You can almost certainly extract a “yes” from someone who says “no” to you, never from someone who says nothing.

via You can almost certainly extract a “yes”… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.

My new program. There is a systematic way to capture the difference between the mathematical properties of the “real world” and those of the “academic” one (in the bad sense of the word), or the difference between “textbooks” and “reality”, and even track the effects of too much certainty in a belief system. It looks like model errors, model uncertainty, and overconfidence lead to underestimation of fat tails, and we know where to correct for it.

For instance we know that the law of large numbers requires MORE observations that what we find in textbooks, etc.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html

via My new program. There is a systematic… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.

The best way to strengthen something is to complain about it. Complaining about bankers, politicians, Harvard, etc., is signaling their robustness: everyone complains yet they are still there, so there has to be something to their existence.

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People need to see action, not complaint. Instead you need to move, do something, establish competing circuits to harm their directly (MOOC, classes on nonacademic risk management, or call for some kind of punishment (preferably legal, like sue the Nobel), then people will join you after they start seeing blood.

via The best way to strengthen something is… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.

Journalists are responsible for changing the culture of risk taking by pointing at “mistakes” by others, seen retrospectively, in both business and science: “Einstein’s Big Mistake”, “Joe Smith’s Failure”, etc. Academic halfmen are st scared of someone pointing at a “mistake” they made somewhere and people justifiably for all they are selling is reputation not results see how scared Pinker is of my disclosure of the flaws in his statistical claims. Regular people are starting to behave like academic halfmen. Yet I can count that I made 600,000 trading “mistakes” during my active business life and if I have a regret, it is that I didn’t make more.
In business, if you survived a mistake, it was not a mistake.Which brings me to the fundamental concept of a heuristic: it is not judged by “right” or “wrong”, but ONLY at the costs of being wrong.

via Journalists are responsible for changing… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.