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A continuation of Nassim and Yaneer’s regular conversation. In this video, they discuss:
1) The errors in ignoring scaling for pandemics. Why a doctor’s micro-expertise doesn’t transfer to collective risks?
2) How evidence-based medicine is closer to anecdote based medicine owing to silent risks?
3) The risks of morbidity must be accounted for.
4) How the dangers of vaccines do not scale.
The Covid-19 pandemic came as an external shock, almost unprecedented. How can we navigate the uncertainty of the post-pandemic future? We talked to the author of bestselling books ‘The Black Swan’, ‘Antifragile’, and ‘Skin in the Game’, risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
SophieCo Visionaries is an Interview show on RT hosted by Sophie Shevardnadze where she talks to people who look beyond today and see the bigger picture.
Link to Podcast – soundcloud.com/rttv/sophieco-visionaries-nassim-taleb…
Link to Transcript – rt.com/shows/sophieco-visionaries/497321-taleb…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about the pandemic with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Topics discussed include how to handle the rest of this pandemic and the next one, the power of the mask, geronticide, and soul in the game.
Link to Podcast – econtalk.org/nassim-nicholas-taleb-on-the-pandemic/
Direct Link (mp3): Talebpandemic.mp3
About two years before the recent collapse, at a dinner, a then (slow thinking) member of the Lebanese parliament kept bugging me for an economic forecast. There was already some anxiety in the air. My answer was that we were facing imminent financial disaster, but that it was not necessarily bad news, long term. Why? Because such a total collapse could lead to natural responses that are better than the one we would have spontaneously, going from patching bad stuff to patching worse stuff. The lira was artificially kept too strong for any industry to survive and the financial system (the Ponzi) was sucking up all the money and destroying the economic substructure. But my point was that the (unavoidable) collapse would lead to an adaptation, the weaning from chronic foreign “loans” and, possibly, a huge bounce. De-financializing the country was a necessity, and people never do that spontaneously. Nothing was going to be fixed without a collapse. Was I optimistic? pessimistic? He was trying to figure out what I was saying and couldn’t get it as it did not fit his elementary static classification.
Continue reading on Medium: medium.com/@nntaleb/lebanon-from-ponzi-to-antifragility
Incompetence and Errors in Reasoning Around Face Covering
SIX ERRORS: 1) missing the compounding effects of masks, 2) missing the nonlinearity of the probability of infection to viral exposures, 3) missing absence of evidence (of benefits of mask wearing) for evidence of absence (of benefits of mask wearing), 4) missing the point that people do not need governments to produce facial covering: they can make their own, 5) missing the compounding effects of statistical signals, 6) ignoring the Non-Aggression Principle by pseudolibertarians (masks are also to protect others from you; it’s a multiplicative process: every person you infect will infect others).
In fact masks (and faceshields) supplemented with constraints of superspreader events can save us trillions of dollars in future lockdowns (and lawsuits) and be potentially sufficient (under adequate compliance) to stem the pandemic. Bureaucrats do not like simple solutions.
Continue reading on Medium: medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade
Link to Nassim’s Review of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas on Amazon.com
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Modern financial theory assumes that distributions are elliptical. We show what happens if the assumption doesn’t hold. And the assumption doesn’t hold.
Diversification does NOT reduce risks in the financial market; it causes near-certain long term blowups under any leverage.
Nassim Taleb joins EndCoronavirus.org Founder, Yaneer Bar-Yam, for a Town Hall discussion.
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