Studying the work and intellectual habits of a “genius” to learn from him is like studying the garb of a chef to emulate his cooking.
via Studying the work and intellectual habits of a… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
From Dave Lull who, like me, enjoys seeing NNT’s ideas spreading far and wide.
Jean Bauer interjects: “Memories of serendipitous discoveries in physical stacks are example of Black Swan Theory. Rarely happens but very memorable.”
Brian: “Yes. But… the impact that it has probably makes for a larger memory of it.”
Chris: “And I think it’s especially stack-based serendipity that gets played up. We don’t talk about social networks this way.”
Brian: “I think we are just getting there with online serendipity … it is still much newer phenomena than physical.”
via “a love letter to libraries and archives” | hangingtogether.org.
Technical but shows logic behind my comments that future tail events larger than past (BRL GER)
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIOXo2a2xKSXgyM0k/edit?pli=1
Where Do Thin Tails Come From?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(Submitted on 25 Jul 2013 (v1), last revised 29 Jul 2013 (this version, v2))
The literature of heavy tails (typically) starts with a random walk and finds mechanisms that lead to fat tails under aggregation. We follow the inverse route and show how starting with fat tails we get to thin-tails when deriving the probability distribution of the response to a random variable. We introduce a general dose-response curve and argue that the left and right-boundedness or saturation of the response in natural things leads to thin-tails, even when the “underlying” random variable at the source of the exposure is fat-tailed.
via [1307.6695] Where Do Thin Tails Come From?.
pdf download link
Valuable advice from great people, 2: Mark Kac told Benoit Mandelbrot: “Stop writing papers. You are confusing us more and more. Write a book!” (which was not considered a scientific contribution, in fact counted in reverse). Hence “The Fractal Geometry of Nature”.
http://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0716711869
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, and lightening does not travel in a straight line. The complexity of nature’s shapes differs in kind, not merely degree, from that of the shapes of ordinary geometry, the geometry of fractal shapes. Now…
amazon.com
via Valuable advice from great people, 2: Mark Kac… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
