[Twitter] A mini tutorial explaining the #FooledbyRandomness point

Mistakes often made in the interpretation of R^2 beyond the standard textbook by people who haven’t studied the ‘Fooled by Randomness’ effect on parameters of distribution, particularly when samples are small.

[Bloomberg Podcasts] Nassim Taleb on What Bitcoiners, Anti-Vaxxers, and Deadlift Maxis All Get Wrong

In this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast episode, hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway have a wide-ranging conversation with Nassim Taleb, well-known author of Antifragile, The Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness. Taleb has been engaging in public debates on Twitter with various communities such as Bitcoiners, anti-vaxxers, venture capitalists, and deadlifters. The discussion covers topics such as Taleb’s clash with these communities and what they’re getting wrong about his ideas, as well as his newfound passion for cycling and how to reduce tail risk in one’s own life. Join us for this engaging conversation on finance, economics, and markets.

[YouTube] Disinformation and Fooled by Randomness

We are not naturally good at dealing with information.

Disinformation artists confuse you by focusing on noise over signal by playing on saliency, the same effect as the one discussed in Fooled by Randomness. We mistake the particular for the general, details for the ensemble, and noise for signal –all from the same mental bias.

Fake Regression by Psychologists

Fake Regression by Psychologists (Fooled by Randomness), Based on the paper on Trust by Nicolas Baumard

How to detect fake regressions. Never pay attention to numbers before looking at the graph.

First I show how to spot fakes in a sinister paper by Nicolas Baumard et. al. linking people’s physical traits to (un)trusworthiness.

Second, more technically, I derive the distribution of the slope between two random variables and show how one can game it.

[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.