone before further up in the discussion) make the common fallacy of thinking that favoring the artisanal means going back in the ages --as if eating organic food and refusing to breathe nonindustrial fresh air meant endorsing all Medieval standards.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityJuly2011.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 9, 2011 12:35:38 AM UTC
The idea here was to prove intuitively why fragility=nonlinearity. Antifragility becomes a detail.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 11, 2011 12:37:12 PM UTC
Exactly, thanatophobia. Age without dying v/s dying without aging.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 11, 2011 2:32:05 PM UTC
What is fragile for the individual is antifragile for the species.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 14, 2011 1:23:57 AM UTC
Kapil, one cup is more fragile thermally, the other mechanically (i.e. with respect to shock), etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 8, 2011 10:08:12 PM UTC
Some don't get it. Someone who did it "once" and does not repeat it is less likely to do it again than someone who has never done it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 8, 2011 11:12:50 PM UTC
Jonathan, no sophistry here. Debate is not sophistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 6, 2011 7:02:06 PM UTC
Prostitutes don't make ethical claims to justify their profession. And they don't tell the client they are in it because they love his nose and smile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, July 6, 2011 11:40:07 PM UTC
gold-digger in the lingo is a woman who marries a rich man because she likes his nose, etc. not a literal person digging for gold.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 7, 2011 12:47:28 PM UTC
Nobody said the golddigger was a professional. Virginia i keep deleting your remarks because you can't read the table. I wrote Profession and activity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 8, 2011 12:00:16 PM UTC
Richard Gryphus, please limit your posts. It intimitades others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 8, 2011 1:28:02 PM UTC
Bingo. Conditional and unconditional; casuistry v/s deontic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, July 3, 2011 10:22:47 PM UTC
No, Alan, you need to say (what many think) that I am outrageously wrong.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/ch.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 27, 2011 10:24:10 PM UTC
Thanks! I love B-Aires.
[All comments that do not get the "conditional on having survived" will be deleted. Hint: robustness and Lindy effects.]
(it is beyond Veblen, status, etc., but about modernistic v/s natural objects)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 21, 2011 12:31:14 PM UTC
(Nice Airport)
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/convexityeffects.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 20, 2011 5:21:39 PM UTC
So far I am getting a lot of chickenshit nobody is noticing (or disagreeing on) the universal definition of fragility?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 19, 2011 2:38:40 PM UTC
Simon, it is impossible for those who have experienced envy to become suddenly "indifferent".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 11:50:20 PM UTC
Not my point, friends. My point is that it is we have illusions of cause and effects; random events are fit back with some human agency.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 12:51:00 AM UTC
Andy you got it. So many things are epiphenomenal and we attribute direct action to them. Economic growth, etc. My chapter 9. Natural antifragility is the cause, not design.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 8:56:22 PM UTC
Am I the only one to notice this nonsense? This post is not about democracy but epiphenomenalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 9:34:29 PM UTC
Pablo not a problem as you say it; but the focus is "side effect". Topics don't need to be neat and narrow; but side effect is vastly more ointeresting than introductory political science.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1864633
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 13, 2011 4:54:08 PM UTC
Anything with 4-consonant-roots in arabic is of non Semitic origin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 13, 2011 7:58:37 PM UTC
Russ, these seem to be of Aramaic origin and Aramaic incorporated non-triplet words from Persian, unlike pure Arabic, Hebrew, and Yerushalmi Aramaic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 13, 2011 7:59:24 PM UTC
THe reason is that Persians used Aramaic as a state language (thought they were not Semites and spoke anonSemitic language)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 13, 2011 8:13:30 PM UTC
Choghondar ->Shimndar, that's it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 1:57:58 PM UTC
Hi, I did as a child in a movie theatre in Beirut called "GAUMONT PALACE". A maid dragged me there in afternoons. Always sad episodes followed by communal dances.
2) God cannot improve.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 12, 2011 7:13:24 PM UTC
Did you read this in my book ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 12, 2011 7:14:01 PM UTC
That is what Arabs call Samad
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 11, 2011 9:39:21 PM UTC
No soccer mom; barbell of parental library and street fights.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 11, 2011 1:45:57 PM UTC
Marcos, let's stop this TED-style socionaive talk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, June 12, 2011 1:16:31 PM UTC
Thanks Jordan I ordered
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 10, 2011 11:44:24 AM UTC
?Ban ma bifham.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 10, 2011 11:45:34 AM UTC
Let us not stuck with the topic of conscience; it is necessary but not sufficient. you need reciprocal gratitute that offsets the psychopath cases.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 10, 2011 4:50:15 PM UTC
Ban Ba3d ma bifham? Bil-gharb (West) amma bil-Ghorb (In the absence)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, June 10, 2011 6:13:18 PM UTC
It is levantine dialect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 11:18:55 PM UTC
I am not saying this is caused by an economy class seat, but presenting the cost of comfort in business class
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 9, 2011 12:44:50 AM UTC
Friends, you are confused about the causative effect of airplane seat. There is none. FIrst class does not cause unhappiness; what comes with it does.
Our first "assignment" will be Plato's Protagoras, in which a youngish Socrates confronts one of the most famous "wise guys" in ancient Greece.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 12:30:49 AM UTC
Protagoras is the center of the transformation of discussion from lawyerese argument into collaborative search for truth. It kills modern academia: you need to be genuine and assent all the way, all the way, never accept "for the sake of argument". Thanks John, I still owe you a walk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 6, 2011 10:51:34 AM UTC
Its is quite certain that much of "Greek" philosophy was more Eastern, in ideas and agents. THales, Protagoras, Zeno of Kition, etc. And close to 75% of the later philosophers in Plato's academy were Syriac-Aramaic speaking Levantines.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 12:45:16 AM UTC
No, no. Levant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 1, 2011 7:37:41 PM UTC
Yes Julius,Corey is right about asymmetry; as Yogi berra has said: in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 1, 2011 7:44:16 PM UTC
If you need "evidence" to change your mind, you have a problem. Sorry, Dan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 1, 2011 8:38:52 PM UTC
Let us move the debate into the rise of respect for declarative knowledge..and the loss of the respect for the apophatic. My problem is that this mentality will blow up society.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 30, 2011 11:40:11 AM UTC
My idea is to separate revenge from punishment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 29, 2011 9:59:48 AM UTC
(Perhaps the best argument against excessive wealth.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 29, 2011 1:25:01 PM UTC
No, my observations is that expensive watches & cars are signaling of the wrong kind. Simple heuristic for me that has worked over time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 29, 2011 4:58:06 PM UTC
Ban, I need to translate it as: "If your intellect isn't twice your wealth, you have a problem".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 9:56:06 PM UTC
Actually religion in Semitic is usually "Din", meaning "rules", "law" (Beth Din, etc...) Levantine Christians shifted it to "religion".
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1850428
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 27, 2011 4:36:02 PM UTC
No
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 27, 2011 4:41:17 PM UTC
My work is different from the bullshit on complexity, agent based, etc. My work is on opacity, what we don't see and how to handle it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 28, 2011 11:35:40 AM UTC
Carlos, ask him to provide his own "proof" against an idea when he asks you for a proof, and you will see.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 3:53:37 PM UTC
This is in the back of the book (technical appendix) and in scientific papers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 6:15:01 PM UTC
That is fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 6:30:40 PM UTC
No, the fragile breaks (absorbing barrier).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 6:06:03 PM UTC
I like Yozan's notion of "pride in craftsmanship". This is where everything lies. Everything. I am embarking on my chapter on ethics...
Thanks in advance.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/figures.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 15, 2011 2:02:38 PM UTC
Thanks a million friends. Now the Question: Who prefers no graphs at all?
This helps understand the abhorrent aspect of much of economic "growth", neophilia, genetic modification, "chemical enhancements" of life, "singularity" and other naive rationalistic concepts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2011 1:06:48 AM UTC
Domain dependence; egocentric bias, etc. etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2011 1:07:14 AM UTC
I disagree with yours for one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2011 11:00:02 PM UTC
What's chilba in Arabic?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2011 12:29:24 AM UTC
It is not just Arabic; entirely Mediterranean. The evil eye is how we represent it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 12, 2011 12:51:20 AM UTC
I just ordered Peter Walcot's Envy and the Greeks (1978).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 8, 2011 2:02:36 PM UTC
Some obsessions (like in Proust, Swan's obsessive love for Odette). Others, like hate, are convex.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 11, 2011 12:59:32 PM UTC
Exactly... dependence on outside factors ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 2:19:35 PM UTC
Artemisia, stop posting distorting --and diverting -- nonsense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 2:36:32 PM UTC
Artemisia you distort the points on the benefits of exposure to stressors (say exercise, germs, difficulties, hurdles, training) and turn them into advocacy of sado-masochism (deriving direct pleasure from harm to self or others). So please don't divert the discussion for the sake of other people here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 2:42:43 PM UTC
Nitpicking is the enemy of dialogue, particularly when someone stretches points for the sake of discussions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 2:48:39 PM UTC
كل ذو عاهة جبار (he who is handicapped is a giant)- Arabic saying but I can't trace it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 2:49:35 PM UTC
Christopher, I was quoting from memory. use "good" in place of right
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 4:04:55 PM UTC
Stretching my argument is equivalent to saying: let us not eat otherwise we would have indigestion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 4:34:35 PM UTC
Same with books, etc. Selling is ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 7:04:28 PM UTC
Bingo Brenda; there are good (natural) stressors and bad stressors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2011 2:19:11 PM UTC
Jordan, I agree that 5000 years of heuristics eliminate blatant errors (survival). Ban on debt, for instance and other interdicts... Present in all Semitic cultures (and Orthodox Christianity) -Greater levantine heritage. I am writing on legal systems that have trial-and-error built-into them compared to Codes (Napoleonic), etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2011 3:33:11 PM UTC
Lindy laws, my friends: I am not saying time makes things better; it makes the surviving nonperishable item more likely to survive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2011 4:11:02 PM UTC
Let's stay away from potentially heated debates, please. They will not go anywhere and kill the other branches of the idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2011 4:25:47 PM UTC
We can talk about Semitic religions, ideas etc. without causing trouble; it is just modern politics in that spot that degrade very rapidly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2011 4:35:21 PM UTC
(Not physical). Somehow I tend to remember much better what I toiled to get, or discover.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 7, 2011 11:09:37 PM UTC
Jean-Louis, it is not you. We don't remember electronic stuff. If this conversation were in a book, we would remember more. (the method of the loci). When I read stuff in a book, they come back to me when I look at it. Same with conversations. The electronic is air.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 8, 2011 9:20:03 AM UTC
History chose. What survived should command more respect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 9, 2011 5:44:32 PM UTC
Bad news, J-L, for electronic stuff--can't stick. Why is why those who express themselves in books and physical stuff (and only use the net for its elaboration) and like me work as much as possible on paper documents (printouts of my drafts) might have a longevity edge lindy-wise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, May 6, 2011 11:45:15 AM UTC
it is there. can you see it?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 10:49:08 PM UTC
Envy is very old (so many writings, since the OT and Roman expressions). Not knowing how to deal with it is new.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 4, 2011 12:59:28 AM UTC
Envy Vergil (in the negative sense) is when you try to put down the person (or hurt him) rather than emulate him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 5, 2011 7:37:37 PM UTC
A problem here. We have all felt envy, etc. It is normal. What I find wrong it to not feel shame at having had such sentiments. Worse, what I find unacceptable is glorifying such sentiments into some theory (whether envy or, for others, greed, etc.)
(Technical: a convex payoff (on a random variable) implies positively skewed distribution, a concave payoff the opposite).
ERRATUM: Fig 4, the left tail should be "thicker" not thinner.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 2, 2011 6:12:34 PM UTC
YEs, but antifragile -> skew>0, robut ->skew=0
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 2, 2011 7:33:11 PM UTC
Rich, yes, but lottery tickets are bounded and a probabilistic scam.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 2, 2011 10:47:48 PM UTC
NO]o, lottery payoff are skewed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 12:04:16 AM UTC
It's OK Yvan, I am at my best when I am fuzzy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 8:54:45 AM UTC
Daniel, impossible to have positive skewness (the way I define it) and negative tail only since my definition of skewness is in the difference between the size of tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 1:42:08 PM UTC
Kurt, you are right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 1:43:15 PM UTC
Thanks Kurt I corrected. I meant "thicker"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 7:05:47 PM UTC
Here is a proof: www.fooledbyrandomness.com/AF-skewness.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 8:24:47 PM UTC
Actually I found the exact proof in an 1964 monograph. Obscure.
I only read about Fukushima in (& in the website of) the French magazine "philosophie".
I break with my rule & post here because the idea was developed on this page (ANTIFRAGILITY comes from regular shocks) Thanks friends.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67741/nassim-nicholas-taleb-and-mark-blyth/the-black-swan-of-cairo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 25, 2011 9:07:17 PM UTC
I just purged a comment of the sort "can you quantify?". I thought this page was by now completely clear of these people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 25, 2011 9:38:37 PM UTC
I am getting: "Access to this article is available for non-subscribers until 6/13/2011.
To retain permanent access to this article and the rest of the archives, you must subscribe."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 25, 2011 10:48:07 PM UTC
It took 4 years for people to realize the message is not s***t happens but s***t happens in a set of fragile environments. Now, step 2, the taxonomy of these environments is taking shape in their minds. This is excellent news: being understood during your lifetime.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 2:11:26 PM UTC
"Monsior", the argument is extremely spurious: like saying "I will die eventually" so jumping from the window is OK.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 24, 2011 11:45:19 PM UTC
Sorry, Will, they made me sign a form; I can't make it available immediately.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 25, 2011 8:26:00 PM UTC
The article is now open to nonsubscribers...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 12:23:01 AM UTC
Fahad, there is an interesting traffic experiment confirming what you are saying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 23, 2011 6:57:23 PM UTC
Breaking a fast is the opposite of a hangover.
Generalization: no-one should be allowed to declare war, make a prediction, express an opinion, publish an academic paper, manage a firm, treat a patient, etc. without having something to lose (or win) from the outcome.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 22, 2011 10:42:34 PM UTC
No, no George. It is not to make others pay for your risk-taking without sharing upside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 22, 2011 10:50:14 PM UTC
Pilot on board necessary not sufficient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 22, 2011 11:50:55 PM UTC
Vergil, thanks. I have seen this quote in English, but never in Seneca's own writing except something vaguely related in "On Wrath".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 23, 2011 12:12:15 AM UTC
Amy this is why small is beautiful. We need to world to be built in a way to minimize the agency problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 23, 2011 12:58:38 AM UTC
Thanks, Vergil. I am eager. I read On Benefits and do not recall having seen it there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 23, 2011 2:29:29 PM UTC
Take a ritual bath when you go home. It works.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 23, 2011 6:56:29 PM UTC
Elleni, was Calchas making the sacrifice of Iphigenia a price, a condition?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 24, 2011 9:50:59 PM UTC
yes Dunbar's number or more generally a certain optimal size beyond which things degrade...
But only for those who can navigate it...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 11:07:30 AM UTC
For noise and serendipity one can get so much more (and better quality) in a physical library.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 3:42:22 PM UTC
I deleted a reference to a TED talk. No TED. I am trying to escape philistinism and pseudohumanitarian scam artists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 3:43:38 PM UTC
Frank, bookstores calculate that the business sections have "more traffic" than the philosophy ones
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 10:29:40 PM UTC
John, the dionysian is natural...
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/errors.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 16, 2011 9:29:49 PM UTC
Mother nature, Andy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 16, 2011 10:02:28 PM UTC
Small probabilities have error rates > than the probabilities themselves.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 16, 2011 10:21:42 PM UTC
Carlos I am not interested in statistics, just epistemology.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 16, 2011 10:38:58 PM UTC
I've revised the paper, Ang. it answers your question.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 16, 2011 11:55:24 PM UTC
David, there is epistemology (just talk) and epistemology (something relevant to science and decision-making). Academics messed up the subject.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 17, 2011 1:13:25 AM UTC
John, I write these things to kill time when it rains and I can't take long walk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 17, 2011 1:59:01 AM UTC
Alan, not at all. fixed the sentence to express the asymmetry in the error.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 17, 2011 12:20:47 PM UTC
David, what was your research specialty?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:43:00 PM UTC
I loved the part on the dishwasher being more effective than the internet.
http://www.thenation.com/article/159728/swans-and-zombies-neoliberalisms-permanent-contradiction
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2011 6:18:44 PM UTC
That's not the point. You don't want people to spread a modified version your ideas, and a wrong specialty (like finance, etc.). Minimal effort to punish once in a while.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2011 6:46:54 PM UTC
It is the same sense of outrage as when seeing someone cheating on a major exam ... it leads to the debasement of public debate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2011 7:28:16 PM UTC
(LEGAL NOTE: what I call here a fraudster (here, intellectual fraudster, in the "bullshitter" sense) is someone discussing on a public forum a topic in which he has little knowledge & misrepresenting the content of your work and ideas --here misclassifying it ).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:09:50 PM UTC
Marcos, errors about the quality of one's work are not particularly consequential --part of the process. But because of the epidemiology of these descriptions, the mis-specification of the Black Swan needs to be exposed/penalized once in a while to set the example.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, April 9, 2011 8:44:08 PM UTC
Walter, there is a web comments/letters to the editor. Feel free to answer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, April 10, 2011 2:58:13 PM UTC
wrong emphasis: the problem is that he is misrepresenting the book not in what he is saying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 11, 2011 1:14:49 AM UTC
Hilarious, J-L.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 11:02:36 AM UTC
How many people aside from Marko have put a remark there that was not accepted by the editors? The journal seems even shabbier than I thought.
(Commentary. 1) We are still extremely ill-adapted to disliking someone without attempting to kill him and harm ourselves ...; 2) Idiots get wealthy but then start multiplying these frustrations (idea: neither master nor slave), 3) A benefit of technology: it allows me to put on autodelete all mail from irritants
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 7, 2011 3:20:22 PM UTC
(deleted comments about hiding in the woods... it does not mean seeking solitude & being alone -just with people you like or with whom you have some bonds/obligations). Friends, no strangers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 7, 2011 5:42:28 PM UTC
Antifragility requires acute stressor + recovery. In the past we had acute, not chronic, stressors. Today these are chronic stressors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 7, 2011 6:13:03 PM UTC
Chad, your statement is a typical example of the rationalistic (and moralizing) bent that hurts human and has been very harmful since the enlightement; it partakes of this illusion that your mind can control you and that reasoning can solves all problems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 7, 2011 6:19:41 PM UTC
Yes Chad but this requires conscious effort on your part. An easier solution is to avoid too much exposure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 8, 2011 12:41:29 PM UTC
These are episodes --not chronic (like work or commute, etc.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 8, 2011 7:48:29 PM UTC
Graeme we are only talking about chronic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 8, 2011 5:19:27 PM UTC
Not really. plenty of undergrads.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityChapter8.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 12:16:51 PM UTC
Please do not present typos (irritates me -this is a draft) and references are in the back of the book.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 4:07:31 PM UTC
Thomas, Art De Vany will explain why you are getting dizzy (not in sync). Also while fasting your attention gets much sharper... you need to hunt...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 4:26:16 PM UTC
George, the apples you are eating are not the real thing, but some cross, bred for sweetness (and the shiny look). Original Mediterranean apples were small, sour, fibrous, and low in sugar.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 4:27:35 PM UTC
...and you should not be eating them out of season. Deprivation for a long time to sensitize you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 6:10:51 PM UTC
(I had to act by blocking someone who after all the argumentation in this treatise questioned whether following nature was naive rationalism).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 11:05:11 PM UTC
Jordan Bublick, Ketosis is switching from carb to ketone in fuel (different from autophagy). Maimonides was more than an intermittent Moslem (many were shocked by his recent bio): he was as much as an Arab hakim (fr. Hokhma) as one could get --a spiritual and physical healer. His oeuvre is in Arabic, something neither Moslems nor Jews seem to be proud to mention. Dalalat al-Ha2irin is the most beautiful Arabic prose, and closer to the one spoken at the time than the more archaic Koranic styles. He wrote Arabic in Hebrew script, just as Maronites wrote in Karshuni but it was Arabic no less (on that, later). More on via negativa (another chapter). Thanks all for the wonderful contributions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 11:06:49 PM UTC
Joseph Merkin Perkovich you are getting the point of the iatrogeny of abundance, and that of avoiding boom-bust cycles.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, April 4, 2011 11:07:54 PM UTC
Ban Kanj, sfarjel --but apples were different.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 7, 2011 1:10:21 PM UTC
Jack Duval, you have a problem understanding what you read? I never wrote that mother nature was perfect, just that it is smarter than humans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 7, 2011 2:06:50 PM UTC
I even explicitly said it was not perfect, but that epistemic opacity favored time over rationalism.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityChapter8.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 1, 2011 12:12:53 PM UTC
Hi Jordan is there a way you could explain the YouTube link in a sentence? I am anti hyper-links.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 1, 2011 1:49:47 PM UTC
Yes, cognitive load.
COPENHAGEN- Iatrogenics occur when we have small identifiable gains (say, avoidance of small discomfort or a minor infection) and delayed invisible large side effects (say, death).
Just like short a financial option.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 28, 2011 4:13:41 PM UTC
Dru, Yes you can have fallacies of aggregation. The fragility of individual parts (say humans) can help the antifragility of the collective (via antifragile DNA). This is why I fail to understand these ideas of making humans live too long.
So fat I have 1) TRANS FATS (to replace saturated fats turned out to have killed legions of people), 2) SYNTHETIC MOTHER MILK, 3) CARBS, 4) STATINS (kills you if you are not sick), 5) THERMAL REGULATION, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 8:59:24 PM UTC
Brendan I wonder what you mean by eyeglasses worsening the problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:00:13 PM UTC
We now have evidence of marathon running killing people --and you don't need too many marathons to shorten life expectancy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:01:13 PM UTC
Please, let us stick to the medical field (for now) to focus the conversation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:05:02 PM UTC
Wow! Facebook at its best! What can bring down the Syrian regime can bring down the rationalistic medical establishment :)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:05:42 PM UTC
The "three meals a day" nonsense, disproved by experience.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:06:46 PM UTC
Tonsilectomy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:08:28 PM UTC
Stergios, Lens-induced myopia?Pray, more
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:19:29 PM UTC
Dru, I have every book on iatrogenics here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:21:34 PM UTC
Sugar-free sweetened drinks make you gain weight. The logic of nature is deeper than ours.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:35:28 PM UTC
Ted, can you rephrase? thx
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:35:45 PM UTC
Navin, only medical situations for this discussion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:46:01 PM UTC
How about "icing" a swollen nose? Practiced as a make-sense to men/ an insult to nature, without empirical evidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:56:54 PM UTC
if icing after trauma made sense, why do we swell?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 9:58:28 PM UTC
Back surgery for sciatica worsens the condition... usually the back self-heals
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 10:07:54 PM UTC
Smooth surfaces, nonfractal ... lack of squatting...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 7:50:13 AM UTC
Any idea on toothpaste? Does it destroy the bucal flora ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 10:21:42 AM UTC
Iatrogenics= when (usually hidden or delayed) harm from a treatment exceeds the benefits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 1:26:23 PM UTC
Matthew Vallarino, please explain the automatic transmission.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 3:27:31 PM UTC
I need to put a long list of thank you in the acknowledgment of AF (antifragility). But note one thing for now; all these treatment cause fragility (in the sense of *concavity*, hence vulnerability under Jensen's inequality).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 5:40:34 PM UTC
Michio Kaku is dangerous to planet earth. A BS operator, on top.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 5:54:17 PM UTC
The main idea is: immediate benefit (visible)/delayed (hidden) costs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 7:03:25 PM UTC
Brendan, any literature on that?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 7:08:03 PM UTC
We can actually can come up with very simple heuristics on remedies ...same lindy laws... on that later. My chapter 8 will be done soon...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 8:36:16 PM UTC
Not everything, not everything.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 10:37:45 PM UTC
To me everything has the same solution: remove the agency problem. On that, later (Chapter 10). Meanwhile, on my way to Beirut via the Persian Gulf, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 10:54:10 PM UTC
J-L, I agree with you that iatrogenics, while present, are not ubiquitous, but please let ideas on *unintended harm* or *disguised help* flow up and let's let people vent their frustration. We can later separate the separable in another discussion (s.a. why do we live longer than paleo, or do we etc.).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 21, 2011 11:19:25 PM UTC
that's how it all started, nick hewling
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 28, 2011 1:58:54 PM UTC
Please, no more discussions of Bateson here. You guys should contact each other and discuss it privately.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 6:35:38 PM UTC
What was your post about? I have been removing empty statements s.a. "thanks for your book" that should not interest anyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 6:45:21 PM UTC
Bien sur, we are concave to food supply (squeezability) because inventories are optimized. Much more error prone than we think.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 7:04:15 PM UTC
nonlinear
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 5:48:32 PM UTC
P-A, I don't criticize Wittgenstein, only those who use him for linguistic games (particularly where he is too obscure); your point is answered in my chapters on heuristics. I do not believe in decision theory because humans do not make "rational" decisions (in the rational choice sense); they just find ex post rationalizations. Many of these Arrow-style paradoxes are just masturbation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 18, 2011 11:46:30 PM UTC
apollonian-dionysian lines up to rationalism-empiricism,episteme-techne, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 19, 2011 3:04:54 PM UTC
Christian, I read a bit of Schumpeter; he completely missed the point of convexity his creative destruction is way behind Nietzsche's anti-rationalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 19, 2011 3:37:33 PM UTC
Edited out Ben's comments as they use for basis an erroneous representation of my ideas on religion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 19, 2011 8:59:56 PM UTC
Ted, I believe that large corporations should be taxed disproportionately because they draw resources from us in a hidden way. But just not helping them out would suffice, since they tend to commit suicide (look at the empirical record: they break much faster).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 5:49:36 PM UTC
Exactly we need the balance Apollonian-Dionysiac.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 20, 2011 5:49:55 PM UTC
(which was disrupted by Socrates, and, much later, by the enlightenment)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 18, 2011 8:19:03 PM UTC
Hala it took 60 years to remove it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 18, 2011 11:07:41 PM UTC
Jos you don't seem to get the point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, March 18, 2011 11:53:03 PM UTC
{COMMENTS CLOSED HERE, MOVING TO NEXT ONE ON CREATIVE DESTR.}
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 4:59:59 PM UTC
Ben you should rewrite your post in terms of *costs* of failure. Floods are not the same as blown up nuclear reactors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2011 12:36:33 AM UTC
Amy even when you know the odds, some uncertainty (s.a. is the person cheating, etc.) can explode in the tails.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:34:24 PM UTC
Saifedean a reminder: you need to do more writing on your thesis and less visits to this page --until of course you are done.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2011 4:57:38 PM UTC
Ben, you got the point!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2011 7:10:47 PM UTC
Forget the parts; take time (every n is a period). This shows how very small errors in probability is survival rate over one period multiply into certainty of total failure. I looked at it from a convexity standpoint: errors affect you more one way than the other.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2011 7:33:51 PM UTC
Exactly. Any additional uncertainty raises small probability more than it lowers it (convexity).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2011 7:44:30 PM UTC
Voila, Nicolas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, March 17, 2011 8:38:08 PM UTC
Time to understand the fragility of small probabilities (from asymmetry: they increase but don't decrease).
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:04:36 PM UTC
The problem is that I don't write about current events, in a reactive way, why is why I am reluctant...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:14:49 PM UTC
Removed mistakenly Jason's posts (as well as, intentionally, some nonsensical ones).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 5:09:46 PM UTC
Removed comments (and commenters) that are either nitpicking & diverting from the main argument or lacking in both rigor & elegance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 14, 2011 7:22:55 PM UTC
Mais non Jean-Louis, it is not you, it is them... they wish to emulate.
Posts are not emails. You are under no pressure to post; with emails, most of the stress comes from the need to keep a conversation and not offend people by not replying to noise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, March 14, 2011 9:16:01 PM UTC
Removed Julia's replies (to J L & me ) as either inelegant or not meeting standards for this page.
For antifragile matters in the nonphysical (i.e., socio-economic) domain, Thom's Catastrophe Theory (about discontinuities) does not make a difference. What matters is convexity or concavity, period.
This graph gives the intuition behind my need to separate my idea of antifragility from conventional physics. Social science is a complete different animal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2011 6:54:44 PM UTC
Evolution is largely INFORMATION, hence has jumps without energy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2011 7:51:54 PM UTC
Mediocristan/extremistan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2011 12:40:32 AM UTC
Ignore evolution for now. Consider the following.
A price can go from 1 to 1,000,000 in a second just because people decide so -a painting, oil, a stock, etc. But a heat particle cannot go to the moon without energy.
From there: informational randomness has less structure than physical randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2011 1:51:58 PM UTC
Yes, ergodicity: anything fragile eventually breaks
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2011 7:26:18 PM UTC
Removed idiotic comment about Catastrophe theory as neologisms & connection between neophilia and neologism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2011 9:14:11 PM UTC
Matt, wrong. Price is consensus. Consider Weimar or Zimbabwe - prices going to trillions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2011 9:56:29 PM UTC
Thanks a million Puso for the rigor (and the help).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2011 11:55:33 PM UTC
Amy, depends on the level of boredom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, March 12, 2011 6:36:14 PM UTC
Will periodically renew wishes to Saudis rioters (then delete).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, March 13, 2011 12:50:36 AM UTC
Please neveruse the hindsight bias as an excuse to suspend filtering and drown in informational junk.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, March 9, 2011 9:12:18 PM UTC
Not price momentum at all --added a comment.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Thank you
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, March 1, 2011 7:05:49 AM UTC
Be careful, Saeid.
In *Peri mystikes theologias*, he did not use these exact words, nor did he discuss disconfirmation, nor did not get the idea with clarity, but to me he figured out subtractive epistemology and asymmetries in knowledge. He was the disciple of Proclus the Neoplatonist and repeated the metaphor of making statues by substraction.
This solves the problem of happiness, for instance. We know what being unhappy means; the vulgar "pursuit of happiness" is not equivalent to the "avoidance of unhappiness", etc...
Note that the apophatic was, initially, not quite a definition by the negative, rather the avoidance of direct description, reference, discussion of something --but not the avoidance of the treatment of its opposite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 12:08:23 AM UTC
Yozan, not quite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 12:19:21 AM UTC
And it found it way into the modern notion called Popperian asymmetry (I got excited about it when I did not know the French predecessors & Neoplatonic theology).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 12:46:51 AM UTC
Carlos it is Via Negativa. P-D the Areophagite had huge influence on many up to Aquinas. But originally apophatic was not the exposition of NOT[x], rather the avoidance of discussion of a given subject.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 12:56:01 AM UTC
Dru, check a later period: Palamas & his rejection of Universals.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 12:58:38 AM UTC
CORRECTION (I meant the avoidance of a *DIRECT* discussion of a given subject)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 1:05:19 AM UTC
Impossible, Jean-Louis. Charlatans only sell positive advice & "actionable" stuff. I have an entire chapter on that. But let us leave business & the vulgar out of this, please.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 1:14:32 AM UTC
No idea about Zen etc.
Wittgenstein got many points, but the problem is that he did not have the baggage. He went the definitional route first then realized the limit you just mentioned (already in Tractatus)... But he was trying at the beginning to squeeze it all into analytical philosophy...Remember he was doing it as an engineer. His erudition was too limited; even other contemporaries did not know theology. Had he read about Palamas...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 1:28:15 AM UTC
In The Bed of PRocrustes:
A theological Procrustean bed: for the Orthodox since Gregory Palamas and for the Arabs since Algazel, attempts to define God using the language of philosophical universals were a rationalistic mistake. I am still waiting for a modern to take notice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 4:34:04 PM UTC
Dru Stevenson you are watching a replay of how Al-Ghazali's epistemological argument led to Sufi mysticism --or for the Christians how Pyrrhonic skepticism in 16-17th C. Europe developed into Fideism, etc.
I am trying to go the inverse route: FROM THEOLOGY (mostly Orthodox) TO EPISTEMOLOGY.
(Note: I would be happy if everyone left the Zen-Tao business out of here).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 5:33:45 PM UTC
Artemisia, what do you think I am doing?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 7:28:30 PM UTC
Jason positive thinking has absolutely nothing to do with via negativa (no more than negative temperature on the thermometer...). I deleted your comment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 10:39:06 PM UTC
Drew, I am about to go on a trip and will sign off this to think outside the holy (and read Hegel taking a fresh look at dialectic = antifragility). So I will have a long answer later, but take the hint: try *ab ovo* to *define* God as what is above, beyond the limit of your understanding, instead of anthropomorphizing him, or logicizing him, etc as a higher man, or a "creator", etc., and see what this leads to. Spinoza did that and discovered pantheism. & the laws of nature The Arabs, similarly equated it to fate. The orthodox and some moslems went the other direction... This is where I am going. This is where my definition of *uncertainty* lies, where it merges with these theological approaches.
I have been going through the exercise and am just starting to see things...
But let me check out for now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 25, 2011 3:31:40 PM UTC
(The "psychobabble" was deleted. I have been "purifying" this place from inelegant remarks and people.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 25, 2011 3:49:52 PM UTC
John you are getting it backwards, they reject the possibility of black swans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 25, 2011 4:30:27 PM UTC
Friends, THe Selfish Gene is not Dawkins idea at all but exactly Trivers' essay (not a derivative but an exposition). Trivers is bitter about it and feels exploited.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 25, 2011 4:44:00 PM UTC
My definition of a "nerd" is (among other things) someone who does not get "family resemblance". Some people here are not getting my Asperger problem right in context.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 12:55:40 PM UTC
John Aziz, there is no real definition of Asperger --it may not be a matter of spectrum (Asperger himself thought it was distinct from autism). [Besides I am not a fan of BAron-Cohen male-female characterization as it is merely correlative]. And I may be talking about a disease that overlaps with it --but to me it is certainly a loss of some human function and ONE THAT IS DANGEROUS IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET as its members can take on larger and larger roles. Perhaps we can focus on the pathologies affecting "domain specificity" and "domain general", the ability/inability to connect the dots, the under/overgeneralization or some underdevelopment of some modularity (we have very strong evidence of modularity of Theory of Mind so it could be something associated).
The central point here is that you have individuals who dislike the apophatic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 7:07:58 PM UTC
John, this grouping has problems --this takes us into psychology away from cognitive science/informational theory with testable separations.
You need to separate people with respect to an empirically defined task. For Asperger, TOM is the cutpoint.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 8:41:35 PM UTC
John, all mentions of neural correlates will be deleted here. I don't want to have the so-called convincing pseudoscientific "brain porn". Users will be also invited to post elsewhere as I don't want this sire to become the New Yorker.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 8:44:00 PM UTC
John, this is becoming very unhealthy pseudo-science.
I have rejected neuro-correlation in TBS and now proved it mathematically (too many false correlations, like gene-fitting).
BTW this is the site discussing "brain porn".
http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/blog/2010/03/05/the-“brain-porn”-area-of-the-brain/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 26, 2011 10:06:35 PM UTC
I agree on the set of non-Aspies with mental blindness to certain classes of recursions & meta-analyses, in other words with affection for propositional forms of first order (Chapter 7). But it needs some work on my part, so should reopen later & time is long for that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 24, 2011 8:20:42 PM UTC
(I have been removing comments that do not address the idea here, the apophatic = cannot be described explicitly, using words, but should not be ruled out).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 24, 2011 9:29:36 PM UTC
Jason, please stop putting videos here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 25, 2011 11:28:37 AM UTC
Lorenzo, please delete your comment. I am talking about apophatic and you are asking for an explicit definition of things (commoditized).
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:21:02 PM UTC
Good point John. The way it is executed, too much transfer from entrepreneurs/investors to finance people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 24, 2011 1:45:03 PM UTC
No, no, no, Ben. Specialized labor hijacks capital, not the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 24, 2011 3:11:26 PM UTC
Let's not get diverted into accounting, pls.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityFeb20.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 10:53:55 AM UTC
Serghei, I deleted your comments (distracting). We all have wikipedia. I am looking for the explicit USE of the theorems in architecture.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:09:08 AM UTC
Assume I know nothing, that I am just looking for evidence of first episode of science to practice as opposed to practice to practice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:17:44 AM UTC
John Aziz, my point is not so much which theory replaced which theory, but at what point did the illusion of theory leading to practice (or necessity of theory) emerge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:35:04 AM UTC
Eleni, Vitruvius was rediscovered in the late middle ages... Hopefully there is a free-mason on this site with some idea about the construction of the temple of Solomon & the heuristic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:39:21 AM UTC
I just proved the illusion in
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/JEBO2619.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:42:06 AM UTC
Alexis, merci enormement! This is what I needed! (BTW Alexis was my student last year --he became my student after recognizing me on a Paris-NY flight).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 12:27:23 PM UTC
WONDERFUL: I am citing:
A l'époque la notion d'ingénieurie et celle de mathématiques étaient de toutes façons très éloignées l'une de l'autre. Les romains (qui faisaient des calculs en chiffres ... romains) étaient de meilleur architecte et avaient toute une ingénieurie sans Math (c'est dur à croire ... dans les temps moderne). Certes les grecs avaient pu aider ... mais on ne sait rien de la construction du Panthéon ... et pourtant le dôme est là.
Il ne faut absolument pas penser que les architectes pensaient en terme de formule ... c'est complétement faux.
Le dôme de florence est le premier édifice dans lequel l'architecte (sous très haute surveillance) va introduire des notions mathématiques (on dirait physique aujourd'hui)
Alors avant ?
On savait des choses, sur les pilliers, les arcs, les poutres, les fondations, les portances ... et comme vous faites ça en petit ... êtes vous capable de le faire en plus grand, en encore plus grand, en toujours plus grand ...
La géométrie pouvait entrer en ligne de compte, mais presque plus pour des critéres estétiques (nombre d'or, perfection du cercle ou de la croix) que réélement scientifique (mot qui ne voulait rien dire pour l'époque)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 12:40:27 PM UTC
This genius on the site wrote: "The Romans did engineering without mathematics, just as they did medicine without biology".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 3:01:37 PM UTC
I have been deleting comments that stray from the topic of heuristics v/s theoretical knowledge, as well as those written by someone without a real name.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 3:56:36 PM UTC
Daniel Bernouilli, you just made two classical logical errors I've faced since "fooled by randomness". (But no problem I thank you because I now need to add a footnote).
A- For the past 10 years (since FBR pub) people have accused me of saying "it's all random" when my point is that we underestimate randomness. It comes from simplifying the idea one step beyond-logical form NOT(all skills) = All Luck. This is also applicable here: I never deny the power of rationalism, I deny its exclusive arrow and our blindness to "possibility" of a circle of tinkering.
B- Your examples are rather confirmatory (and they don't say anything about whether some of the phenomena were discovered heuristically, with science to follow). I address the point with the story of the jet engine later on -evidence that science came to mask the actual heuristic discovery. But I agree, of these, the atomic bomb is a certain non-heuristic process...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 4:08:02 PM UTC
Ben, the point is not that they used heuristics, the point is that we think they used science.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 4:12:40 PM UTC
THen
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/heuristics.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 5:57:19 PM UTC
Guru why don't you fake a name & try to fool me?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 5:59:11 PM UTC
John Aziz, right about autism, but the spectrum (Baron-Cohen) mainly high functioning ones is characterized by systematizing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 4:18:31 PM UTC
Ted, Kealey shows evidence that the industrial rev was entirely heuristic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:31:13 PM UTC
I read it. Largely spin. There is a lot of spin in what Mokyr calls the "epistemic base".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 21, 2011 12:03:49 PM UTC
(friends I removed comments and petty arguments between people turned personal as this is not the right forum for these. I also removed a user who got personal.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 12:56:46 AM UTC
Guru, I am sorry, but you will have to use your name if you want to post here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 9:20:58 AM UTC
Alexander, he is mine too. But I do not like the concealment of identity --too inelegant when you deal with people.
Who would you like to have dinner with?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 10:31:10 PM UTC
Marx on Bentham:"in no time and in no country has the most homespun manufacturer of commonplaces ever strutted about(...) The principle of utility was simply what Helvetius and others have said with wit & ingenuity(...) tgis is the kind of rubbish ... (Chap 24)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 10:47:25 PM UTC
Oleg, good wine is useless for anything else.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:34:06 PM UTC
I meant ONLY benefit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 3:21:20 PM UTC
Michael, rich people tend to feel & act superior to other members of mankind...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 1:02:43 AM UTC
I started skiing at age 3 1/2. I am realizing for a second time (the first one was when I was in my late teens) that it is a fake activity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 9:53:12 PM UTC
Marc, I like walking, hiking, weightlifting and streetfighting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:55:41 AM UTC
no mail in my inbox from Ted Speers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:39:23 AM UTC
Art, I am writing something about it. He was a thinker but not an academic - rare. And he understood alienation, something close to your ideas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 5:14:34 PM UTC
Haplogenes are simple: one lineage if you limit to males (same with mitoch dna w/females). But it happens that we each have mothers, which makes the tree explode.
The news is that Greeks are just as Syrian as Syrians, Syrians are just as Greek as island Greeks, etc. As to the Turks... But the Mediterranean is where the mixing took place: a little bit of mixing explodes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 5:15:32 PM UTC
There is fellow at AUB called Pierre SOmething who does genetic distances --he does not understand my fooled by randomness effect: spurious correlations dominate large datasets... on that, later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 5:22:24 PM UTC
Languages have remained more stable than races... because of the need to understand an older person, they can't evolve too fast.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 5:53:40 PM UTC
Justin any "correlation" with DNA is spurious. (removed John Aziz's comment because confusing the problem).
Here is the issue:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/NEJM.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 6:19:02 PM UTC
Stephen, wrong discussion. Even assuming single ethnicity, things lose in differentiation very rapidly under slight mixing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 6:39:39 PM UTC
Justin you did not get my point. Please stop confusing people here with "correlation" and other stuff before understanding data mining.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 8:56:45 PM UTC
David B, good point on genetic drift: increases (linearly) distance from ancestors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 10:37:19 PM UTC
Jean-Louis, france is even more mixed..."Nos ancetres les gaulois" is a nice fiction, in every possible sense...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 10:40:56 PM UTC
...Incidentally Jean-Louis the "phoenician" fiction started with french nationalists and was hyped up by Barres (perhaps the best French prose writer). The poor fool detected phoenician "blue eyes" (voyage au pays du levant_...not realizing that in lebanon sunnis are more likely to have blue eyes, mostly because crusaders who stayed converted to islam.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 18, 2011 9:59:27 PM UTC
Not my point... nationalism or genetic resemblance is not it. My point is that distance from ancient cultures is HUGE.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 18, 2011 10:21:53 PM UTC
Karen, don't write nonsense.
Path dependence is central.
H is the trigger; it breaks in the case of fragility, it ratchets up in the case of AntiFragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 9:56:11 PM UTC
bingo! When S crosses H for the first time, there is a gain that it keeps.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 14, 2011 11:09:43 PM UTC
Cancer treatment in response to diagnoses of small tumors actually shorten life expectancy because of iatrogenics of chemo/rad. We are ignoring the numerous undiagnosed tumors that never killed patients. There are numerous such studies.
Also when hospitals go on strike and cancel elective surgeries, many patients don't come back (healed by nature + time) ... and life expectancy goes up (data slightly insufficient but I have a hunch from translation of cancellation of surgeries).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 14, 2011 11:44:39 PM UTC
Taha, no, no, no, no, no, alternative medicine is FRAUD.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 14, 2011 11:58:41 PM UTC
I said ALTERNATIVE medicine was. Hyped up rationalism based on "sounds good". To me anything that is not empirical does not exist --except for traditions and mother nature because of their empirical/statistical power in surviving.
But "integrative" sounds interesting but cannot be part of anything not empirical.
(This is the same mistake neophiliacs made when they imagined us ingesting pills in place of classical foods).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 14, 2011 2:12:51 PM UTC
I like Guru's heuristic. Anything that requires a battery is out!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 14, 2011 4:32:11 PM UTC
Ogi, pen and paper. Much more soothing to write long hand; much better text (for me).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 12, 2011 5:05:06 PM UTC
It is just like when Lebanese run into Syrians, they focus on the tiny variations in their respective Levantine dialects and, when they run into Italians, they focus on similarities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 12, 2011 11:38:01 PM UTC
Guru, great comment: "no batteries".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 13, 2011 12:05:20 AM UTC
The analogy between books and records is flawed: we do not access records directly, but through a device (what's worse, sequential). A book we access directly and control our access to it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 12, 2011 11:18:36 PM UTC
gib that's not Simpson's paradox at all.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/prophecy/index.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 11, 2011 10:43:52 PM UTC
I am going to drop by Ilili in NY to drink Lebanese wine.
Hope it stays that smooth.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0001414
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 11, 2011 4:46:31 PM UTC
Gott's argument still fails but it fails even more in these cases of exponential decay. The argument I used (from Mandelbrot) has no such flaw.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 11, 2011 10:26:55 PM UTC
I did my own derivations above.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityJan27.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 11, 2011 11:27:32 AM UTC
David, sorry to contradict, but the ' in Semitic languages is not a glottal stop but an active consonant (same in Arabic, the hamzeh can be silent yet active as part of the triplet of consonants).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 11, 2011 11:32:20 AM UTC
Ok, then I should not write using Y but ' for nonsemites. I think the Lebanese transcribe as 2. Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 11, 2011 11:48:30 AM UTC
In Arabic & Aramaic, the ' is pronounced at the end. The same with Hebrew as spoken by Sephardic jews.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, February 11, 2011 2:42:34 PM UTC
Most studies show no effect on well-being beyond a lowermiddleklass income. There are thousands of such studies. Jordan you are probably mentioning the studies on rank (Marmot et al.). Rank matters.
كترته متل قلته
يللي بزيد بينقص
Likewise, Mediterraneans did not like tall men (but accepted excess in other attributes):
homo lungo raro sapiens
الطويل هبيل
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 9, 2011 9:54:13 PM UTC
Dru, Indeed you guys had at your root a different culture than us Mediterraneans...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 9, 2011 9:57:22 PM UTC
Dru, Indeed you guys had at your roots a different culture than us Mediterraneans...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, February 10, 2011 3:09:32 PM UTC
Simon why don't you make the same complaints about reports of prejudice favoring tall people in American society and accuse writers of being self-serving because they are tall? This post is about differences between Mediterranean values and Modern Western ones & the "less is more" effect & ancestral heuristics.
Another lebanese expression (strange to see values so different from today's Western ones):
طول بلا غلة
And the poem
نحنا صغار و بعيون الاعادي كبار
http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/adaptive-behavior-and-cognition/summer-institute-2011
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 9:52:47 PM UTC
I am working on convex heuristics (see antifragility) coming from ancient cultures and seasoned systems. Anti-debt, anti-nerd, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 9:59:16 PM UTC
Jean-Louis, this is the subtractive heuristic! The idea is to rank them based on robustness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 10:52:06 PM UTC
Heuristics are NATURAL, implicit, intuitive, hard to explain. Nerds are logical, explicit, rationalizing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 11:14:45 PM UTC
A heuristic is designed in a way to know it is not universal, not the best, not flawless, just a trick that is not necessarily the optimal one. This is why it is not nerdy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 12:39:10 AM UTC
Bravo Ricardo; Doob's inequality is exactly what I am talking about: that you can decompose a stochastic process in drift (signal) + a random term (noise).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 11:02:01 PM UTC
I mean Doob's decomposition...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 12:34:39 AM UTC
I prefer Seneca, largely because I feel Latin better than the Greek. Seneca is also deeper and broader.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 7, 2011 8:16:01 PM UTC
Peter, don't stray... businessmen getting 500 emails a day are not flaneurs.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 7, 2011 8:52:25 PM UTC
1) True, Constantine: if you are more prompt at reading an sms than an email, then you think it is filtered.
2) I have been filtering notices here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 7, 2011 8:56:37 PM UTC
I used to get close to 300 msgs a day. Now thanks to my autoreply, warnings and policy to not reply to nonsubstantive msgs, <20. Ideally I would only get 10 msgs a day.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 7, 2011 9:26:03 PM UTC
No, twitter tweets are so much more frequent (10 million times?) Even if short... Max noise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 7, 2011 11:09:30 PM UTC
Ben, technology is something to handle with care.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 12:33:01 AM UTC
When I turned 80, 6 years ago, I also stopped using technology.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 7, 2011 1:38:34 PM UTC
I am reading "la rebellion francaise" (Nicolas). It used to be the French national sport (pre-TV soccer).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, February 7, 2011 3:03:46 PM UTC
I have been removing "noisy" comments, that is, those that miss the point of signal theory.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 7:47:46 PM UTC
Ban, I filtered him out.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, February 6, 2011 2:19:47 PM UTC
I try to never set foot in the right bank, except on the way to Roissy. (I don't count St Louis & Le Marais as part of the right bank).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, February 5, 2011 10:19:38 PM UTC
Not my point. Regimes that makes noise (like Italy or Lebanon) are more volatile but less risky than ones like Saddam's Iraq, Egypt, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_central_coherence_theory
http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2011/01/30/dix-morts-dans-une-collision-ferroviaire-en-allemagne_1472700_3214.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, February 2, 2011 9:09:38 AM UTC
It is no coincidence that I wrote the above from the Gigerenzer lab in Berlin.
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityJan27.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 27, 2011 3:13:27 PM UTC
Marc Binda, removed your post as you should read the piece twice before writing anything.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 28, 2011 4:02:50 PM UTC
Ben, I am now writing in a disorganized, nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness way,hoping to be repetitive enough to cover all ideas, while letting others work on making the points clear.
An Archimandrite and elderly Armenians fluent in Arabic will be there,
among others. Carb-free food could be arranged, also German schnaps made
of fruits, and possibly Armenian mulberry spirit. No one expects a
lecture.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 27, 2011 9:57:08 AM UTC
Thanks a million. I can't ... Will be still in NY.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 27, 2011 6:48:53 PM UTC
sent you address.
http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2011/01/25/agriculteurs-francais-du-mal-etre-au-suicide_1470416_3224.html#ens_id=1470459
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 3:56:51 PM UTC
Kiran, 17,500 a year +-. Please delete your comment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 8:02:42 PM UTC
So either the alarm about farmers suicide in India is journalistic hype, or, if they are almost all caused by financial squeezes (which did not exist before), they come from fragility to modernism. So I would love to clear up the following: 1) these suicides are associated with financial squeezes; 2) they are relatively new.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 9:26:41 PM UTC
No, Guru, it has to do with squeeze.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 11:27:08 PM UTC
You can't do comparative statics -baseline suicides may be different. You need to compare pre-squeeze numbers with each other.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 21, 2011 11:34:45 PM UTC
Hihi, Should be back next month.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMzAmrNS164
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 17, 2011 10:22:47 PM UTC
Je repars demain ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 16, 2011 2:37:11 PM UTC
14 beers once a week is completely different biologically. I don't know about the benefits of beer (I never drink it voluntarily), but by getting your nutrients episodically you absorb them better --so convex.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 16, 2011 10:09:17 PM UTC
Alexander, this is not off topic. Insulin is information. I was told (by Art D V ) and read in the literature that insulin was concave per meal, so having a huge meal was better than grazing all day long. Read the intermittent fasting literature... spending a long time without food sensitizes you to information...
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Du_contrat_social/Édition_Beaulavon_1903/Texte_entier
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, January 14, 2011 10:30:26 PM UTC
I know very very very well what war means, so Ken don't write stupid stuff.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, January 15, 2011 12:02:16 AM UTC
Alexander Boland, right on: peace can be "great moderations". It has been so often so... Long periods of "peace" have ended up killing many more people than chronic instability!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 11:18:42 PM UTC
They also like...regulations!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 11:54:44 PM UTC
Josh I think that was Nietzsche's obsession. But great work has been done by John Gray, Oakeshot, etc. My only problem is that some, like Joseph de Maistre, tend to become conservative.
Antonello, nerds build interesting things, but, consider: that could be the problem.
George Chiesa, I agree there is a spectrum. I am only focused on the deficit of theory of mind.
Finally I will start numbering my notes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, January 13, 2011 12:13:11 AM UTC
Antonello, it is not that out of topic: the balance between Dionysian and Apollonian (to use Nietzsche's terms) has been disrupted by too much growth in technology. These things blow up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 9:02:39 PM UTC
No need for explicit definition. You can tell a nerd unless you are one...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 9:09:34 PM UTC
Justin, intellectual influence. Oleg, from his bio Keynes was no nerd... a snob perhaps.
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/sen.clem.shtml
http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/author-events/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb/2770462
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/taleb010311.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 3, 2011 4:20:38 PM UTC
Jordan, that "mercy to the guilty" was in the Levantine aphorist Publilius Syrus...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 3, 2011 4:39:38 PM UTC
Invitat culpam, qui delictum praeterit & Socius fit culpae, qui nocentem subleva -PUBLILIUS
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, January 3, 2011 8:29:10 PM UTC
Putting it into Levantine Arabic
كل من رحم اللي بيقزي قزا اللي بيرحم
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 2, 2011 9:41:32 PM UTC
Sorry guys the solution may be that fragile equals concave. Will be deleting this post.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, January 2, 2011 9:52:20 PM UTC
My definition of fragile is just restrictive.
And just be careful in what you wish for. Ciao, N
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 31, 2010 12:07:56 AM UTC
Lorenzo can you bundle all your posts in one? It is disruptive for other posters. Grazie, N
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 29, 2010 10:53:05 PM UTC
Remember all I am a libertarian, first and last. And a deontic libertarian at that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 29, 2010 11:45:24 PM UTC
Andy, bingo. let me explain to others: liberty is not something you want for its benefits, but for its own sake.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, December 29, 2010 8:08:43 AM UTC
اهل هناك فرق بين العقيده و الثقافه(ام البيءه؟
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 8:14:56 PM UTC
I fear physical terrorists because they are antifragile to punishments; as to cyberterrorists: you catch a few & jail them & the others will lose heart.
Gladwell showed how little twitter played in the Iran thing... He blamed it on online "thin links" ; I attribute it to absence of physical courage.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 8:50:37 PM UTC
The statement includes "rare exceptions", so please stop giving us the Black Swan bullshit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 8:58:57 PM UTC
I have this idea that systems with people that don't go down with ships, traders with no personal risk on the line (and no love of risk), and revolutionaries not expecting to be caught have tremendous fragilities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 9:07:25 PM UTC
The mere notion of someone engaging in harm without physical risk to himself and standing completely behind the veil of anonymity appears an aberration. It is also repugnant --but that's another matter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 9:14:38 PM UTC
You guys should look at it backwards: think of sampling bias. There can be courageous people hiding behind a keyboard, but the mere fact of messing with others anonymously would imply a bias.
THanks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 9:47:38 PM UTC
I see so many people here with cognitive dissonance. Sorry, to me a man is only a man after he has taken personal risks (gender free).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 12:41:59 PM UTC
Dear all, religion is not about "belief" in the modern sense. Let's not have this discussion here & now.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 8:15:56 PM UTC
Guru, leave religion alone you are getting substractive logic only halfway.
[Life is antifragile at the expense of the living; economic systems are antifragile by making single entities break. etc.]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 27, 2010 11:37:46 PM UTC
Ben I am not saying I approve. Ethics are there to counter the ruthlessness of mother nature.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 28, 2010 1:49:30 AM UTC
Ben I don't like Platonicities, crisp universals, oversimplifications, like of nuances --but I like the idea that you brought this up. Don't think that my belief of natural exercise & lifestyle should necessarily lead to endorsement of ruthlessness towards others. We are humans not animals --though we tend to be humans in the wrong places, and animals where we should be humans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 27, 2010 1:08:45 PM UTC
bingo. riots are fed by repression.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 27, 2010 7:36:45 PM UTC
Guru, what's the difference between reasoned skepticism and voodoo ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 26, 2010 11:43:24 PM UTC
A bit technical. Says a system is at state x, S[x], with absorbing barrier at x-a [it "degrades" in condition], and kikking barrier at x+k [where it "improves" in condition]. Seeing the system at a certain level between x-a and x+k tells you nothing. We used to say "hit from above" or "hit from below".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 26, 2010 6:25:54 PM UTC
right, flaneur
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 25, 2010 11:10:40 PM UTC
Hi, thanks Uberto. What's the name of the book? I am eager to know.
Corrolary: for 3, change the arrow. You are not good (or bad) because you are doing good (or bad), but you are doing good (or bad) because you are good (or bad).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 20, 2010 11:44:13 PM UTC
Oui Emmet, but in the domain of the sacred. Platonic, of course, deep inside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 20, 2010 11:45:44 PM UTC
Nobody here seems to care about the Indian wine?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 12:05:04 AM UTC
I would say that Indian beer is much, much better than Lebanese beer... is it diplomatic enough?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 12:59:00 AM UTC
But Anthony, I don't drink beer ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 11:38:45 AM UTC
I didn't think I would hit moral relativism: we know what is good (saving a life) and what is bad (killing an innocent), so please STOP.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 1:32:56 PM UTC
Friends, wine originates in the Levant, and spread to other countries by Coastal Cannanite (Phoenician) merchants. It is native to the area, so has my "opacity" thing going for it. So even when other wines "taste" better, I feel the taste of authenticity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 5:02:37 PM UTC
In Greek literature, you invariably read about mixing water and wine... Wine's initial purpose in the Levant might have been to purify water.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 5:02:55 PM UTC
Pierre, I will try.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 23, 2010 12:30:25 AM UTC
Not you Jason, and not yet; you are still looking trying to figure out what you want.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 20, 2010 6:07:22 PM UTC
The first class, the top 1 in thousands...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 20, 2010 6:36:27 PM UTC
I've been removing comments that miss the point rather than moving the discussion into Ethics 101.
الأمام علي (ع) قال: ربي
ما أعبدك خوفاً من نارك ولا طمعاً في جنتك
وإنما وجدتك أهلاً للعبادة فعبدتك
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 20, 2010 5:15:40 PM UTC
Yes Jordan, I have been searching for precedent's to the C I --in my new work they are called UNCONDITIONALS.
Being HUMAN is all about unconditionals.
When things become clearer in my head I will link to the rigidity of designators (under permutations).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 20, 2010 5:36:18 PM UTC
Jordan, Kant in the Metaphysics of Morals wrote about the WILL and "choices influenced but not determined" by impulses, which answers all the repetitive nonsense I got yesterday about "neurobiological" rewards --setting back the discussions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 20, 2010 5:51:05 PM UTC
Ben, I see where you are going with this. Which is why I have an a priori separation of sacred/profane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 7:01:07 PM UTC
Chris, that the the Euthyphro problem? Are you devout because you are loved by the gods, or loved by the gods because you are devout?
This is where Socrates messed up everything since and Fat Tony has a word with his Chapter 3.
http://www.come-and-hear.com/babakamma/babakamma_92.html#92a_5
Incidentally that Aramaic is close to Amioun dialect but cannot find the original
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 2:33:07 PM UTC
Here is the Aramaic but I wonder if the numbering 92 should be "Daf Tsadeh Bet" -help, please
http://books.google.com/books?id=rlQMAQAAIAAJ&pg=PT743&dq=%D7%91%D7%91%D7%90+%D7%A7%D7%9E%D7%90&hl=en&ei=5xUOTce6F8OqlAejyqDmCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCcQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=בבא%20קמא&f=false
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 2:46:26 PM UTC
Chezi I wonder if it is page 742.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 2:52:48 PM UTC
Dear all, I am looking for quotes asking someone to do good IN SPITE of negative outcome. So far one Levantine proverb ("do good and throw in the sea")
اعمل الخير و كب بالبحر
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 2:54:34 PM UTC
Ben, this is great. But still there is this "fear of heaven" that kills the deontic in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 3:15:03 PM UTC
Nawal this is the same as Baba Kamma 92a "What you wish for your people you will get yourself".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 3:22:25 PM UTC
Simon, it is said (as I know it) without the second part -hopefully evolution.
Ban, we are not there yet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 3:26:56 PM UTC
Ben and Jordan, thanks a million: I am trying to figure out if the deontic did not reappear before Kant. Clearly the deontic is present in Classical Culture and somewhat in Levantine folk culture.
The very notion of standalone "ARETE" is what went missing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 3:43:42 PM UTC
Abdulrahman, this is great.
Evan Lotzof, where is gemara on the page? The central part in larger characters? I have a hard time identifying the passage.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 3:52:56 PM UTC
انما نطعمكم لوجح الله لا نزيد منكم جزا و لا شكورا
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 4:04:54 PM UTC
The talmudic passage reads like Lebanese Arabic when you pronounce "waw" not "vav" etc. Will transcribe in a minute.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 4:14:40 PM UTC
Abdulrahman, indeed. And I found a great reference that showed evolution of ethics. The Koran was written after the gemara, which was written after the new testament.
So I was wrong thinking that he had to wait for Kant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 4:17:02 PM UTC
Incidentally, there is so much more pleasure in classical languages, particularly in the power of Semitic tongues, than in ideas...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 9:17:14 PM UTC
You guys are not getting it at all: what you are talking about is "warm glow", a form of internal reward. I am shifting the problem to the very act doing something because it is part of you to do so, because of who you are, totally non-consequentialist.
To understand it better: for Aristotle the ARETE of a knife is to cut. If it is a good knife then it cuts well [NOT TH REVERSE]. Virtue is ARETE, you do things BECAUSE it is part of you.
Please think for a bit before responding.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 9:49:23 PM UTC
I am isolating the following point: whether the very notion of action for NO gain exists in ethics and WHERE it started showing. The kind of stuff I got, that actions have some motive, etc. is another (lesser) discussion.
Also Fabricio, you should learn to avoid slippery slope arguments: Aristotle's point on slavery (or any other topic) have nothing to do with his definition of ARETE and his example of the knife.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 9:51:40 PM UTC
(religious ethics I mean).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 9:57:25 PM UTC
Beyond that if you cannot act without reward (neurological or other), then you don't have free will.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 10:16:45 PM UTC
Peter stop arguing, go take a walk, and think about the notion of DUTY (Deontic <- duty) that I've been trying to discuss. Don't post a word here until you figure out why the notion of DUTY needs to be separable from reward (or if you want a rigorous argument about some connection).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 11:24:39 PM UTC
Sorry, but it is precisely civilization that brought the notion of duty. Animals are moved by neurobiological rewards.
This is where human rationality works --not in forecasting
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 19, 2010 11:39:08 PM UTC
Fabricio, why don't you take a break from this topic? It is deterring intelligent remarks like those of Kapil.
Thanks Kapil. I am rushing to the BG after I return from dinner (Lebanese wine).
So a "name" is perfectly robust, the perfection is robustness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 1:31:49 PM UTC
Anthony I spent the night wondering and woke up with the conclusion that no, rigid designations are perfectly non-fragile and non-antifragile.
Perfection is eternal stability.
Antifragile is unstable (improving).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 2:19:00 PM UTC
I spent part of my life wondering what separates the unborn from the dead. Saul Kripke is a genius.
He showed that dichotomy a priori/ a posteriori does not map to necessary/contingent. You have a posteriori, YOUR birth (hence "name"), now becoming necessary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 2:20:24 PM UTC
Hans your posts degrade the discussion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 2:56:03 PM UTC
Rigid designators don't evolve, by definition. Our understanding, perhaps.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 5:51:18 PM UTC
Here is a good synthesis of Krikpe's rigid designations.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:DQutycQw4JQJ:post.queensu.ca/~mozersky/250/lectures/lec10.doc
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 6:16:20 PM UTC
No, Bob.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 8:17:00 PM UTC
There is some confusion here concerning rigid designations: something that once attached, is invariant across counterfactual histories (if it exists in nth world W(n) it will be X.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 8:45:11 PM UTC
No, not anti-fragile, not fragile, perfectly robust.
Here is a better description about r.d. as necessarily true.
Bob, the Water=H2) in the article explains why I said "No" and will channel your thinking.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rigid-designators/#BasChaRigDesTheInt
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 12:35:43 PM UTC
Will Gerard, I sort of see where some of my readers may come from (Ayn Rand mistaken for Nietzsche). "Riding with fortuna" has nothing to do with opportunism; opportunism is when you lift some principles for gain (or improvement in situation) --with fitback explanations like "I have a family to feed" (or, for a golddigger "he has a great sense of humor"), etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 12:48:12 PM UTC
Will, that is what is mistaken -from ex post success to imparting properties. I never EVER compromised; and I may owe my good fortune to the exact opposite of opportunism but I did not act for that purpose.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 12:53:46 PM UTC
No, Ayn Rand is to philosophy what (inelegant) astrology is to astronomy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 12:57:04 PM UTC
Someone who speculates and risks downside for his beliefs is NOT an opportunist in my morally warped sense (SAY A TRADER with skin in the game); but someone who works for the FED RESERVE or teaches econ theories that are bogus and fits explanations to them BECAUSE HE FITS HIS ETHICS TO HIS PROFESSION is the lowest brand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 1:10:54 PM UTC
Then Upanishad is pre-deontic. You sacrifice to sacrifice not to harvest.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 2:52:22 PM UTC
Some people have trouble understanding my theoretical approach. Let me restart with practical life: you can tell someone is an opportunist if he makes friends with someone else for gain "fair weather friend" or if he/she sleeps with the boss, etc. and that IT HAS NOTHING TO DO with "seizing an opportunity" (in a business situation) provided you do not claim that you are acting out of "friendship" or other holy values. The problem is that while they get it with friendship and love, they fail to recognize such crass opportunism with some middle class positions, choice of professions, & other domains.
For instance I once called the dean of a B-School a fraud (publicly) which prevented me from getting a job there. I broke with every single person who found that what I did was foolish.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 4:23:16 PM UTC
Carl, Bingo. Anna Politkovskaya. This is why I have been banning every Ayn Rand follower from here (disgust).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 5:39:03 PM UTC
I am not banning people from expressing themselves I just don't want them on my site. Very different.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, December 16, 2010 6:00:02 PM UTC
Alexander you need to understand that this is NOT a public forum but something that needs to fit my sense of aesthetics/ethics, my private refuge against philistinism. You are welcome to stay but i am not interested in your misplaced and idiotic comments about free-speech, which you should post elsewhere.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, December 18, 2010 11:36:38 PM UTC
Partaking of the process that puts cigarettes in the hands of people is unethical, even if they are willing to pay for them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?_r=2&hp
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, December 13, 2010 11:36:02 PM UTC
Sorry, friends, All I am doing in this post, all I am doing is trying to get Assyrians and other Iraqi Christians to discuss PRACTICAL charities and their reputations. NOTHING PHILOSOPHICAL. I need web links and reputations.
It seems to me that there is an important Platonic fallacy going on in this discussion - I don't want to be too harsh, since language is Platonic, and as a result, to some extent, the Platonic fallacy is unavoidable wherever words are used - nevertheless I think we can do better. When speaking of fragility/robustness/antifragility, we must always specify the environment. My antique china is fragile in the environment of the US Post Office, but robust in the environment of being buried in the ground for 4000 years. Or, it might be fragile in one way (keeping its form) but robust in another (preserving its color) and antifragile in a third (serving as an inspiration to John Keats). All of which brings us back to the Black Swan. Since we can never know what to expect in our environment, can we ever truly gauge the robustness or antifragility of anything?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:39:32 PM UTC
David, the discussion is about convexity w.r. to A SINGLE source of variation, for a given RANGE of variations. Using precise language is not necessarily falling for Platonicity --provided you do not make claims that are more general than warranted.
More on expansion, later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:08:40 PM UTC
I was worried about the "quasi-linear".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 7:47:38 PM UTC
Stephen can you expand or rephrase? I don't understand at all. Antifragility (locally) AS I DEFINED IT mathematically is convex to (local) variations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:50:44 PM UTC
Ben, I have an answer I think in terms of information replication, etc. can you remind me in a few months? It has to do with writing and the storage and replication of information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:57:02 PM UTC
Let me answer now. Whatever is perishable, say a human life, has an upper bound, hence is thin-tailed (exponential distribution, for example). Information is not perishable, hence doesn't have an upper bound and will be convex. A technology is information, say the concept of a car, but a single car is perishable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:59:41 PM UTC
This is why the gene pool is antifragile, while living expressions are fragile, and BECAUSE they are antifragile.
1) In the presence of an upper bound, the function will end up concave (asymptotically pasting), even if it starts convex (hence the sygmoid shape).
2) In the absence of an upper bound, the function is necessarily nonconcave, hence necessarily power-law style.
3) Now my epistemic opacity problem: IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE UPPER BOUND, then you need to treat it as convex.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:10:25 AM UTC
Peter, you are right: we don't know the exact upper bound of things like weight. But there is a number that you deem impossible to reach: say 1 million lbs is impossible, then you work your way down. But you can't do the same with wealth, inflation, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 6:28:21 PM UTC
Kyle, true, but you are getting it backwards: all bounded functions need to end up concave.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:28:22 PM UTC
Nothing that I can think of, in biology, therefore nothing seems to truly fully antifragile --only locally so. See graph above.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 10, 2010 2:23:53 PM UTC
Antifragility to smear campaigns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 10, 2010 3:03:32 PM UTC
Ben I was approached yesterday at Waterstone (Piccadilly) by an employee who busted me and almost got me to sign books. He who knows my work... from your blog (I didn't know you had a blog).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 10, 2010 3:32:54 PM UTC
Ben Atlas, this is very good. I don't usually read blogs, but this has a Slavo-Euro-WalterBenjamin-Zeitgeist-antitourist flavor to it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 10, 2010 5:39:08 AM UTC
I NEVER watch movies & moving images.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, December 10, 2010 4:26:09 PM UTC
Eduardo Casasola removed all your posts as you are making people go backwards in the discussions & wasting the time of readers here. We have already discussed fragility and robustness v/s antifragility. Please don't post.
Note that the Kahneman/Tversky Prospect theory has the same shape (with small change in first derivative at 0)
It means, as suspected, concentration (feasts/famine) that you should eat a lot when you eat.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 7:38:57 PM UTC
Alan, NO -all monomodal distributions have this shape. Try the Cauchy distribution (the fractal of fractal) and you will see.
Anything with an upper bound and a lower bound that are approached asymptotically will have this shape.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 9:48:17 PM UTC
Lorenzo Benedetti, anything with a LOWER and UPPER bound has the shape ... & it is very prevalent in biology, hence my book. I noticed it first with the dose-response function, & then realized you had Jensen's >=
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 29, 2010 8:57:49 PM UTC
I've deleted all (very interesting) comments on dieting that are NOT related to the very narrow q of nonlinearities and Jensen's inequality.
So a prostitute is not an opportunist compared to a gold digger; an academic is the worst brand of opportunist...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 28, 2010 7:12:11 PM UTC
For those who wrote on evolution, our entire system of ethics has been to counter the ruthlessness of evolution with unconditionals.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 28, 2010 7:13:45 PM UTC
So I'd rather STARVE than, say, work for the Fed Reserve. That's how unconditionals counter evolutionary opportunism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 28, 2010 11:12:13 PM UTC
Let me state EXPLICITLY here that I don't want to hear anything about Ayn Rand -especially when mentioned with Nietzsche in the same breath. Fairly or unfairly all comments will be deleted.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 29, 2010 3:24:03 PM UTC
Ben, you are right. John Gray is the most competent enemy of utopinanism and he would debunk Ayn Rand's starter-Platonicity. The connection to Nietzsche is strange: N is antirationalistic.
Also I have been "pruning" the answers and banning a few disruptive persons (no second chance).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 4:44:29 PM UTC
George Chiesa, thanks for the film suggestion.
2) My ethical system can be reduced to the following: OPPORTUNISM is despicable in all its forms -under constraints of manners. Classicism clashes with post-4th C. AD: doing good to go to heaven or other reward (to be lucky) is CORRUPT in essence. Modernism & Middle class values are the most corrupted by post-classical system of fitting ethics to behavior (hence "economics").
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 29, 2010 12:46:09 AM UTC
Madame. Empathy does not work by moralizing. Please suggest more empirical means...
(Plane still at stoopid JfK)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 29, 2010 12:47:32 AM UTC
The idea of a "good deed" is not to make the W a better place, just to do a good deed because it is YOUR nature.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 28, 2010 3:46:58 PM UTC
Very honored to see Art De Vany here.
b) Studying for an exam is unethical (but to a lesser extent): if you are not interested in the material, you should not be gaming the system.So far I have NEVER prepared a lecture, but have not yet penalized students for b).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 27, 2010 10:57:50 PM UTC
Nicolas, you said it: anything you do for money and money only (that you would not do for free) is a form of prostitution, with the exception of minimum wage (if you need to feed yourself). I am so sorry about that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 27, 2010 11:42:08 PM UTC
Please EXCLUDE the notion of preparation as honing presentation skills; let's focus the discussion to preparation as STUDY of material.
[ Οι γαρ κακοι γνομαισιν ταγαθον χεροιν/εχοντες, ουκ ισασι,πριν τις εκβαλη, "Vulgar minds can only know the price of what they have the day they have lost it",in AJAX, Sophocles]
http://books.google.com/books?id=j44LBI9MQpUC&dq=ουκ+ισασι%2Cπριν+τις+&q=ισασι#v=snippet&q=ισασι&f=false
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 26, 2010 2:47:16 AM UTC
Very Moving: Tecmessa telling the Acheans how they will feel after the loss of Ajax whom they despised so much during his life.
In fact so many teenagers kill themselves hoping to get respect and be missed after their death.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 27, 2010 10:24:56 PM UTC
Hi I delete comments that strayed from the topic. Thx, N
Now I may try the Beaujolais Nouveau 2010 as NO Lebanese wine in sight.
By the way, and I realize you may not have time to answer this in the next few days, but what do you think of the work on fat-tailed distributions that some physicists have been applying to predict the intensity, but not the precise timing of terrorist attacks in 3d World civil wars/insurrections/whatever-you'd-like-to-call-them? They have been fairly successful in isolating a "Friday night effect" whereby terrorists in South America, for example, time their incidents to one-up the most recent ones committed by another group to get maximum t.v. exposure for their cause but detract attention from others. The intensity of the attacks seems to fit an exponential decay model quite well. The sociology types are angry because they don't like the idea of there being an predictability that doesn't reference factors such as motivation... This research was started up by Neil Johnson at the University of Miami (Physics) and it's quite fascinating.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 25, 2010 12:32:29 PM UTC
Please never use "PREDICT" when it comes to powerlaws.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 8:01:26 PM UTC
Fat Tony, c'est moi!
http://www.amazon.com/Quaestiones-2-16-3-15-Ancient-Commentators-Aristotle/dp/0715626159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1290425843&sr=1-1
See Veronique Boudon, Katerina Ierodiakonou, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 19, 2010 11:28:49 PM UTC
Thanks. Just ordered it. Ciao, N
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 19, 2010 11:10:13 AM UTC
By definition a meta-procrustean bed is NOT a procrustean bed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpTpjhVo7I
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 18, 2010 3:31:27 PM UTC
OK, OK, Maybe 1 year...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 18, 2010 4:21:07 PM UTC
Brendan, EXCELLENT, but hard to make a concept with reverse OR inverse; mathematically anti is often used to mean reverse
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 18, 2010 5:21:04 PM UTC
Ben Atlas, you are close to guessing why I picked Anti-fragility among other possible words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 18, 2010 5:59:23 PM UTC
Ben, fractal comes from fragilis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 3:10:33 PM UTC
Hi Nabil, but the story is not that clear: Arabs (as well as Babylonians & ancient Egyptians) believed in pharmacology & worshiped the rationalism of Galen ("Jalinos").
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 4:45:39 PM UTC
Ce Pomponius Atticus, à qui Cicero escrit, estant malade, fit appeller Agrippa son gendre, et deux ou trois autres de ses amys ; et leur dit, qu'ayant essayé qu'il ne gaignoit rien à se vouloir guerir, et que tout ce qu'il faisoit pour allonger sa vie, allongeoit aussi et augmentoit sa douleur ; il estoit deliberé de mettre fin à l'un et à l'autre, les priant de trouver bonne sa deliberation, et au pis aller, de ne perdre point leur peine à l'en destourner. Or ayant choisi de se tuer par abstinence, voyla sa maladie guerie par accident : ce remede qu'il avoit employé pour se deffaire, le remet en santé. Les medecins et ses amis faisans feste d'un si heureux evenement, et s'en resjouyssans avec luy, se trouverent bien trompez : car il ne leur fut possible pour cela de luy faire changer d'opinion, disant qu'ainsi comme ainsi luy falloit il un jour franchir ce pas, et qu'en estant si avant, il se vouloit oster la peine de recommencer un'autre fois. Cestuy-cy ayant recognu la mort tout à loisir, non seulement ne se descourage pas au joindre, mais il s'y acharne : car estant satis-faict en ce pourquoy il estoit entré en combat, il se picque par braverie d'en voir la fin. C'est bien loing au delà de ne craindre point la mort, que de la vouloir taster et savourer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 21, 2010 11:29:55 PM UTC
اين ممكن ان اقرء هذا؟
شكرا
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 9:27:19 PM UTC
Druin Birch showed evidence that you save more lives by SUBTRACTING nicotine than everything medicine has done since 1945. EVERYTHING, including operations, etc.
Likewise you do more for economic risks by subtracting risk experts, etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 9:52:49 PM UTC
Friends, note that most of these additions (chemotherapy, antibiotics) are responses to (additively obtained) diseases of civilization. Also note the "largely" in front of subtractive, denoting a bias not an iron law.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 11:24:16 PM UTC
Ivan Illich understood iatrogenics, harm done by the healer.
The entire general problem is illusion of control.
More later... friends you can see how this connects to antifragility and natural systems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:25:08 AM UTC
James is right --that's what I am talking about: manmade unnatural systems. Other comments are addressing the wrong point & have been deleted.
Books as monument (though not Summas): Bayle's Dictionaire (16 vol!),Proust's Recherche, Gibbon's D&F, Zola's Rougon Macquart, Martin Du Gard's Les Thibault, Anthony Something Dance to the Music of Time...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 11:34:46 PM UTC
Any suggestions for the BOOK-AS-MONUMENT museum?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 11:36:37 PM UTC
Karl Marx's Das Capital, 3 huge Penguin volumes... I am not in my library but can't image many more...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 14, 2010 1:27:56 AM UTC
Georgi, TALMUD! of course. a feeling of completeness from Tractate Baba Metzia, Steinsaltz. But then there is some Hadith of the same monumental stature...
Let me add (from Memory), W. FELLER, 2 vol. (a lot for math), probability theory & appl; Roger Penrose The Road to Reality' Jules Veyne (ed.) Histoire de la Vie Privee (4 vol); Fernand Braudel La Mediterranée ...
I heard Zizek wants to write a SUMMA LACANIANA.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 14, 2010 10:59:13 AM UTC
Balzac did not write the Comedie Humaine as a unit the same way Proust wrote his Recherche. Musil of course. Ideally, an author with a single book, or a single idea.
Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature, or his Selecta [complete technical works under one series].
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:10:01 AM UTC
I would add Photius' Bibliotheca.
I have by my bed the Corpus Aristotelicum, called complete works [2500p, 2v., PRINCETON/BOLLIGEN series], but we know very well that only a THIRD is extant, and many books like Magna Moralia [with the famous table of the triplets with golden middle] apocryphal (or written by a student). Yet it feels about as complete as a book can ever get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 14, 2010 4:20:19 PM UTC
Peter, there is something called a "library"; it contains more than ONE book. Likewise erudition = having read more than ONE book & increases with the number of books read.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 15, 2010 3:00:39 PM UTC
I forget a monument: LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura; in it I found the first treatment of romantic love as a disease (with evil attributes for self and others); one that requires sophisticated methods of prevention, management, & cure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:15:32 AM UTC
No lo sé. Se publica en español por Paidós en Barcelona
& who dominates this discourse on teleology? Not "the philosopher" (Aristotle), but the more pervasive "commentator", IbnRushd aka Averroes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 2:36:09 PM UTC
Interesting question Lucio, because that is EXACTLY what I am trying to avoid to to be mired in the medieval theological problems (charming, but, alas distracting): I am staying one level below the metaphysical. So I simplify by making luck entirely epistemic for a single agent -in other words mother nature might know (hence God exists) or not know (hence he doesn't), but given that I don't know her mind the point for me human is of no consequence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 4:25:55 PM UTC
Thanks Lucio -note that wiki page was (characteristically) updated by an idiot. Averroes did not know Greek and was not the translator of Aristotle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 4:41:07 PM UTC
The other page, Christophe.
He most certainly knew no Greek.Incidentally, Aristotle was not translated from Greek into Arabic, but from SYRIAC (the Aramaic of the post-Antiquity Levant) in Bayt el HIkma in Bagdad.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 5:22:33 PM UTC
Christophe, Borges HIMSELF wrote that Averroes knew no Greek. My point is about the shoddy scholarship of wiki.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 8:35:36 PM UTC
Will, look at the economics entries on Wiki such as Nobel or VaR. Entirely hijacked by the econ establishment. Completely. Wiki corresponds to the opinion of the MOST MOTIVATED.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 8:36:51 PM UTC
So on paper wiki seems OK but in fact it is prone to mob rules and contagion effects. Like many things on the web exacerbate the crowd effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 13, 2010 10:26:14 PM UTC
The problem with WIKI is a winner take all of the most motivated. Natural systems would give you multiple WIKIS, not one planetary single one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 14, 2010 12:13:41 PM UTC
Mark Weaver, you are right about his evolutionary epistemology. It contradicts rationalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, November 20, 2010 2:10:02 PM UTC
Benjamin Peterson, please read the stuff before commenting. I have been throwing out of here people who jump into ongoing conversations without homework.
GAME CONTINUES. {Incidentally there seem to be confusion about magnificent as Aristotle used two different terms: Μεγαλοπρέπεια, largesse, munificence (connection to the Orthodox Church μεγαλοπρεπὴς δόξα is tr. Sublime Glory? ) & μεγαλοψυχία greatness of soul, in Ar. Kibr An-nafs]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 11, 2010 10:17:02 PM UTC
Stephane, by your definition the word "strong" should not exist. Note the text (see my discussion of wine and entropy) that AF (just like convexity) is a local not necessarily global property, so you say "AF against...". (please read the text Stephane before distracting others into sophistry)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 12, 2010 3:47:29 PM UTC
Stephane, my point is that for the discussion to be positive, it shd not go backwards on terrain already covered. Please read document af.pdf or don't comment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 10, 2010 5:40:49 PM UTC
Yvan it did NOT need to be Gaussian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 11, 2010 11:04:07 AM UTC
hi, look in my technical papers, I have one with Haug proving why we can use bachelier-THorpe, not Black Scholes
http://www.pnas.org/content/98/24/13763.full.pdf+html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 10:24:44 PM UTC
Robert Brown The flaws of average has been well known,see my Dynamic Hedging (1997), but not its consequences to model error and the benefits of uncertainty under convexity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 10:27:11 PM UTC
Robert Brown The flaws of average has been well known,see my Dynamic Hedging (1997), but not its consequences to model error and the benefits of uncertainty under convexity -the fact that it puts statistics/econometrics out of business.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 11:14:16 PM UTC
Robert Brown I will take a look at his book. Look at the paper below: why parametrization of gaussians doesn't work & you will see why. My consequence is that parametric uncertainty requires, under uncertainty, the raising of small probabilities. This argument is completely missed by statisticians -- it is burried in TBS and FBR but here it is more salient.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1669317
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 11:31:02 PM UTC
Robert, please read the paper before more comments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, November 10, 2010 9:53:14 AM UTC
Thanks Sam Savage. Just ordered your book. Will give you proper credit. Robert Smits the theorem is simple and the road shown by Cauchy. In fact it was used in a way by Louis Bachelier in 1905. But there is domain dependence that make people miss on it where it is central. On that later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 11:15:08 PM UTC
Jason please don't talk about money.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 11:12:23 AM UTC
Mark Safranski, I agree about tribal structure.
Luciano, I am simply using CONVEXITY with respect to a random variable as a indicator of antifragility. Discussion is in ssrn paper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 2:34:15 PM UTC
Ban, Convex HEuristisc. Marc, it means NA
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 8, 2010 10:23:24 PM UTC
Hi Nathan,
I will explain this is called DEGENERACY (or functional redundancy) which may be required for evolution. But work on it is scant so I am trying to express it geometrically to verify convexity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 11:13:37 AM UTC
Alexander Boland, think in terms of Jensen's inequality. Barbells have option-like characteristics. More on that in text.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, November 8, 2010 12:15:14 PM UTC
Peter, thanks. Staircase it is.
Think of a one-step staircase. On one side you can only rise, on the other you can only fall. Of course there are combinations (various steps differing in size).
The Heaviside Function (integral of the Dirac Delta Function) [H[x] =1 if x> x0, 0 otherwise] can be used as the Atomic block for ALL situations of robustness, fragility, & antifragility.
NONLINEAR situations can be presented as series of weighted H[x], or integrals of series of H[x] (hint: this is European DIGITAL option, so it can be integrated ...).
I used this to PROVE that fragility = concavity, negative optionality; antifragility = convexity, positive optionality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 7, 2010 2:15:14 PM UTC
Look at the second graph: the curve has a negative second derivative. also see my paper on ssrn.
Now need to prove explicitly that PHILOSTOCHASTIC systems are Philoentropic & functionally convex to the variable against which they are antifragile -optionlike payoffs.
There is blindness to antifragility proved by absence of such word across languages.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, November 7, 2010 2:15:51 PM UTC
Of course chemotherapy resistance is a form of evolution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 5, 2010 9:13:24 AM UTC
So far no word for antifragile (as opposed to NONfragile)?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 5, 2010 10:44:30 AM UTC
Eevi, Sisu is not it - close, but not there. Antifragility implies robustness (necessarily), but robustness does not imply antifragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 5, 2010 10:57:57 AM UTC
Thanks Eleni for telling them to pay attention to the theme... anything that benefits from stochasticity (on balance), like evolution (natural selection) or benefits from moderate increase in entropy (time) is antifragile... good wine, artisanal shoes that need breaking in, things that age gracefully "seasoned", etc.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 5, 2010 11:14:23 AM UTC
Does "sarsılmaz" do so? What does it mean? I am also using the word "philostochastic" and STOCHASTOPHILIA for related systems that love (some) randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 5, 2010 2:05:53 PM UTC
Grigor, is [amoor] the EXACT antonym in Armenian, or just non-fragile?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, November 5, 2010 3:16:40 PM UTC
Tychophilia; philostochasticity... viscosity, but my scientific term is CONVEXITY:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1669317
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, November 4, 2010 7:18:47 PM UTC
Hi. Try Naya ; & try Massaya (sp?) wine. Tell them you are my (first) cousin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 24, 2010 6:32:55 PM UTC
My post...has nothing to do with wine, but with proverbs.
(Thanks Pradeep)
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/TIMEBenoitM.pdf
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 23, 2010 4:16:50 PM UTC
The initial posted PDF did not include the sentence "he is only teacher I ever had" that they tried to cut and restored after my explosion of anger ...so i replaced with Peter Rollman's screenshot.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, October 23, 2010 4:21:54 PM UTC
Saad, writers make their living WALKING.
A Greek among Romans.
This site is closed to all comments for a while.
A l'occasion de la venue du Prof. à Paris, je vous propose un petit meetup autour des thèmes des cygnes noirs, des fractales et de l'économie. RV demain mercredi 13 à 19h30 au 30 rue de Châteaudun, 75009 Paris, au bar Le Saint Georges. La conférence du prof. Taleb se termine vers 18h45 juste à côté. Si certains veulent venir plus tôt pour optimiser les possibilités que le prof viennent nous passer un petit bonjour, n'hésitez pas.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 8:23:57 PM UTC
le cocktail ne sera pas sans doute pas fini a 19h30. mettons 19:45?
http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2010/10/07/quand-la-poesie-fait-chavirer-la-raison_1421477_3260.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, October 8, 2010 5:38:51 PM UTC
James, I don't watch movies, but I went on a pilgrimage to the exact spot where he had his big bout of madness, & started hugging a horse to prevent a man from harming it, muttering incantatory verses; one of the most moving moments in literary history.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, October 10, 2010 9:29:09 AM UTC
Bravo Ben! Venice is the 1st!
Is there any way your French fans can meet you outside of this event ?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, October 4, 2010 8:46:11 PM UTC
Hi Harry; I have no idea of the schedule, but certainly after the event. Un grand plaisir.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 7:33:49 PM UTC
Andy/Alexander et al. Agree; in context he is just saying that courageous people don't want to make an effort to LOOK courageous... I also apply the "aristos" to generosity. Nothing to do with humility -it is the denigration of the external manifestation of virtues.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 7:41:44 PM UTC
Andy, but moderns are AGAINST all these classical virtues: economics, etc. Fakes... Courage has vanished as a virtue. Idleness is seen as a vice. Middle class values advocate pettiness...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 8:07:42 PM UTC
Amy, in classical times vices were different, individual, not collective. My new topic: in the absence of the corrupt self-serving yet intolerant middle class...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 8:52:42 PM UTC
Greeks had rage, destructive rage... Think of Medea... But it was individual. The big difference for me is in the behavior of the collective once you let people in it: the courage of wimps getting strength from the group will destroy us.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 27, 2010 3:35:59 PM UTC
So half the people here are getting it right, the other half backward.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, September 27, 2010 4:07:15 PM UTC
Sorry Mohammed, but Thomas Sowell is neither deep not witty. You would do better from now on citing non-economists.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 26, 2010 10:16:14 PM UTC
Guru, say something nice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, September 24, 2010 5:22:26 PM UTC
not sure shd keep fb...
"Find out if your business is robust enough to survive a Black Swan event!
Sign up here https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/634123176 "
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 12:51:51 AM UTC
nobody invited me, thankfully...
You only move up from the status of halfman with courage, generosity, disregard for your reputation, and the cultivation of idleness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, September 5, 2010 6:38:45 AM UTC
Also please do not open up too many new discussions... It intimidates others...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 29, 2010 10:16:35 PM UTC
Sorry to interfere, but I respect prostitutes over bankers, (almost all) academics, employees of the Federal Reserve, lobbyists, etc... Prostitutes, at the worst, are harmless.
Ciao, N.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, August 30, 2010 9:03:19 AM UTC
I don't really think prostitutes are violating any sacred - they are not making claims of unconditional love. Further there have been sacred prostitutes in the classical and Near Eastern world.
Violation of the sacred is when you debase art or human relations with hidden commercial interests.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 22, 2010 6:09:14 AM UTC
Thanks!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 20, 2010 4:05:25 PM UTC
Hi Justin; comment later.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 15, 2010 2:13:54 PM UTC
Read my work ...the Poisson is even more of a fraud than the Gaussian.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 8, 2010 5:13:56 PM UTC
am on my way... eager to watch the lions: the alpha lion sleeps 20 hrs a day.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 8, 2010 9:24:55 PM UTC
Are there lions in the wild in cape town?
When a self-help 'guru' writes about spirituality, the book gets shredded. Only a truly religious person can say Spirituality and sound erudite, everyone else just sounds brainless, shallow and incredibly pathetic
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 6, 2010 7:38:34 PM UTC
Great start: negative selection is more powerful predictor. But Spirituality is never used by those who know "religion", who refer to degrees of hesychasm, etc.
Cheers, Yahia
http://www.bu.edu/agni/authors/Y/Yahia-Lababidi.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, August 6, 2010 12:17:01 PM UTC
Very nice.
http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/supercrunchers/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 1, 2010 9:13:54 PM UTC
عزيزي محمد لست معجب بهذا الكتاب اعرف المولف
This is the downside of being 'public property' which is magnified with the advent of the Internet.
I have found your books, work, philosophical thoughts and aphorisms truly enlightening.
You have a lot of silent support.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, August 1, 2010 9:18:55 PM UTC
كتاب الحكم خلّصته
Then what is the non-feminising (or masculine) alternative?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 26, 2010 6:03:36 PM UTC
Sport masculinises women and feminises men
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 23, 2010 10:47:52 PM UTC
انا كتبت عنه بكتابي السابق
Most people will never have the latter. It seems to me that if people wait until they have a stash in a deposit account before they can adopt a courageous and independent attitude, they will remain servile and compliant all their working lives.
It's always Manyana..."today i have to pay the mortgage and my boss needs my report on the Widget Marketing Strategy by 11am wednesday".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 22, 2010 8:26:59 PM UTC
هيدا مظبوط مهم انتا من جوا
One thing that is very important here to realise is that everything you learn at business school is wrong and that businesses tend to die.
I abandoned *** after Davos, so I went into hiding, doing my research but luckily something strange that was happening, the less of an activist I am, the more people absorb my ideas and they start using them and promoting them
http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page292670?oid=497047&sn=2009+Detail
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 22, 2010 4:12:36 PM UTC
PLease this is NO place for finance postings. I will delete them all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 19, 2010 9:08:37 PM UTC
Google translate, mercifully, does not know lebanese dialect! Nishkr allah
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 19, 2010 9:17:43 PM UTC
Hilarious!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 19, 2010 9:23:34 PM UTC
Ziad, stop spoiling the game. Can you delete it? Keep them confused!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, July 5, 2010 5:34:30 PM UTC
They probably want me to discuss Lebanese wine, Lebanese restaurants, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAOIBIDRhJw&feature=related'
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, July 2, 2010 10:54:01 PM UTC
I only met him 4 times but liked him immediately.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, July 3, 2010 12:55:28 AM UTC
Believe me you'd rather go out drinking with him than some boring person you agree with.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 1, 2010 3:31:59 PM UTC
Thanks for coming.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 1, 2010 5:59:56 PM UTC
Rick I couldn't see very well how they reacted...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, July 1, 2010 8:17:52 PM UTC
Do you remember his question? I can't ... I lost focus as he kept talking and talking and cut him off when I heard "mathematics".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/plato-mathematical-musical-code
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 11:53:46 AM UTC
Sounds similar to the "Bible Code" -fooled by randomness.
But the musicality of writing makes some sense; in Plato's days The Iliad & other poetry was not recited, but sung. Music was inseparable from words --there was no prose "text" in today's sense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, June 26, 2010 12:26:09 AM UTC
Motasim, I don't read these things. There are so many other things to read.
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/syrus.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, June 14, 2010 7:41:11 AM UTC
I found the Sentencias in Loeb Classics in a volume on "MInor Latin Poets".
Basically I agree that Every Stranger is Your Teacher. However, as i've said in previous posts...people are ignorant, and they're ignorant about their own ignorance. They are confident in their ignorance.
If you want to eat well you can start by not eating junk, don't read junk, don't watch junk, don't have friends who are junk.
Everytime you watch/read/mix with junk...your brain dies a little. Wisdom of crowds?...Give me a break.
I choose to have few friends on Facebook, because having loads of FB friends brings down the average.
I'm really struggling to be a thinking person...not perfect, but a thinking person. To me, thats the biggest challenge in life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 3, 2010 9:29:50 PM UTC
Marc please open fewer new topics; it would make dialogue easier
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 3, 2010 10:50:35 AM UTC
Unethical; very much so. Acts of omissions are as nasty as acts of commission.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 3, 2010 10:55:31 AM UTC
The only country where laws try to transcend the distinction is France:"nonassistance a personne en danger"; not helping is a crime.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 3, 2010 11:24:57 AM UTC
Djamal, please try to reframe within the existing discussions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, June 3, 2010 11:00:07 AM UTC
I will say for now that materialism makes you path independent; the dead would be equivalent to the unborn. If you refuse the equivalence, you are somewhat religious.
Likewise, if you celebrate a birthday, you are somewhat (poorly) reinventing religion.
bytheway: my Vergil exam was very refreshing...mirabile visu!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 7:10:40 PM UTC
Nothing interesting. Latin poets are more interesting.
Discovered a hidden gem: Publilius Syrus (The Syrian).
Thank you very much.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:02:19 AM UTC
Bingo! Western economies are like Greece, but without the charm & the Ouzo.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:28:45 AM UTC
You mean the standard person (i.e. median) is below average.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 12:20:08 PM UTC
What you call the "average person" is the median, mathematically.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:04:10 AM UTC
Notice the others don't seem to understand my insults...
I have the lifestyle of a hedgefund manager/philsopher/bon vivan....i'm in the coffee bar now writing this on my laptop....but i only have £2.79 in my pocket. I my mind I could be doing the Same in Paris or Berne. Yeah right Mark.....
'Beggers MUST be choosers' and i'll stick to that until the pressure becomes too much or i die...or that i've been wrong all along.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 23, 2010 3:26:09 PM UTC
Now this is interesting. Self-ownership is a state of mind; a moral strength that can be more present in those earning minimum wage that the employed. Now you can be employed and remain honorable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sunday, May 23, 2010 12:57:32 PM UTC
As I said I couldn't care less about these things these days. Just classical epigrams...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Saturday, May 22, 2010 10:29:33 PM UTC
My dear Peter, I couldn't care less about treasuries. All I care about is Lebanese wine, arack, and Martial's epigrams.
http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/intfor/v25y2009i4p744-759.html
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 2:20:17 PM UTC
you can get if for free at ssrn
Dr Taleb has used his insights and understanding in one domain and used it to ask questions in an ostensibly unconnected one. If you're a skeptic you have to use that in everything otherwise you're shallow. You also have to be even more skeptical about you're own knowledge and beliefs. It's difficult to do and gives you a headache. Every now and then you need a holiday from your own thought...but not too long otherwise self-disgust kicks in. But that's the lot of true thought.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 10:10:52 AM UTC
I am certain that insulin is not the whole story. Diabetes might be a correlated symptom to some other disease. The damage / mortality is not completely explained by high glucose or high insulin.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 12:26:08 PM UTC
In business schools & econ departments, anything with equations is bogus, at least so far.
The May 11 conversation with Gloria Origgi in Brooklyn was surprisingly refreshing; everytime I think you've fully explored all possible dimensions of the Black Swan, I find myself (pleasantly) mistaken.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 3:31:22 PM UTC
I am here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, May 6, 2010 3:48:01 AM UTC
Close, but more general: we cannot reverse-engineer the right generator, Platonic form, etc. from observations --particularly under nonlinerarities.
I have a question. I have read FBR and TBS at least 6 times. But there is still something that I don't understand.
My question I will phrase as an example.
Say you have an urn with red/purple balls. A man tells you the distribution for purple is 1/100, you are only allowed to draw once. The first draw you get a purple ball.
How does one know if (A) that was chance (1 in 100 just happend to occur on the 1st draw) OR (B) the man who told you the odds were 1 in 100 for purple was mistaken about the probablities and it is actually much higher?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 6:31:00 PM UTC
Tony I am in a rush --in Abudhabi where I found Lebanese white after a long trip (private) in Saudi Arabia.
See the econtalk below that Motasim gracefully linked to. At some point I raise the problem.
I am also answering your question in a paper with Raphael Douady about the "p" and "n" (sample size) when p is small compared to 1/n ,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 1:57:10 PM UTC
Tuesday, I think, worldwide.
Thank you!
Georgi
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Monday, May 3, 2010 7:18:54 AM UTC
I will discuss those things commonly called love & friendship in my next text, but in an oblique way: the idea of both love & friendship, in a qualitatively distinct way, as the "victory of the particular over the general, and the individual over the universal, etc". --with the difference that love has the form of "madness" (Plato's "divine madness") in it that friendship doesn't necessarily have. Yevgenia writes a series of love letters to Nero, in which she calls him an idiot for not understanding the nongeneric aspect of things; she detest biology because, to her, there is no such thing as "a disease", there is an individual with some ailment, and every pair individual-ailment has a name...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 30, 2010 10:05:30 PM UTC
no but i will be back in dc june 30 at politics & prose... need to go to sleep.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 30, 2010 3:06:02 AM UTC
There was a huge contrast between Salman Rushdie & james cameron (avatar). I had never heard of the latter --but he was an intellectual pygmie by comparison.
Rushdie spoke about literature, the other guy about sales during opening week. This told us something about the permanence of the word and the transience of the digital.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 30, 2010 1:55:16 AM UTC
Why?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thursday, April 29, 2010 9:51:46 PM UTC
Another lifetime, Suzy. my current interests are in ancient texts, particularly Plato (now, almost obsessively Plato), Lebanese arack, Lebanese white wine, Lebanese desert wine, Lucian of Samosata, writing aphorisms, running on rocks, French essays, and airline strikes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Friday, April 30, 2010 1:55:02 AM UTC
Thanks Kevin I am embarking on a long trip; & have in my suitcase the entire works (extant), including satires of philosophers. Will report soon. i don't know if I am sensitive to his Syrian sensibility, or if he is the genuine philosopher I am told he is ...
Built by Stanislav Yurin