Friends, what should I do about all these “intellectuals” and journalists who write about “The Black Swan” without having read it? It is my duty to randomly expose fraudsters as a deterrent… Anything else?

http://www.thenation.com/article/159728/swans-and-zombies-neoliberalisms-permanent-contradiction

Swans and Zombies: Neoliberalism’s Permanent Contradiction | The Nation
www.thenation.com
Modern capital is in crisis, but neoliberalism, which redistributes wealth upward, keeps the zombie shambling forward, hungry and blindly grasping.

The ultimate luxury is to never be in the same physical space with people you don’t like.

(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

Shared by JohnH

Hope we can find an audio recording.

I thank those who came to Philadelphia for the lecture.

Thanks again for the help; added the second half to the chapter on iatrogenics…
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/AntiFragilityChapter8.pdf

Though black swans aren’t as rare as once thought, their symbolism is that of transformative occurrences, like 9/11. Photo: CC BY: JoshBerglund19

 

 

Why call big surprises black swans?
It goes back to the 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal, who said that some events are “as rare a bird as a black swan.” In reality, black swans aren’t so rare, but Europeans once believed there was no such thing because they had never seen one. Their certainty evaporated when early European explorers of Australia came upon swans whose feathers were black. The term has recently come into vogue thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which became a surprise best seller after the 2008 financial crisis. As defined by Taleb, a black swan is not just an unprecedented event but one with a large, widespread impact. “A small number of black swans,” Taleb writes, “explain almost everything in our world.”