The probabilistic argument for the effectiveness of nature in managing risk: What is fragile will eventually break and what is not will not… This is the argument that nature does not produce monstrous tail events that threaten its existence, with n=trillions of trillions … And why we should act WITHIN nature’s statistical properties.
And unless we have ZERO tolerance for stuff such as GMOs we can’t survive.
This is the reasoning behind it: kolmorogov’s zero-one law, Borel-Cantelli lemma, etc.
(There is a weak survivorship bias, I agree, but it has to be very weak.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov’s_zero–one_law

Kolmogorov’s zero–one law – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In probability theory, Kolmogorov’s zero–one law, named in honor of Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, specifies that a certain type of event, called a tail event, will either almost surely happen or almost surely not happen; that is, the probability of such an event occurring is zero or one.

via The probabilistic argument for the… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook. 7/5/2013

The danger of reading financial & other news (or econobullshit) is that things that don’t make sense at all start making sense to you after progressive immersion.

via The danger of reading financial & other… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook. 7/1/13

To get a clearer idea of your preferences in the safety vs security debate (NSA), ask yourself whether you’d rather live in a hospital (or prison) where you would be “safe”, or in messy life where you would be exposed to hazards. Or, if you happen to be an animal, in the wilderness or the safety of a zoo.

via To get a clearer idea of your… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.

Friends, I am presenting this document (summary of recent work) explaining what is wrong with economics models at a conference in France (which is not fully infected with the Anglo-American disease).

Please let me know if you find mistakes as I cut/pasted from *Fat Tails & Fragility*.

A Brief Exposition of Violations of Scientific Rigor In Current Economic Modeling (pdf)

via Friends, I am presenting this document… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook. 6/28/13