Showing all posts tagged #nassim-taleb:
Posted on September 22nd, 2020
The group running for the Municipality of Beirut (representative of Sunnis, Maronites, Shiites, Druzes). Genes havenât changed in 3700 years.Note added in June 2020:The archbishop of Canterbury claimed Jesus was "nonwhite". Under such a definition so would Homer, Caesar, Alexander, Socrates, Aristotle, etc. (East) Mediterraneans were more alike, quite remote from Northern Europeans.
"To pass for a Jew or a Nabatean ["Arabes"], a Roma...
Posted on September 14th, 2020
This story begins the same way all great stories begin: on Twitter (haâŠ).
Last fall, as my ten-year high school reunion fast was approaching I reached out to one of my classmates on Twitter, which led to a few intriguing phone calls. Long story short, our conversation eventually led us to trade book recommendations. He recommended a few books by Nassim Taleb: a well-known mathematician, author, and "uncertainty" guru.
Taleb has a s...
Posted on September 14th, 2020
âWho is my mentor? I have inverse mentors: people I learnt to not imitate,â says the scholar and philosopher
âŠ
What was your childhood or earliest ambition?
I was utopian. I found adults and adulthood fundamentally corrupt, self-serving and unclear. I still do but I now find the utopian even more harmful.
Public school or state school? University or straight into work?
French lycée, whatever that means. University but largely autodid...
Posted on September 14th, 2020
Optionality. One of the most underrated concepts of life I think. The very simplest defintion can be described as by Taleb: being able to accept both outcomes, to be comfortable with the counterfactual. Itâs opposite? The Squeeze. The Japanese understood this through wabi sabi- incompleteness. The Taoists knew it when Laozi discussed the empty bowl. Being incomplete means being open to the infinite. A fractal has infinite length beca...
Posted on September 14th, 2020
Paradoxically, one can make long-term predictions on the basis of the prevalence of forecasting errors. A system that is over-reliant on prediction (through leverage, like the banking system before the recent crisis), hence fragile to unforeseen "black swan" events, will eventually break into pieces. Although fragile bridges can take a long time to collapse, 25 years in the 21st century should be sufficient to make hidden risks salie...
Posted on August 16th, 2020
AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has been a sobering reminder of the extensive damage brought about by epidemics, phenomena that play a vivid role in our collective memory, and that have long been identified as significant sources of risk for humanity. The use of increasingly sophisticated mathematical and computational models for the spreading and the implications of epidemics should, in principle, provide policy- and decision-makers w...
Posted on March 31st, 2020
Dominic Cummings loves to theorise about complexity, but heâs getting it all wrong
Crowds of shoppers in Edinburgh, 2 March 2020: âHerd immunity was nothing more than a dressed-up version of the âjust do nothingâ approach.â
Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
When, along with applied systems scientist Dr Joe Norman, we first reacted to coronavirus on 25 January with the publication of an academic note urging caution...
Posted on January 4th, 2020
The controversial thinker who predicted the 2008 financial crisis hates bankers, academics and journalists. He's also a man of mystery â he eats like a caveman, and goes to bed at 8pm. We took the risk of meeting him
âHeâs forever having spats and fightsâ: Nassim Taleb in Brooklyn, New York this month. Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Observer
How much does Nassim Taleb dislike journalists? Let me count the ways. "An...
Posted on December 21st, 2019
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Claire Lehmann seemed like natural allies: Both are contrarian, entrepreneurial free thinkers. But recently, Taleb started calling Lehmann names on Twitter.
Lehmann had defended behavioral genetics, especially claims about "intelligence": that it is measured by IQ testing, is genetically based, and correlates with success in life. Taleb has extensively criticized all three claimsâthey exhibit some of his co...
Posted on November 9th, 2019
To shake up my thinking and expose myself to highly-believable people, I attended the two-day program at Nassim Talebâs â Real World Risk Institute.You can find my daily notes here. Cleaned up digital version of my notes here.
What follows is my thinking on wealth inspired by what was presented. Mistakes are my own. I can hear things differently than what was actually spoken, so donât assume my attributions are strictly accurate.
To ...
Posted on September 9th, 2019
We see whatâs visible and available. Often this is nothing more than randomness and yet we wrap a narrative around it. The trader who is rich must know what he is doing. A good outcome means we made the right decisions, right? Not so quick. If we were wise we would not judge the quality of a decision on its outcome. There are alternative histories worth considering.
***
Writing in Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in L...
Posted on September 1st, 2019
Dear graduating students,
This is the first commencement I have ever attended (I did not attend my own graduation). Further, I have to figure out how lecture you on success when I do not feel successful yet âand it is not false modesty.
Success as a Fragile Construction
For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when pe...
Posted on August 31st, 2019
Nassim Nicholas Taleb traveled the conventional route of education to real-life and theory to practice in inverse sequence from the common one, moving from the practical to the philosophical to the mathematical. He started as a trader, then got a doctorate in mid-trading career; he wrote literary books before writing technical papers, and his work became progressively more technical and formal with time.
- Taken from Bio
Notes
Lin...
Posted on May 1st, 2018
In November 2008, with the financial crisis in full swing, Queen Elizabeth attended a ceremony at the London School of Economics. Facing an audience of high ranked academics, she posed a simple question: "Why did nobody notice it?"
How could it be that no one among the smartest economists, commentators, and policymakers in all her kingdom â and beyond â had been able to see the formation of a bubble of such dimensions?Illustration of...
Posted on July 25th, 2017
Summary: How to deal with risks dominates our headlines, usually driven by single-interest groups that see only their favorite threat. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Talebâs latest work offers a way to identify the most serious threats facing us, and determine how much we should spend to fight each of them. It has received much attention. Is it useful? Part one of two.
A series of papers by Nassim Nicholas Taleb et al made a large co...
Posted on March 19th, 2017
The World According to Nassim Taleb
Derivatives Strategy: What problems do you have with financial
engineering?
Nassim Taleb: I disagree with such an approach in financial risk
management. Some folks looked
at the literature and saw differential equations and said "Gee it's like engineering".
Engineering relies on models because you can capture the relationships in the physical world very
well. Models in the social sciences se...
Posted on August 10th, 2015
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Greek Orthodox Christian from Lebanon; the Levant. In the course of his book Antifragile, he promotes skepticism, theism, tradition, the writings of the stoics and seeks to restrict the claims of theory and "naĂŻve rationalism."
Elsewhere I have said that often theory seems to make us stupider than we would be without the theory. This is particularly true when theory says something is not possible. A key phr...
Posted on April 24th, 2015
These are excerpts of Nassim Nicholas Talebâs book Antifragile. I use Maestroâs words as a skeleton to build upon some ideas synthesized by Col John Boyd and Miyamoto Musashi. Themes include: Knowledge as intuition built from engaging with reality, understanding when an adversary is employing the Art of the Advantage against you and when to call bulls*t, and why itâs important to embrace uncertainty and randomness in order to affirm ...
Posted on March 11th, 2015
Hormesis is the ability of organisms to become stronger when exposed to low-dose stress. Is hormesis a basic principle of biology â or is it merely a strange but unimportant quirk of nature that only applies in exceptional circumstances?
Nassim Nicholas Talebâthe options trader turned philosopherâis intrigued by hormesis, and sees it as but one example of a much broader phenomenon: a fundamental principle he calls "antifragility"....
Posted on March 11th, 2015
In April, Brian Eno wrote to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, asking, "how can we even think about designing for a future that we canât imagine?"
The letter he sent was the inaugural Longplayer Letter, the first in a series of letters published by ArtAngel and Jem Finerâs Longplayer â a project to compose and perform a 1,000 year-long piece of music (running now for 13 years).
The letters are to be written in relay-style: in responding to Enoâ...