Monthly Archives: February 2013

Nassim Taleb is hosting a book party – Upcoming Events at Book Culture NYC

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On Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm Nassim Taleb is hosting a book party.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 20 years as a derivatives trader before starting a full-time career as a scholar of applied probability and risk management. Taleb’s current program is to build rules of decision-making under incomplete information and understanding, and to make political and economic systems robust to Black Swan problems. In his groundbreaking and prophetic book, Black Swan, Taleb shows in a playful way that black swan events explain almost everything about our world.

via Upcoming Events at Book Culture.

Friends, comments are invited for this draft…

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Friends, comments are invited for this draft on a philosophy paper w/ Constantine Sandis, “ETHICS AND ASYMMETRY: SKIN IN THE GAME AS A REQUIRED HEURISTIC FOR ACTING UNDER UNCERTAINTYC. Sandis & N.N. Taleb
Abstract: We propose a global and mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action that can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. We link the rule to various philosophical approaches to ethics and moral luck. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SandisTaleb.pdf

via Friends, comments… | Facebook.

Virtue is the attribute that brings admiration but…

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Virtue is the attribute that brings admiration but cannot elicit envious resentment or jealousy.

COMMENT: “Success”, “performance”, the so-called “excellence” and other goals in modern culture harm others, & belittles them -but courage, temperance, wisdom, & generosity don’t. If you follow this logic, you should never (Lebanese grandmother-style) push people to “succeed”, since it will put a shadow on others, and harm the collective (or themselves in the event of failure), rather nudge them to produce acts of courage for the sake of the general good, such as, say, standing up against fraudsters-hiding-in-groups, such as economists, banksters, and econ journalists. (Note to dispel an ancient confusion: There is no conflict between courage for the sake of the collective and the great virtue of prudence, since prudence is the courage of the general).

via Virtue is the….

Fragility, Robustness and Antifragility – NNT Video – National Science Foundation

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Audio

Everything in life has nonlinear responses, from medical treatments to project management, for both benefits and harm (medical and economic iatrogenics). The talk introduces the concept of fragility and antifragility and maps them to nonlinearities in life and decision making. The presentation is adapted from Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.