This is technical but I am adding a note to show that the fragile is necessarily in the nonlinear concave, why existing coffee cups need to be concave in their response.Also preparing a micro-mooc on nature and why it has some specific probabistic properties and why we should mess with small things never fuck with large things we don’t understand.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/nonlinear-response.pdf
via This is technical but I am adding a note… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
I have to give credit where credit is due. I was at dinner with two people who said that Steve Pinker stood by them at a difficult moment, when it was very unpopular to do so, when other academics abandoned them. And he went out of his way to do so. Very honorable. So one should respect the man, without setting aside the statistical problems, or perhaps look at the statistical problems as good news: here is a man worth fighting against.
via I have to give credit where credit is… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Being nice to others reveals character if and only if it is optional.
via Being nice to others reveals character… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Published on Aug 21, 2013
Micro-Mooc on a paper by Taleb and Tetlock (one manifestation of the LUDIC FALLACY). There are serious statistical differences between predictions, bets, and exposures that have a yes/no type of payoff, the “binaries”, and those that have varying payoffs, which we call the “vanilla”. Real world exposures tend to belong to the vanilla category, and are poorly captured by binaries. Yet much of the economics and decision making literature confuses the two. Vanilla exposures are sensitive to Black Swan effects, model errors, and prediction problems, while the binaries are largely immune to them. The binaries are mathematically tractable, while the vanilla are much less so. Hedging vanilla exposures with binary bets can be disastrous–and because of the human tendency to engage in attribute substitution when confronted by difficult questions,decision-makers and researchers often confuse the vanilla for the binary. The paper is here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2284964
More general Fat Problems with Tails: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html
To have a great day: 1) Smile at a stranger, 2) Surprise someone by saying something unexpectedly nice, 3) Give some genuine attention to an elderly, 4) Invite someone who doesn’t have many friends for coffee, 5) Humiliate an economist, publicly, or create deep anxiety inside a Harvard professor.
via To have a great day: 1) Smile at a… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.