{"id":4172,"date":"2012-02-24T12:14:57","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T20:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/?p=4172"},"modified":"2012-02-24T12:14:57","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T20:14:57","slug":"nassim-nicholas-taleb-donnie-darko-and-the-meaning-of-history-jeremiadus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/nassim-nicholas-taleb-donnie-darko-and-the-meaning-of-history-jeremiadus\/","title":{"rendered":"Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Donnie Darko, and the Meaning of History \u00ab Jeremiadus"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>Anyone interested in my previous essays on Taleb can read them <a href=\"http:\/\/jeremiadus.com\/2011\/10\/15\/nassim-nicholas-taleb-and-the-fallacy-of-truth\/\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/jeremiadus.com\/2011\/12\/18\/scaling-risk-and-political-decline-or-the-triumph-of-the-dark-lord-sauron\/\">here<\/a>. In this present essay, I would like to shape Taleb\u2019s ideas in relation to two reality vectors \u2013 the film Donnie Darko and the concept of \u201csumming over histories\u201d deduced by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. As I indicate above, a reality vector does not have to be literally true. Donnie Darko is a story that never happened. Summing over histories represents a series of quantum events that violate every rule of traditional non-particle physics. As Feynman himself said about summing over histories, no rational explanation exists for this phenomenon that is scientific fact.<\/p>\n<p>Both Donnie Darko and summing over histories are reality vectors for Taleb because they attune us to a central proposition in Taleb\u2019s writings, that stochastic processes, particularly randomness, rule reality. With his Monte Carlo generator, Taleb exposes the fraud that Wall Street bankers and traders can lay claim to any particular skill or insight to account for their accumulation of the wealth of Croesus. Their success is only one of thousands or millions of outcomes, fractions of a whole which sums all conceivable outcomes and their probabilities.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"http:\/\/jeremiadus.com\/2012\/02\/23\/nassim-nicholas-taleb-donnie-darko-and-the-meaning-of-history\/\">Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Donnie Darko, and the Meaning of History \u00ab Jeremiadus<\/a>. HatTip to Dave Lull.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone interested in my previous essays on Taleb can read them here and here. In this present essay, I would like to shape Taleb\u2019s ideas in relation to two reality vectors \u2013 the film Donnie Darko and the concept of \u201csumming over histories\u201d deduced by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. As I indicate above, a reality [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contributors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4173,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172\/revisions\/4173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}