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?
ETHICS AND ASYMMETRY: SKIN IN THE GAME AS A REQUIRED HEURISTIC FOR ACTING UNDER UNCERTAINTY
From Nassim Taleb’s Facebook Page:
Friends, comments are invited for this draft on a philosophy paper w/ Constantine Sandis, “ETHICS AND ASYMMETRY: SKIN IN THE GAME AS A REQUIRED HEURISTIC FOR ACTING UNDER UNCERTAINTY
C. Sandis & N.N. Taleb
Abstract: We propose a global and mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action that can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. We link the rule to various philosophical approaches to ethics and moral luck.
Link to Paper: http://www. fooled by randomness. com/ SandisTaleb.pdf
Link to Facebook Discussion: https://www. facebook. com/ permalink.php? story_fbid= 515541175165176&id=13012333374
Nassim Taleb at the National Science Foundation (NSF) talk Fragility, Robustness and Antifragility
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.
RSA: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Antifragile
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
“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
Al Jazeera English: Nassim Taleb on The Stream – Embracing ‘Antifragility’
Essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb on how we can benefit from disorder.
GoogleTalks: Authors@Google Presents Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Authors@Google is proud to present Nassim N. Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, talking about his new book.