Tag Archives: Silent Risk

Silent Risk, Pascal’s Wager, Baal, Skin In the Game, Trump, Clinton-Malmaison, Gary Ruskin, Popper

AN INVITATION TO CONTRIBUTE (Facebook)
Friends, I promised to deliver in the next few hours a discussion of the most neglected fragilities and the most overestimated risks. We can tell fragility when we see it… but we first need to look at it.

I won’t say for now what I came up with but would love for you to contribute suggestions. Don’t be shy, don’t be afraid to be out there, but please observe salon rules. And, for Baal’s sake, let’s all be brief.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681574436768722944

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681562381412102146

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https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681153169313935360

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681128896952164352

Friends, we made a page for the precautionary principle (Facbook) with application to GMOs, with a variety of articles.

1) It looks like PR promoters/smear campaigners are so dumb that they don’t know that we know that they are dumb.

2) Calling GMOs “transgenics” (moving genes from one organism to a different one) better reflects their nature as genetic modification is too vague a designation.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680879127457624064

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680843010389741568

 

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680738137237229568

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680465658807738368

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680403721361162240

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680368473663520768

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680368178317389824

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680063562065276929

What I think is my central piece from *Skin in the Game* (Facebook) explaining risk-loving and precaution can live together, how risk taking has a distinct logic (similar to quantum logic)… Risk management is boring, risk taking is exciting; how the two can be reconciled. How can we reconcile Aristotelian precaution and courage, both considered virtues?

www.fooledbyrandomness.com/rationality.pdf

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679701305154244610

A book isn’t just its contents; it’s a state of mind. (Facebook)

Note: Without a state of mind, a book never survives. Also note that *almost* no book from 15 years ago has survived.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679357806407995392

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679336090583629824

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https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679006823228284929

Friends, this is technical. (Facebook) Here is the “Statistical Estimators Under Fat Tails Project” and my small contribution to it during 2015 (7 papers). One can see that very little has been done to understand random events under Extremistan and there is a lot, a lot to do.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/FatTailedpapers2015.pdf

Social networks are a great place for convex optionality. (Facebook) In 2015, I met three collaborators, two co-authors (one probabilist, one economist who specializes in inequality) and one business partner on Twitter (a partner with the Real World Risk Institute). I do not think that I would have been able to initially run into these three collaborators in the physical world, no matter how many parties I had attended (I attended a lot, a lot of parties in 2015). You can tell from people’s twitter conversation whether there can be a possible technical collaboration.

Ironically these technical matches revealed themselves through arguments during fights in my antiBS crusades (such as the Pinker-BS problem). Social life (physical, that is) is too harmonious, too devoid of fights and arguments for some skills to be made apparent.

This is a one-page answer as the journalist-passing-for-scientist Pinker…

This is a one-page answer as the journalist-passing-for-scientist Pinker has been working the press to show that violence has “dropped” since 1945, citing political science bloggers innocent of fat tails, who seem clueless about the difference between data and information. How to separate anecdote from evidence, sampling error from truth, journalism from science? Well there is something called a “test statistic”.
This also illustrates how to do rigorous statistics in the absence of a textbook recipe for a fat-tailed process, by means of Monte Carlo analyses.
I will be teaching a course called “Extreme Risk Analytics” at NYU-Engineering this fall and will have to produce an 80-p lecture notes booklet, which I will write progressively from interaction with the class. SILENT RISK is too advanced, so I need a more introductory book.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/comment.pdf

Source: Facebook

An introduction for Silent Risk…

An introduction for Silent Risk. Presenting the difference between verbalistic description of probabilistic events and the true rigorous (contractual or mathematical) one. We really don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about probability. Except, of course, firefighters.

Adding (p 55) a definition of a Charlatan. Why verbalistic “predictions” (and prediction markets) are nonsense.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QINW1YQm1uSmRjcmc/edit

via An introduction for Silent Risk. Presenting the… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.