Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Got some news from the author Jamie Whyte who wrote to say he repents & "felt shitty". I will not relent. Why? Think of all these helpless authors. Because of the principle of symmetry reviewers should go down with their review. Authors a…
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Something to report: Nader endorses the idea to "make captains go down with ships; all captains & all ships" –as the central problem in society is "asymmetry" & we need to remove it in complex systems. As a consumer advocat…
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
In the wake of wikileaks, I wonder if hackers can partake of a revolution since nerds are (with rare, very rare exceptions), just like academics, devoid of physical courage.
Monday, December 27, 2010
No readers of The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness or any of Taleb’s academic writings about economics, probability, risk, fragility, philosophy of statistics, applied epistemology, etc, will question whether he is qualified to dish out wisdom. And non…
Monday, December 27, 2010
Mother nature cares about life, not the living.[Life is antifragile at the expense of the living; economic systems are antifragile by making single entities break. etc.]
Sunday, December 26, 2010
The last aphorism is one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s favourite, or rather the one “he likes more than others”.
Taleb, a Lebanese “technical philosopher”, likes turning things on their head and, he confesses, that he is not too popular for it (especiall…
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Hysteresis is indeed a path dependent property that can expressed as ratchet options –will therefore lead to antifragility and fragility. But all antifragilities/fragilities are not from hysteresis (though one can prove the reverse). [This is to answe…
Saturday, December 25, 2010
I was using my book the Black Swan by Taleb to save seat @ church last night. When someone stopped to take its pic. Said I'd understand
Friday, December 24, 2010
Shared by JohnH
HatTip to Dave Lull
Take one of Taleb’s aphorisms: ‘The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.’ A summary would seek to neutralise the potential for parado…
Friday, December 24, 2010
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Jamie Whyte (with whom I once had breakfast) is in the business “to dissect confused logic and nonsensical arguments” and has written many books on errors of reasoning… in others.Let’s go through the exercise of finding the 6 cr…
Friday, December 24, 2010
My definition of fragility and antifragility lie in path dependence, the “ratchet” property and its nonlinearity: pass a certain level of stress, something irreversible takes place. What breaks doesn’t return to its initial state. I get this from optio…
Friday, December 24, 2010
Shared by JohnH
Item 16 is an audio interview with NNT from The Economist
The Economist
ByThe Economist Newspaper Limited
View More By This Publisher
To listen to an audio podcast, mouse over the title and cl…
Friday, December 24, 2010
Watch the full episode. See more Tavis Smiley.
Filed in John, Video
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Tagged aphorism, changing the wrong variable, courage, diatribe against modernism, drugging children, erudition, media diet, social filter, The Bed of Procustes, Travis Smiley
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Friday, December 24, 2010
Shared by JohnH
HatTip to Dave Lull
To prevent Black Swans from society, let me summarise two simple rules; one, do not give the manager of a nuclear plant an incentive bonus based on cost cutting; two, the captain goes down with his ship. The fir…
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Shared by JohnH
HatTip to Dave Lull
Every aphorism in the book is about a procrustean bed of sorts, he says in the book’s preface. “We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tens…
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
My first draft introducing AntiFragility (unedited)http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af.pdfhttp://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af.pdfwww.fooledbyrandomness.com
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Shared by JohnH
This fellow apparently doesn’t think much of The Bed of Procrustes, or NNT for that matter, but in the interest of balance, and because the graphic is hilarious, I’m passing it along. HatTip to Dave Lull.
Illustration for …
Monday, December 20, 2010
Let me try again. In India last week dined with a sage, former economist (Indian wine Suda & Grower). We converged on the following layering: 1- talking. 2- doing. 3- being. Corrolary: for 3, change the arrow. You are not good (or bad) because you …
Monday, December 20, 2010
Shared by JohnH
What if NNT had is own show! That I’d watch.
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — New York University professor Nassim Taleb talks about his new book “The Bed of Procrustes.”
Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Im…
Filed in John, Video
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Tagged accountability, aphorisms, Aquinas, bloomberg, captain down with his ship, danny kahneman, Davos, debt, europe has a diagnosis, financial regluation, forecasting, long walks, Markowitz, Nobel Prize, QE2, social filter, The Bed of Procustes, the sucker problem
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Monday, December 20, 2010
Now that we have established over the past week a straightforward notion of Unconditionality as central virtue, there is a scale for humans: 1) at the bottom, those who bend their principles for gain (opportunists), 2) at the top those who sacrifice fo…
Monday, December 20, 2010
A Wonderful epilogue to my search for deontic/unconditionals: An anonymous reader sent me this quote from Imam Ali: “Lord, I neither worship you for fear of the flames nor for the fruits of Paradise, but it is because you are fit for worship that I do …
Sunday, December 19, 2010
I wonder if Near Eastern religion ever caught up to “doing good without rewards”, and if so, WHEN. So far, in Talmud Babili: Baba Kamma 92, “one who solicits mercy for his fellow while he himself is in need of the same thing, will be answered first.”…
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Saul Kripke’s rigid designator: “naming” is ROBUST to every possible counterfactual, alternative history. It solves the mind-body problem: person named X remains the same X under all biological perturbations, recombinations, all historical contingencie…
Friday, December 17, 2010
8. A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
Same as above. You’ll win by default if you simply avoid the mistakes others make. Those who made a fortune betting against housing didn’t have special ins…
Friday, December 17, 2010
I had just begun to read the book when there it was, right on the bottom of page 5: “Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do – something people who take showers discover on occasion.” I was floored. None other th…
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