Monthly Archives: January 2012

Taleb on Antifragility | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty

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I’ve been waiting for this!

Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about antifragility, the concept behind Taleb’s next book, a work in progress. Taleb talks about how we can cope with our ignorance and uncertainty in a complex world. Topics covered include health, finance, political systems, the Fed, your career, Seneca, shame, heroism, and a few more.

“A Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”

via Taleb on Antifragility | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty.

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Response | 2012 Annual Question | Edge

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Hormesis Is Redundancy

Nature is the master statistician and probabilist. It follows a certain logic based on layers of redundancies, as a central risk-management approach. Nature builds with extra spare parts (two kidneys), and extra capacity in many, many things (say lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus, etc.), while design by humans tend to be spare, overoptimized, and have the opposite attribute of redundancy, that is, leverage—we have a historical track record of engaging in debt, which is the reverse of redundancy (fifty thousand in extra cash in the bank or, better, under the mattress, is redundancy; owing the bank an equivalent amount is debt).

via By Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Response | 2012 Annual Question | Edge.
HatTip to Dave Lull.

Apocalypse How? Dire 2012 Forecasts: Pessimistic Prognosticators – Bloomberg

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The author of the best-selling 2007 book “The Black Swan,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb said last June that the U.S.’s debt situation was worse than that of Greece. “The difference between Europe and the U.S. is the consciousness of the problem,” Taleb said in September. He warned the world’s predicament is more dire than in 2008. “And, we will pay a higher price,” he said in October. “We haven’t done anything constructive in three and a half years. Nobody wants to do anything drastic now.” Asked about these statements, Taleb wrote in an Jan. 12 email: “These are not predictions but statements of riskiness.”

via Apocalypse How? Dire 2012 Forecasts: Pessimistic Prognosticators – Bloomberg.