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Monthly Archives: May 2015

Copy editing is similar to plastic surgery…

Copy editing is similar to plastic surgery: unless there is severe damage, the natural, when moderately imperfect, prevails aesthetically. Source: Copy editing is similar to plastic surgery:… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Is the World Getting Safer? Maybe Not | Bloomberg

To get a clearer sense of what’s really going on, the statistician Pasquale Cirillo, working alongside Nassim Taleb of “The Black Swan” fame, did an analysis using extreme value theory — a branch of mathematics specifically designed for such problems. Looking at war data over 2,000 years, they found that violent conflicts have fatter tails than […]

Violent warfare is on the wane, right? | Mark Buchanan

That has now changed. Just today, Taleb, writing with another mathematician, Pasquale Cirillo, has released a detailed analysis of the statistics of violent warfare going back some 2000 years, with an emphasis on the properties of the tails of the distribution — the likelihood of the most extreme events. I’ve written a short Bloomberg piece on the […]

On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation

On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation. A statistical picture of violence: no, the frequency of violent conflicts and their risk did not decline. The “long peace” is not seen in the data. With Pasquale Cirillo. http://fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf Source: On the tail risk of violent conflict and its… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Our statement on climate models…

Our statement on climate models (Joseph Norman, Rupert Read, Yaneer Bar-Yam). We have *only one* planet and need to learn to live with imperfection of models. Source: Timeline Photos – Nassim Nicholas Taleb