[Video] Nassim Taleb speaking at the Rafael del Pino Foundation

Rafael del Pino Foundation organized, on July 3, 2013, the keynote of Nassim Nicholas Taleb titled “Antifrágil. Las cosas que se benefician del desorden” (Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder) on the occasion of the presentation of his work with the same title.

Preview: Entrevista. Antifrágil. Las cosas que se benefician del desorden

Full talk: Conferencia. Antifrágil. Las cosas que se benefician del desorden.

Nassim Taleb replies to Brian Eno: The Artangel Longplayer Letters

The Artangel Longplayer Letters:

From: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York.
To: Stewart Brand, Sausalito

3 July 2013

Dear Stewart,
I would like to reply to Brian Eno’s important letter by proposing a methodology to deal with risks to our planet, and I chose you because of your Long Now mission.

First let us put forward the Principle of Fragility As Nonlinear (Concave) Response as a central idea that touches about anything.

Read the rest: http:// longplayer. org/ what/ whatelse/ letters.php

Paper: Problem with Economics

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb Facebook Page:

Friends, I am presenting this document (summary of recent work) explaining what is wrong with economics models at a conference in France (which is not fully infected with the Anglo-American disease).
Please let me know if you find mistakes as I cut/pasted from *Fat Tails & Fragility*.

https:// dl. drop box user content. com/ u/ 50282823/ Problems%20 with%20 Economics.pdf

A Brief Exposition of Violations of Scientific Rigor In Current Economic Modeling

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
NYU-Poly Institute

July 2013

This is a brief summary of the problems discussed in philosophical terms in The Black Swan and Antifragile with a more mathematical exposition in Fat Tails and Antifragility (2013). Most of the text was excerpted from the latter book.

Note that this is not a critique of modern economic modeling from outside, but from within, using mathematics to put the methods claimed under scrutiny.

The message is simple: focus on measurable robustness to model error and convex heuristics, instead of relying on “scientific” measurements and models. For these measurements tend to cause blowups. And we can measure fragility, not quite statistical risks.

Bed of Procrustes

Nassim Taleb talks to Margareta Pagano in The Independent about banking, Babylon and birdsong

the-independantLong article in The Independent Nassim Taleb: ‘The Black Swan’ author in praise of the risk-takers, some excerpts:

 

“If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.”

“I’m a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge. We also need to look after the less well-off – so they have skin in the game too. Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.”

“Small is powerful. We should be breaking up the big bureaucratic corporations; use anti-trust laws as Roosevelt did in the US.”
His reasoning is deliciously simple: “It’s much easier to bullshit at the macro-level than it is to bullshit at the micro-level.”

“No public servant or politician should profit more from private business than they earned before. You know who are the worst? Robert Rubin (ex-US Treasury Secretary who made $120m at Citibank) and your Tony Blair. It’s outrageous how they have profited.”

“Top-down knowledge is an illusion. Education without erudition is nothing. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education – I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.”

For him, the ancients had the right notions of justice. “You know Hammurabi’s Code? Well, he was the Babylonian king whose laws were based on an ” eye for an eye” – or lex talionis. So, if a builder built a house and the house collapsed and caused the death of the owner of the house – the builder was put to death. And so on.”

Much has been written about what the paradoxical Taleb doesn’t like. So what does he enjoy? “Aah,” he says, pondering while getting into position for our photographer, whose south London accent he admires, and wishes he had had while trading options: “Walking, anywhere, around cities or the country, running (in five-finger shoes), sitting in cafés listening to chatter, parties, working in my study in the New York suburbs, listening to the birds, to the noises of the countryside, the mathematics of Steve Wolfram, Andalucian music, philology and the history of the Mediterranean and now the Maghreb. That’s my new obsession.” Watch out.

New Nassim Taleb paper with Phil Tetlock on SSRN: On the Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure, with Implications for Forecasting Tournaments and Prediction Markets

ssrn-logoTaleb, Nassim Nicholas and Tetlock, Philip E., On the Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure, with Implications for Forecasting Tournaments and Prediction Markets (June 25, 2013). Available at SSRN: http:// papers. ssrn. com/ sol3/ papers.cfm? abstract_id= 2284964

Abstract:
There are serious differences between predictions, bets, and exposures that have a yes/no type of payoff, the “binaries”, and those that have varying payoffs, which we call the “vanilla”. Real world exposures tend to belong to the vanilla category, and are poorly captured by binaries. Vanilla exposures are sensitive to Black Swan effects, model errors, and prediction problems, while the binaries are largely immune to them. The binaries are mathematically tractable, while the vanilla are much less so. Hedging vanilla exposures with binary bets can be disastrous–and because of the human tendency to engage in attribute substitution when confronted by difficult questions, decision-makers and researchers often confuse the vanilla for the binary.

From Nassim’s Facebook Page:

New paper with Phil Tetlock on the difference between the Thalesian and the Aristotelian: On the Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure, With Implications For Forecasting Tournaments and Prediction Markets.

Link to paper (PDF): http:// papers. ssrn. com/ sol3/ Delivery. cfm/ SSRN_ID2284964_code475810.pdf? abstractid=2284964&mirid=1