Taleb around the Web

» Property Soul, Notes from a Singapore property investor writes Six reasons why property is not an antifragile investment after meeting Nassim at his recent talk there.

» Zero Hedge talks Antifragility on Prepared? When Ebola hits your town you will want to be antifragile.

» Nouriel Roubini on CNBC reveals his black swan scenarios.

» Business Insider names Nassim one of The 25 Most Successful Wharton Business School Graduates.

» Antifragility explored when applied to raising children on Why Parents Inadvertently Hinder The Success Of Their Children on Forbes.

» Lorin Hochstein discusses the fragile side of cloud software concluding the “future of cloud software is systems that fail much less often, but much harder” on Cloud software, fragility and Air France 447.

Got any other links? Let us know in the comments!

[PODCAST] The Wharton School: Nassim Taleb on Living with Black Swans (2011)

Knowledge@Wharton: Nassim Taleb on Living with Black Swans

Nassim Taleb is a literary essayist, hedge fund manager, derivatives trader and professor of risk engineering at The Polytechnic Institute of New York University. But he is best known these days as the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. During a recent visit to Wharton as part of The Goldstone Forum, he spoke with Wharton finance professor Richard Herring — who taught Taleb when he was a Wharton MBA student — about events in the Middle East, the oil supply, investing in options, the U.S. economy, the dollar, health care and of course, black swans.

Small is Beautiful

Take a look at Nassim’s Small is Beautiful: Risk, Scale and Concentration.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: RISK, SCALE AND CONCENTRATION

Chapter Summary 17: We extract the effect of size on the degradation of the expectation of a random variable, from nonlinear response. The method is general and allows to show the “small is beautiful” or “decentralized is effective” or “a diverse ecology is safer” effect from a response to a stochastic stressor and prove stochastic diseconomies of scale and concentration (with as example the Irish potato famine and GMOs). We apply the methodology to environmental harm using standard sigmoid dose-response to show the need to split sources of pollution across independent (nonsynergetic) pollutants.

Nassim Posts Document on Skepticism and How Uncertainty Should Actually Lead to More Conservationism

Nassim recently posted a document called “Skepticism” on Facebook.

He had this to say about it:

Something people don’t get: more skepticism about climate models should lead to more “green” ecological conservationist policies not more lax pro-pollution ones. Why? Simply, uncertainty about the models increases fragility (and thickens the left tail), no matter what the benefits can be in the right tail.
Added the section to the precautionary principle. Please discuss but stick to rigor and avoid buzzwords. (Also do not think that the idea is falling from the sky: it is a mere application of the fragility theorems).