Friday, February 25, 2011
The Apophatic: Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite figured out that you can express the negative (what is not) in theology, not the positive. That seems to be present in Syriac Neoplatonism (but I need to dig for more. He was most certainly Syrian). He did…
Friday, February 25, 2011
The TRAGEDY OF THE APOPHATIC. Just to show that to nerds things that don't have a name don't appear to exist – & same problem 1) fail to understand uncertainty, 2) cannot connect dots, 3) cannot understand religion (what they don't see …
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Shared by JohnH
HatTip to Dave Lull.
So what should they have done, as soon as they realized that there was too much risk in the system, that they had overleveraged? When Obama took power, he appointed people who were part of the system that caused …
Thursday, February 24, 2011
(cont. Hint: consider Mill’s “would you rather be happy like a pig or unhappy like Socrates? ” (hence take a numbing drug or doing a lobotomy) before writing anything. Go through the exercise to realize that we are after is APOPHATIC and cannot be redu…
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Happiness is the lowest form of human satisfaction.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Note 139 in http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Friends, I need help: When did we start using Euclid’s axiomatic geometry in architecture? It seems to be that we had been building structures heuristically (including cathedrals), without any formal framework, that Euclid appeared late as a “lecturing…
Monday, February 21, 2011
Open Lecture NYU AbuDhabi, March 1, 6:30 PM – Lecture on the Philosophy of Probabilityhttp://nyuad.nyu.edu/news.events/events.ad.htmlNYU Abu Dhabi Events Calendar for Abu Dhabinyuad.nyu.eduDescriptions of events organized by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Shared by JohnH
New NNT book review on Amazon. There are 5 pages of NNT’s book reviews, mostly things he really likes, on Amazon. HatTip to Peter T.
Great presentation of modularity, February 19, 2011
Amazon Verified …
Sunday, February 20, 2011
My point on Marx is that he understood fragility & alienation. No other thinker has ever gotten close to that. Ignore his remedies; he got the fragility right, but the rest backwards as he did not reach the level of antifragility (& there was …
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Marx was (perhaps) globally wrong (but locally right); Hayek was mildly right all the way. But Marx, when right, had huge insights; e.g. Chapter 14 of Das Capital I on the Division of Labor and its dismemberment of humans. Immense erudition: he moves f…
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Thales Episode (Ch 3): I would say the main benefit of being rich (over being just independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any “sour grapes”. It is even sweeter when th…
Saturday, February 19, 2011
It’s much better to mistake a stone for a bear, than a bear for a stone. (Click arrow to play audio) Nassim Taleb ManagemenTV.mp3
Filed in Audio, John, Video
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Tagged allow for wrong forecast, avoid losing money, forecasting, how to domesticate randomness, how to live in a world we don't understand, lack of knowledge, mediocristan, positive Extremistan, seeing patterns where there's none, Tinkering
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Saturday, February 19, 2011
Antiflaneur. There is a smell of bildungsphilister in ski resorts, particularly the ones for the rich. Everything is fake, fake, people are opulent, philisitinic, etc. Too painful, fits of rage, etc. Left a day early to take refuge & lock myself up…
Friday, February 18, 2011
(interestingly he was wrong, but that’s not the point).
Friday, February 18, 2011
t just hit me that only ten people attended the funeral of Karl Marx –yet most of them (particularly Engels) believed (even ”’knew”’, according to the record) that he had been the greatest living thinker. That was 130 years ago. He has yet to be sur…
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Lebanese Wine in the Austrian AlpsLebanese Wine in the Austrian Alps (Musar 1989).
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Lebanese Wine in the Alps (Austria-Tyrol-Kitzbühel). MUSAR 1989. A surprise gift after a discussion…
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
I find Lebanese claims of ancestry from "Phoenicians", modern Greeks from ancient Greeks, etc total bogus. Recursing 13 centuries & 30 generations backwards, each has 2^30 , > 1 billion ancestors assuming 0 intermarriage. 1) Except for…
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
ANTIFRAGILITY and FRAGILITY as Path Dependent Stochastic ProcessesPath dependence is central.H is the trigger; it breaks in the case of fragility, it ratchets up in the case of AntiFragility.AntiFragility
Monday, February 14, 2011
Makridakis and I estimate that, because of iatrogenics, if we cut medical expenses by half, and ration to levels close to Europe, life expectancy would rise in the US.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
(E-READERS for NERDS, 2): Information is to the reading experience what calories are to a meal. You should consider that you may want to maximize taste, and minimize information ingested (beyond a point), the exact opposite of what the E-reader offers….
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Don’t let those who need you know that you know that they need you.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
When people talk about e-books v/s books, they focus on SIMILARITIES between the two (they assumes book=information). I have never heard a user address the large differences between the two, like smell, texture, dimension (3D), color,haptic “feel”, phy…
Friday, February 11, 2011
More boring Appendix (sorry to be technical in these exciting times but I need to calm down as I fear disappointment in Egypt) – my own derivations of Gott’s law based on the great Mandelbrot’s fractals.http://fooledbyrandomness.com/prophecy/index.html…
@nntaleb