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RSA: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Antifragile

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RSA Keynote

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of ‘The Black Swan’ and one of the most radical and iconoclastic thinkers of our times, visits the RSA to reveal how to thrive in an uncertain world.

In ‘The Black Swan’, Taleb showed that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In his new book Antifragile, he provides a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Standing uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, Taleb proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine, in Taleb’s uniquely interdisciplinary and erudite style.

At the RSA, Nassim Taleb will show how the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events, and will consider a number of critical questions, such as: why is the city-state better than the nation-state; why is debt bad for you; why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all; and why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak?

Speaker: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and author of ‘Antifragile: how to live in a world we don’t understand’ (Allen Lane, 2012).

Discussant: Rohan Silva, senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister at No 10 Downing Street.

Chair: Fraser Nelson, editor, The Spectator

Link: http:// www. thersa. org/ events/ audio- and- past- events/ 2012/ antifragile
Full podcast including audience Q&A:
http:// www. thersa. org/__data/ assets/ file/ 0006/ 999816/ 20121206 NassimNicholasTaleb. mp3
www. thersa. org/ events/ audio- and- past- events/ 2012/ antifragile

Nassim Taleb: More Skin in the Game in 2013

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“Those who have the upside are not necessarily those who incur the downside. For example, bankers and corporate managers get bonuses for “performance,” but not reverse bonuses for negative performance, and they have an incentive to bury risks in the tails of the distribution –& in other words, to delay blowups.

The ancients were fully aware of this incentive to hide risks,& and implemented very simple but potent heuristics. About 3,800 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi specified that if a house collapses and causes the death of its owner, the house’s builder shall be put to death.”

Link: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/improving-managers–incentives-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb

Rana Mitter talks to Nassim Taleb to test the robustness of his ideas, on Night Waves (BBC)

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BBC-Radio-3-logoNassim Taleb, the banker-turned-philosopher who predicted the financial collapse of 2008, has been called ‘the hottest thinker in the world’. His internationally bestselling book, The Black Swan, was about the impact of rare, unpredictable events. In his latest book he expands on this theory and comes up with the concept of ‘antifragile’ – the idea that through small shocks and surprises humans (and financial systems) can become more than robust – they can thrive and become antifragile. But critics have labelled this theory ‘antisocial’. Rana Mitter meets Nassim Taleb to test the robustness of his ideas, on Night Waves, at 10pm.

Audio Link: http:// www. bbc. co. uk/ programmes/ b01nzq6p

Nassim Taleb discusses Antifragile on Kojo Nnamdi Show

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Kojo-Nnamdi-Show-logo

From the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to the 2008 financial collapse, many of the most consequential events in recent history caught government and investors off guard. In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb provided a highly influential framework for explaining, and adapting to, these unpredictable shocks to political and financial systems, with his book “The Black Swan.” His latest work, “Antifragile,” expands on his theory of the unknown to explain how we can succeed and thrive in a world ruled by disorder.

Link: http:// the kojonnamdi show. org/ shows/ 2012-12-03/ antifragile- things- gain- disorder

Direct Audio Link: http:// the kojonnamdi show. org/ audio-player?nid= 22510