To continue with the mismapping and mental displacement caused by press. The process of making mice look like elephants, has, as a necessary side effect, the result of turning real elephants into mice.
ON OVERCOMPENSATION -One trick when giving lectures. I have been told by conference organizers and other rationalistic, empirically challenged fellows that one needs to be clear, deliver a crisp message, maybe even dance on the stage to get the attention of the crowd. Or speak with the fake articulations of T.V. announcers. Charlatans try sending authors to “speech school”. None of that. I find it better to whisper, not shout. Better to slightly unaudible, less clear. Acquire a strange accent. One should make the audience work to listen, and switch to intellectual overdrive. In spite of these rules of thumb by the conference industry, there is no evidence that demand for a speaker is linked to the TV-announcer quality of his lecturing. And the most powerful, at a large gathering, tends to be the one with enough self-control to avoid raising his voice to be noticed, and make others listen to him.
When Taleb held a public discussion with Cameron about debt two years ago, the admiration was mutual. Taleb described the then opposition leader as ‘the best thing we have left on this planet’. Even now he stands by that assessment. ‘I saw in him, then, someone who wants to rebuild society along the right model. Cameron was the first leader to grasp that deficits are dangerous.’ But this was two years ago. Our conversation moves on to what has happened since.
British economic output is forecast to grow by £100 billion over the next four years, I put it to him, but with a corresponding increase in the national debt of £360 billion. The analogy Taleb reaches for is not flattering. ‘In any Ponzi scheme, there is great growth initially,’ he says. ‘Then you have to pay it back.
’But he’s quick to add that Cameron had limited choices. ‘Debt may be necessary for a while, you don’t want to create great social disruption.’ He can talk about the economic danger of high debt, but recognises there is also political danger in austerity. ‘I try to stay outside immediate debates. I talk about structure that we should arrive at, not what should be done tomorrow morning.’
A simple exercise to understand why the world represented by the press is not the one in which we live: Consider that about 6,200 persons die every day in the United States, many from preventable causes. Compare to what people think from exposure to the media hurricanes, murders, freak accidents, etc.. Then generalize to about anything discussed in the press. Then call any journalist you run into a fraud.
Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology
Neil Johnson, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Jing Meng, Amith Ravindar, Spencer Carran, Brian Tivnan
Submitted on 7 Feb 2012
Society’s drive toward ever faster socio-technical systems, means that there is an urgent need to understand the threat from ‘black swan’ extreme events that might emerge. On 6 May 2010, it took just five minutes for a spontaneous mix of human and machine interactions in the global trading cyberspace to generate an unprecedented system-wide Flash Crash. However, little is known about what lies ahead in the crucial sub-second regime where humans become unable to respond or intervene sufficiently quickly. Here we analyze a set of 18,520 ultrafast black swan events that we have uncovered in stock-price movements between 2006 and 2011. We provide empirical evidence for, and an accompanying theory of, an abrupt system-wide transition from a mixed human-machine phase to a new all-machine phase characterized by frequent black swan events with ultrafast durations <650ms for crashes, <950ms for spikes.
via [1202.1448] Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology.