Monthly Archives: December 2012

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: My Letter Addressing the Guardian’s Distortions (2009)

From 2009, revisited in context of recent Guardian reviews.

I used to think that the US press was guilty of distortions. Recent events changed my mind, as UK anti-Cameron papers tried to cut and paste from my talk to weaken him by trying to demonize me. The problem is that they got my ideas backwards on every single point. Such lack of ethics, I am certain, would have never happened in the US. Here is my letter to the Guardian:

***

Dear sirs,

I am extremely honored to see my conversation with MP David Cameron at the RSA so repeatedly covered in your paper. However I was astonished by the representations that you made as they were in complete reverse to my positions on three subjects: the environment, market crashes, and taxation of the rich…

via Nassim Nicholas Taleb: My Letter Addressing the Guardian’s Distortions.

Friends, this is what I got. Wrote the beginning…

Friends, this is what I got. Wrote the beginning. For comments.

NEITHER STATE NOR MARKET. The fiscal cliff is not really a “cliff”; the entire country will not fall into the ocean should we hit it. This cliff is a bump, but a necessary one, and the fear it instills should jolt us into solving the problems of both taxation and deficit, and find inventive solutions. But deep down in me there is a wish to hit that cliff, in order to accelerate a remedy for our disease. We are in a situation of learned helplessness and it is imperative to break out of it. Anything is preferable to the situation we are in currently

via Friends, this is… | Facebook.

A paid reviewer who writes “this book should have been shorter” is like…

A paid reviewer who writes “this book should have been shorter” is like a prostitute complaining that her client is taking too long.

[Now adding APHORISMS.

I am having some fun translating book reviewer jargon, particularly from my experience with TBS. A real book should elicit a complaint about lack of immediately visible structure; so “messy” translates into “I don’t see the junk food equivalent (cliff note)”, hence this is a reading experience with surprises & atmosphere, not a textbook. Note that I intentionally made the INCERTO Trilogy completely impossible to speed-read by scanning & following subtitles. I caught a few cheaters (Tyler Cowen and Gregg Easterbrook) speedreading TBS. Remember the agency problem: the buyer doesn’t speedread; he wants to consume the product.]

via A paid reviewer who… | Facebook.

Amazon.com: N N Taleb’s review of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking…

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent exposition of overcompensation, December 9, 2012
By N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”
This review is from: The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust Hardcover
I read this book after completing my exposition of overcompensation, how a stressor or a random event causes an increase in strength, in excess of what is needed, like a redundancy. I was also looking for evidence of convex reaction to stressor, or the effect of a mathematical property called Jensen’s inequality in domains and found it exposed here in other words, why a combination low dose most of the time and high dose rarely beats medium dose all the time. The authors presents the evidence for the phenomenon in the following: 1 acute stressors cum recovery beat both absence of stressors and chronic ones; 2 stressors make one stronger post traumatic growth; 3 risk management is mediated by the deep structures in us, not rational decision-making; 4 winning causes an increase in strength the latter are more complicated effects of convexity/Jensen’s Inequality.Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one should seek the familiar.Bravo!

via Amazon.com: N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”‘s review of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking….
HatTip to Dave Lull