This debate with Niall Ferguson, CEO of Pepsico Indra Nooyi was detailed in the chapter “The Antifragility and Ethics of (Large) Corporations” in Antifragile. Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined the discussion towards the end. Walter Isaacson moderates.
Category: General
Nassim Taleb on Bitcoin: “Bitcoin is the beginning of something great”
In Nassim’s recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit he was asked about Bitcoin. His response:
Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.
But I am not familiar with the specific product to assert whether it is the best potential setup.
And we need a long time to establish confidence. I only talk from skin-in-the-game.
If I had money in bitcoin, I would have reported it. But I don’t yet.
I am waiting to understand it better, not with my brain, but with my experience…
Nassim Taleb Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit.com
Nassim has just completed a AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.com
I am interested in decision making under opacity (when we don’t know what’s going on) without being harmed by mistakes, disorder, and volatility, and be potentially helped by them. Antifragility at the gobal level is achieved through the skin in the game rule: people should be harmed by their mistakes if these harm others. At the personal (local) level… let’s discuss. Home Page (Verified on twitter @nntaleb)
Comment Correspondance: ‘Antifragility’ as a mathematical idea
Nassim Taleb’s response to Michael Shermer’s review of Antifragile in the science journal Nature:
In his review of my book Antifragile, Michael Shermer mischaracterizes the concept of ‘antifragility’ (Nature491, 523; 2012).
‘Fragility’ can be defined as an accelerating sensitivity to a harmful stressor: this response plots as a concave curve and mathematically culminates in more harm than benefit from random events. ‘Antifragility’ is the opposite, producing a convex response that leads to more benefit than harm.
We do not need to know the history and statistics of an item to measure its fragility or antifragility, or to be able to predict rare and random (‘black swan’) events. All we need is to be able to assess whether the item is accelerating towards harm or benefit. The relation of fragility, convexity and sensitivity to disorder is thus mathematical (N.N. Taleb and R. Douady Quant. Finance, in the press) and not derived from empirical data,
as Shermer implies.Shermer’s suggestion that I should offer “a checklist of things companies or countries can do to prepare for black-swan events” overlooks 50 or so such heuristics based on the identification of convex responses.
Nassim N. Taleb Polytechnic
Institute of New York University,
New York, USA.
PDF Link: http:// www. fooled by randomness. com/ nature-definition. pdf
Link on Nature.com: http:// www. nature. com/ nature/ journal/ v494/ n7438/ full/ 494430e. html
Michael Shermer’s Review: http:// www. nature. com/ nature/ journal/ v491/ n7425/ full/ 491523a.html
NNT Textbook: Probability, Risk and(Anti)fragility
From Nassim Taleb’s Facebook Page …
Friends, the new project: a linear TEXTBOOK on risk and (anti)fragility. I am putting all the relevant technical papers in linear textbook form. To bust current econometrics and similar frauds, and suggest replacement I need to put it in a complete technical textbook-style format targeted at the new generation of students in statistics (econometrics), risk, and social science.
The document will be freely available electronically. I think it will come out at the same time as the U.K. AF paperback in June.
Will post chapters here.
Nassim Taleb Book Party for Antifragile at Book Culture Bookstore (February 26th 2013)
Stop in on Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm for Nassim Taleb’s book party for Antifragile.
536 West 112th Street
Between Broadway and Amsterdam
New York, NY 10025-1601
Phone – 212-865-1588 Fax – 212-865-2749
[email protected]
Event link: http:// site. booksite. com/ 6665/ events/?& list=EVC1& group=current& preview=1
Facebook Discussion: https:// www. facebook. com/ permalink.php? story_fbid= 214165742061434& id=13012333374
Nassim Taleb Book Review: Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
Here is what I wrote in my endorsement: Emanuel Derman has written my kind of a book, an elegant combination of memoir, confession, and essay on ethics, philosophy of science and professional practice. He convincingly establishes the difference between model and theory and shows why attempts to model financial markets can never be genuinely scientific. It vindicates those of us who hold that financial modeling is neither practical nor scientific. Exceedingly readable.
From the remarks here, people seem to be blaming Derman for not having written the type of books they usually read… They are blaming him for being original! This is very philistinic. This book is a personal essay; if you don’t like it, don’t read it, there is no need to blame the author for not delivering your regular science reporting. Why don’t you go blame Montaigne for discussing his personal habits in the middle of a meditation on war inspired by Plutarch?
Nassim Taleb opinion piece on Wired.com
We’re more fooled by noise than ever before, and it’s because of a nasty phenomenon called “big data.” With big data, researchers have brought cherry-picking to an industrial level.
Modernity provides too many variables, but too little data per variable. So the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information.
In other words: Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.
Link: Beware the Big Errors of ‘Big Data’
http:// www. wired. com/ opinion/ 2013/ 02/ big- data- means- big-errors- people/
Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman at The New York Public Library (NYPL) 2013
Reason.tv: Nassim Taleb Talks Antifragile, Libertarianism, and Capitalism’s Genius for Failure
Taleb doesn’t identify as a libertarian, but he often sounds like one. He has argued that we need to build a society where major actors have “skin in the game” and our public intellectuals can bloviate without subjecting the rest of us to the consequences of their bad ideas. He supported Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential election and has cited the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek as an influence.
Taleb has called New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman “vile and harmful” and coined the phrase the “Stiglitz Syndrome” after Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, which refers to the phenomenon of public intellectuals being held utterly unaccountable for their bad predictions. Paul Krugman and Paul Samuelson are among Taleb’s other Nobel laureate bête noires.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from DisorderTaleb’s new book is Antifragile: Things that Gain with Disorder, which argues that in order to create robust institutions we must allow them to build resilience through adversity. The essence of capitalism, he argues, is encouraging failure, not rewarding success.
Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about why debt leads to fragility (5:16); the importance of “skin in the game” to a properly functioning financial system (10:45); why large banks should be nationalized (21:47); why technology won’t rule the future (24:20); the value of studying the classics (26:09); his intellectual adversaries (33:30); why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50); his intellectual influences (39:10); why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10); why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50); his libertarianism (47:30); and why he’ll never take writing advice from “some academic at Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies” (51:49).
Produced by Jim Epstein; camera by Epstein and Anthony L. Fisher.
Approximately 56 minutes.
Go to http:// reason. com/ reasontv/ 2013/ 01/ 20/ interview- with- nassim- nicholas- taleb for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube Channel to receive automatic updated when new material goes live.