It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness. (Revised). via It is a sign of weakness to avoid… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
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It’s a sign of weakness to worry about showing signs of weakness. via It’s a sign of weakness to worry about… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Never before have I set out to read a book with such high expectations, only to encounter such severe disappointment. As an admirer of Nassim Taleb’s earlier books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, I expected to find insight and wisdom along similar lines in Antifragile. While Taleb’s latest book does contain some valid [...]
Full of typos, but a very concentrated technical demonstration of the need of skin in the game . For comments as I just wrote it quickly. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/skininthegame.pdf via Full of typos, but a very concentrated… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Antifragile Heuristic 34 (Barbell, Jensen’s Inequality): Underreact most of the time, overreact mercilessly on the occasion, going for the jugular, and people will will leave you alone. Fughetabout “measured” reactions. Be unpredictable. *** From FBR (2001). “This point has applications in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, and conflict situations. A mild degree of unpredictability in [...]
The fool considers that what he doesn’t understand is either extremely stupid, or extemely intelligent, pending on how others react to it. via The fool considers that what he doesn’t… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
5.0 out of 5 stars A gem April 28, 2013 By N N Taleb Format:Paperback I know which books I value when I end up buying a second copy after losing the first one. This book gives a complete overview of the basis of probability theory with some grounding in measure theory, and presents the [...]
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Were he not so convinced of my evilness, Taleb might even have allowed himself to like this paper which shows that evidence that some economists are better at forecasting than others is largely due to random sampling error (so yes, people are fooled by randomness …) I will report back on the severe mathematical scrutiny [...]
In this context, his perspective is very consistent with the critique of modern push systems that I (and my co-authors) developed in The Power of Pull. Push systems are driven by two concerns: the ability to forecast or predict events and the quest for increasing efficiency by designing systems that are highly standardized and tightly [...]
Antifragility is the opposite of this, a condition where the potential downside is limited, but the upside is unlimited. A situation where things will probably go badly, but only a little badly, and in the best case they will go really well. An everyday example is that you ask someone out for a date. The [...]
Stragegy to deal with academic smear campaign and figure detect technical mistakes in my work, or substantive problems with it. 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). [...]
top 200 commentssorted by:best[–]vfp15 61 points 13 days agoAre there cases where Skin-In-The-Game is the wrong heuristic?Should judges, jurors, and prosecutors have skin in the game?Also, the whole idea behind corporations “personnes morales” in French is to remove skin from the game. This has made possible large scale enterprises. Isn’t this a good thing?And thanks [...]
In his now cult classic book, “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder”, iconoclastic thinker Nassim Taleb weighs in on such diverse topics as how the “losers” in history eventually prevail, why Thanksgiving turkeys should not make future predictions based strictly on the past and why an increase in theoretical understanding of medicine actually leads to [...]
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Hello fellow NNT fans. It’s been a good run. A solid stream of NNT related info and news since 2007! NNT helped me set a record in sustained curiosity/interest. Life is intervening however, and for the foreseeable future, updates will be intermittent. When I’m back to a daily publishing schedule I’ll update this post. In [...]
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For as much as I love this book and Taleb’s other work, there is one thing that I must take issue with. It seems to me that being both a humanist and a proponent of antifragility are incompatible views. Taleb, however, claims that he is both of these things. The reason I see this as [...]
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Something poorly understood about skeptical philosophers (Hume, Sextus Empiricus, Huet, Montaigne, Pyrrho & the Pyrrhonian skeptics) is that their skepticism tends to be directed at contemporary experts, rather than traditions, which they tend to follow as a default strategy. And the crowds against which they stand up are the crowds of “experts”, or the masses [...]
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Wisdom is overcompensation for loss of energy & strength. via Wisdom is… | Facebook.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
ANTIFRAGILITY OF LOST & FOUND 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). via ANTIFRAGILITY OF… | Facebook.
And speaking of genetics, why haven’t we found much of significance in the dozen or so years since we’ve decoded the human genome? Well, if I generate by simulation a set of 200 variables — completely random and totally unrelated to each other — with about 1,000 data points for each, then it would be [...]
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Interestingly, each man was asked to write a biography of seven words or less. Taleb described himself as: “Convexity. Mental probabilistic heuristics approach to uncertainty.” Kahneman apparently pleaded with the moderator to only use five words, which were: “Endlessly amused by people’s minds.” Not surprisingly these two autobiographies are descriptive of the two men’s bodies [...]
I tell people what I have in my portfolio, not what I predict; that way, I will be the first to be harmed. It is not ethical to drag people into these exposures without incurring the risk of losses. In my book Antifragile, I tell people what I do, not what they should do, to [...]
Friends, the final revision of my rebuttal of the idea that *small probabilities are expensive* (Ilmanen’s paper) is about to be submitted to FAJ (where his paper was published). I link it to the general error, a methological blindess to fat tails, I now call “Pinker empiricism”. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Ilmanen.pdf Comments on the first part is welcome [...]
I have the ReasonTV interview earlier on the blog. But in case you were wondering what Zero Hedge thought of it… Nassim Taleb sits down for a quite extensive interview based around his new book Anti-Fragile. Whether the Black Swan best-seller is philosopher or trader is up to you but the discussion is worth the [...]
Friends, for the Friday lecture in Oxford, we had to change venue to the largest one, the Sheldonian (capacity 1,000). There are a few seats left (27). This talk will be different from others, as I will integrate fractal richness in the texture of life. http://btlecture.eventbrite.co.uk/ BT Centre Lecture to be given by Nassim N. [...]
The highlight of 2012 for me was when, during a difficult moment, I received a message of encouragement from a firefighter. His point was that he found my ideas on tail risk extremely easy to understand. His question was: How come risk gurus, academics, and financial modellers don’t get it? Well, the answer is right [...]
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