This is a little bit all over the place and it seems like there should be more (states that NNT will be with them for the whole hour)…
Taleb on `Antifragile’ Book, U.S. Shootings, Market Bloomberg TV
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Monthly Archives: December 2012
This Is Not a Profile of Nassim Taleb – The Chronicle Review
I had lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It didn’t go well.
We met at a French cafe in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, not far from Columbia University. It was a meeting more than a year in the making. I first e-mailed him when his book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, was published to see if he might submit to an interview. This, I realized, was a long shot. Taleb, best known as the author of The Black Swan, a book about how we underestimate the improbable, isn’t much for interviews and regards most journalists as fools and phonies, right alongside professional academics and bureaucrats. I didn’t expect to hear back.
via This Is Not a Profile of Nassim Taleb – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Seth’s Blog » Best Books of the Year 2012
2. Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder by Nassim Taleb copy sent me by author. Full of original ideas. It may be unprecedented that a serious thinker so anti-establishment has so loud a voice. Much of the book is about a generalization of hormesis, the observation that a small amount of Treatment X can be beneficial even though a large amount of Treatment X is deadly. For example, a small amount of smoking is probably good for you. Taleb goes beyond this to say that in some things, the hormetic benefit the benefit from small amounts is much larger than in other similar things. You can fulfill the same function governance, banking, science with a system where the entities benefit a lot from small shocks which Taleb calls “anti-fragile” or a system where the entities benefit not at all from small shocks. Systems where small shocks cause benefits tend to suffer less when exposed to large shocks.
via Seth’s Blog » Blog Archive » Best Books of the Year 2012.
HatTip to Dave Lull
SUSPENDED COMMENTS FOR 12 HOURS.
SUSPENDED COMMENTS FOR 12 HOURS.
So to continue, let us examine the arguments against gun control…
So to continue, let us examine the arguments against gun control, one by one. 1) Argument of self defense: mass murder weapons like automatic rifles is not compatible with “self defense” (“mass” in that context =weapons that can kill >4 persons). 2) Argument of government tyranny: Why don’t gun advocates fight for the right of private citizens to own large tanks and atomic weapons? A semi/automatic rifle is too potent for self defense, and too weak against government tyranny. Its main use is on innocent crowds and, typically, schoolchildren.
via So to continue, let….