Discovery Invest will once again bring to South Africa some of the world’s most impressive business minds, to share their secrets and insights. Click on the thumbnail images below to view the full profiles of the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit speakers.
The Discovery Invest Leadership Summit will be taking place in Johannesburg at Sandton Convention Centre on 11 August 2010.
Adrian Gore
Chief Executive of Discovery Holdings
Nassim Taleb
Author of The Black Swan
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This Month |
Last Month |
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| 1 | THE TIPPING POINT, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.95.) How and why certain products and ideas become fads.) | 2 | |
| 2 | FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) A maverick scholar and a journalist apply economic theory to everything from cheating sumo wrestlers to the falling crime rate. | 3 | |
| 3 | THE BLIND SIDE, by Michael Lewis. (Norton, $13.95.) The evolving business of football, viewed through the rise of the left tackle Michael Oher. | 1 | |
| 4* | THE BLACK SWAN, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (Random House, $17.) The hubris of predictions — and our perpetual surprise when the not-predicted happens. | 4 | |
| 5 | LIAR’S POKER, by Michael Lewis. (Norton, $15.95.) Wall Street’s tumultuous 1980s, as witnessed by a young bond trader. | 6 | |
| 6 | PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, by Dan Ariely. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) The hidden forces that shape our decisions. | 7 | |
| 7* | LORDS OF FINANCE, by Liaquat Ahamed. (Penguin, $18.) How four central bankers pushed the global economy into the Great Depression. | ||
| 8 | SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT, by Matthew B. Crawford. (Penguin, $15.) A philosopher on what manual labor can teach about the world and oneself. | 5 | |
| 9 | THE FIRST TYCOON, by T. J. Stiles. (Vintage, $19.95.) The biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. | ||
| 10 | THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES, by Ben Mezrich. (Anchor, $15.95.) How two Harvard undergraduates created Facebook. | 8 | |
nntaleb: My idea is to be aggressive risk-taker in the 3 quadrants & extremely prudent in the 4th; establishment does reverse http://TwitPWR.com/LoJ/
[Links to Errors, Robustness, and the Fourth Quadrant ]
It nearly came 2 fisticuffs @ #Politics&Prose Thurs.when N.Taleb called academics schmucks.Yelling & profanity ensued.Will CSpan air fight?
What separates Taleb from the “enlightened ones” is his aggressive activism that lets him bash the highest authority of any given domain such as presidents, lawmakers, bankers, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, professors, economists and Nobel laureates, proving them wrong face-to-face in mass media.
[G]
He is the living application and proof of his beliefs, and his courage to insult authority, for as long as he has damning evidence, empowers the small fries who have been silenced for so long. For the first time in years it’s exciting to watch the news again. You can easily imagine Taleb suddenly popping out of nowhere, calling bullshit on forecasts and predictions by governments and corporations and other institutions.
[H]
What I loved the most among Taleb’s entertaining narratives was on “How to Spot a Phony”:
If you hear an “expert” bring up Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to explain unpredictability, he is a phony. The quantum indeterminacy of subatomic particles average out in classical objects through the Law of Large Numbers, which isn’t even near the complexity of predicting how a butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi can create a hurricane in New Orleans, even within a deterministic universe.