Monthly Archives: April 2010

EconTalk – De Vany on Evolutionary Fitness

1 Reply
MARCH 29, 2010

De Vany on Steroids, Baseball, and Evolutionary Fitness

Arthur De Vany

Hosted by Russ Roberts

Arthur De Vany, of the University of California, Irvine, and creator of Evolutionary Fitness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and Evolutionary Fitness, De Vany’s ideas about diet and fitness. In the first part of the conversation, De Vany argues that there is little physiological or statistical evidence that steroid use increases home run totals in baseball. The second part of the conversation turns to De Vany’s theories of diet and exercise. De Vany argues that our diet and exercise regime should take account of our evolutionary origins, an earlier time when we ate no grains and our exercise was a mix of intense activity punctuated by much milder activity. He argues that jogging is unhealthy and that we would live longer and feel better if we followed a different exercise routine than most Americans do today.

Time: 1:05:44

Download

Size: 30.1 MB
Right-click or Option-click, and select “Save Link/Target As MP3.

 

Nassim Taleb

Leave a reply

Nassim Taleb advocates putting 85% your investment fund in t-bills or other very low risk investments and then take the remaining 15% and place it in a variety of highly speculative investments. He also advocates that you choose a non-scalable career since a dentist drilling teeth for 30 years can do well while somebody who takes up a scalable career like a business owner, actor, or writer etc has a very small chance of success and a high chance of failure.

Maybe it would be a better idea to devote 85% of your working hours to a non-scalable career and 15% of your time to a scalable career like a business owner. That way you can reliable make steady cashflow but also put yourself in a position where you can experience cash windfalls.

Anyway if you want to get better at baseball you’re still much more likely to if you practice correctly everyday.

And you should never do something as a means to an end because your success could be beyond control and lifes to short. Instead practice baseball or whatever because you enjoy the process. Enjoy what you are doing now and let go of the outcome.

Nassim Taleb Asked Me To Rip Apart His New Chapter — I Need Your Help

Leave a reply

Yesterday on Twitter*, Nassim Taleb asked me to rip apart the new chapter of his book that he’s posted online.

But since nobody is better at ripping things apart than you — our readers — I thought I’d open it up and crowdsource the job. So, take a look, and enter your shots in the comments.

*apparently he’s deleted the Tweet, so I only have my retweet.

Robustness

nntaleb: Chap from the nw essay on ROBUSTNESS & FRAGILITY (2nd Ed of TH BLCK SWN in US/UK, sprt bk in Eu/Asia) http://TwitPWR.com/GmF/ [Fixed]

Leave a reply

nntaleb: Chap from the nw essay on ROBUSTNESS & FRAGILITY (2nd Ed of TH BLCK SWN in US/UK, sprt bk in Eu/Asia) http://TwitPWR.com/GmF/ pdf download [Fixed]


Loved this- really, so many of our mistakes seem to lead simply from the poor choice of words.
Pg.320:

For consider the opposite: differences without a distinction. They can be brutally misleading. People use the same term, measuring, for measuring a table using a ruler, and for measuring risk—when the second is a forecast, or something of the sort. And the word measuringconveys an illusion of knowledge that can be severely distorting: we will see that we are psychologically very vulnerable to terms used and how things are framed. So if we used measuringfor the table, and forecastingfor risk, we would have fewer turkeys blowing up from Black Swans.

For those of us who have been following NNT’s Tweets, this will sound familiar.

So I am currently torn between (a) my desire to spend time mulling my ideas in European cafés and in the tranquility of my study, or looking for someone who can have a conversation while walking slowly in a nice urban setting, and (b) the feeling of obligation to engage in activism to ro- bustify society, by talking to uninteresting people and being immersed in the cacophony of the unaesthetic journalistic and media world, going to Washington to watch phonies in suits walking around the streets, having to defend my ideas while making an effort to be smooth and hide my dis- respect.