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Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the manuscript version of his forthcoming book, Skin in the Game. Topics discussed include the role of skin in the game in labor markets, the power of minorities, the Lindy effect, Taleb’s blind spots and regrets, and the politics of globalization.
Link to episode: http:// www. econ talk. org/ archives/ 2017/ 08/nassim_ nicholas_1. html
Direct Download Link: http:// files. liberty fund. org/ econtalk/ y2017/ Talebgame.mp3
The BBC did some kind of educational cartoon on Roman Britain and represented “diversity” in terms of someone looking African in the show as representative of “diversity” at the time. The BBC was effectively applying quotas retroactively (I mean, really retroactively). Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy. Effectively, scholarship is dead in the U.K.
Read the rest here: https: // medium. com/ incerto/ something- is- broken- in- the- uk- intellectual- sphere- 7efc9a1f154a
The current narrative (and, I am not joking, given by “experts” in international relations, etc.) is that the Lebanese Christians, like inhabitants of the Maghreb, picked up French from something called “French colonialism”. But the French only spent two decades in Lebanon, replacing the Ottomans after the great war, a period during which it was a “mandate”, something like a concession. Unlike the Maghreb, there was no settlers, no nothing. And not one noticed that the French language was heavily ingrained in the Christian bourgeoisie during the Ottoman Empire.
Take the Titanic. Among the passengers sunk in 1912 (hence before “colonialism”) are the following Lebanese names: Eugénie Baqlini, Catherine Dawud, Helene Barbara, Charles Tannous, Marie-Sophie Abrahim. A decade before the French army arrived. And my own family has among those, born before 1920, names such as Marcel, Edouard, Angele, Laure, Evelyne, Mathilde, Victoire (later adapted to Victoria), Philomene, etc. My mother was named after her aunt, Minerve (born 1905). Many archaic French names.
Read the rest here: https: // medium. com/ @nntaleb/ when- did- lebanese- christians- start- speaking- french- 771603969932
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Skin in the Game: Silent asymmetries in Daily Life
— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) July 19, 2017
Skin in the Game
A The Invisible Matrix of Daily Life
B The Hidden Symmetry in Daily Life
C Silent asymmetries in Daily Life— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) July 19, 2017
Playing with the most representative title
— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) July 18, 2017
For fat tailed distributions, the empirical distributions does not reflect the true statistical properties, particularly for extremes. This is a simplified side note to a paper with Mark Spitznagel on why people make a mistake by looking at raw historical data as “empiricism”.
So I am fed up with academics who say “we know it is fat tails” yet not understand the consequences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a recent co-authored paper on the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of the Precautionary Principle. Taleb contrasts harm with ruin and explains how the differences imply different rules of behavior when dealing with the risk of each. Taleb argues that when considering the riskiness of GMOs, the right understanding of statistics is more valuable than expertise in biology or genetics. The central issue that pervades the conversation is how to cope with a small non-negligible risk of catastrophe.
Link: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Precautionary Principle and Genetically Modified Organisms
We use fragility theory to show the effect of size and response to uncertainty, how distributed decision-making creates more apparent volatility, but ensures long term survival of a system. Simply, economies of scale are more than offset by stochastic diseconomies from shocks and there is such a thing as a “sweet spot” in optimal size. We show how city-states fare better than large states, how mice and small species are more robust than elephants, and how the canton mechanism can potentially solve Near Eastern problems.
This talk was part of “Cities and Development: Urban Determinants of Success” — the NYU Development Research Institute’s 2014 Conference, hosted jointly with the Marron Institute of Urban Management. The conference touched on the role of cities in the development process.
Originally published May 24th 2014
Sornette vs. Taleb Diametrically Opposite Approaches to Risk & Predictability
Quickly recorded. You do not decrease tail risk by increasing benefits, you decrease tail risk by decreasing tail risk.
On GMOs: “A pound of algebra is worth a ton of verbal commentary”. I managed to fit the Precautionary Principle into a few lines. The GMO paid propagandists are pounding tons of verbalistic statements (even an incompetent smear campaign), but this simple summary should cancel about everything they are trying to say. In a single column. They need to refute my representation or show that f(breeding) has the same maximum as f(GMOs).