For a free person, the optimal – most opportunistic – route between two points should never be the shortest one.
For a free person, the optimal…
Leave a reply
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Handle Without Care: TJ Strydom Reviews Antifragile by Nassim Taleb | Books LIVE
By TJ Strydom for The Times
Many people wish Lebanese-born American thinker Nassim Taleb would redesign the world economy, rebooting it like a computer, making it more durable to shocks, panic and unforeseen tragedies.
In his new book, Antifragile, he makes it clear that he won’t, and that no one should even try.
He distinguishes between three concepts: fragility, robustness and antifragility. Anyone who has ever dropped an anvil on an iPad knows that the first is robust, and the second is fragile. Fragile things can stop working even if a small part is damaged. Robust things seem able to withstand any assault, but over time a tiny crack or a spot of rust will grow into something devastating.
The only way to stand the test of time, according to Taleb, is to be “antifragile”. It is the term he coins for “a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, shocks, stressors and volatility”.
via Handle Without Care: TJ Strydom Reviews Antifragile by Nassim Taleb | Books LIVE.
No, Small Probabilities are Not ‘Attractive to Sell’: A Comment by Nassim Taleb :: SSRN
No, Small Probabilities are Not ‘Attractive to Sell’: A Comment (revised)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
NYU-Poly
January 5, 2013
Financial Analysts Journal, Forthcoming
Abstract: Owing to the convexity of the payoff of out-of-the money options, an extremely small probability of a large deviation unseen in past data justifies rationally buying them, or at least justifies excessive caution in not being exposed to them, particularly those options that are extremely nonlinear in response to market movement or changes in implied volatility. One needs, for instance, a minimum of 2000 years of stock market data to assert that some tail options are “expensive.” The paper presents errors in Ilmanen 2012, which provides an exhaustive list of all arguments in favor of selling insurance on small probability events. The paper goes beyond Ilmanen 2012 and suggests an approach to analyze the payoff and risks of options based on the nonlinearities in the tails.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 6
via No, Small Probabilities are Not ‘Attractive to Sell’: A Comment by Nassim Taleb :: SSRN.
Nassim Taleb Jewish Community Center of San Francisco 12/11/12
It was published Jan. 9, 2013
In his global bestseller The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued that rare, unpredictable events have the greatest impact on our lives—and that our blindness to these random events has a price. Now he returns with Antifragile, a bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error as an antidote to our fragile way of life, instead of trying to avoid mistakes and collapsing when catastrophe strikes.Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:11 — 25.7MB)
Would you rather be an honorable person…
Would you rather be an honorable person perceived to be a fraudster, or a fraudster mistaken for an honorable person? The answer can help you understand why otherwise good people do devious things to avoid standing up against prevailing beliefs.