Supposedly, if you are totally uncompromising and intolerant with BS (particularly harmful BS), you lose friends. These are good friends to lose, for you will also make new friends, better friends.
via Supposedly, if you are totally uncompromising… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
In case you’re wondering… Registration: $2900 / participant
Antifragility: A User’s Manual
Learn to flourish in a volatile and complex world by creating “antifragile” organizations that thrive on stress and disorder.
A two-day program for senior management
May 5th and 6th, 2014
Cambridge, MASpeakers:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Distinguished Professor, Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Yaneer Bar-Yam, President and Professor,New England Complex Systems InstituteFrame:
When strong winds blow, don’t build walls, but rather windmills: there is a way to turn every bit of adversity into fuel for improvement.
Journalistic Eggggregious Error of the Week:
The august “Economist” just showed how companies with executives attending Davos underperformed the market.
Well… looks convincing but they fell for an elementary mistake: companies attending Davos are large and geographically/sectorially idiosyncratic; they did not consider whether large companies underperformed over the period
This is called a confounder in statistics… an elementary mistake. People who drink tend to have lung cancer, but there is no strong relation between alcohol and lung carcinoma… It is because people who drink tend to smoke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
You can only make a comparative statement (nonbullshit, that is) by controlling for size, industry, and location. The companies involved are 103 companies with $12 trillion cap.
It just hit me that the paperback of Antifragile is coming out Tuesday!
PS: This is 1 of 2 announcements that I allow myself to make here, to please my publisher, in return for absence of book tour.
via It just hit me that the paperback of Antifragile… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Updated January 22, 2014, 2:19 PM
I admire the move by the European Union to restrict the bonuses of that class of privileged civil servants called “bankers” — a recognition that the taxpayers have the right to control the income of those they subsidize and bail out, just as they set the salaries of other state-sponsored workers.
Restricting the bonuses of bankers would be correctly recognizing that taxpayers have the right to control the income of those they subsidize and bail out.
Alas, bankers in their current status are an offense to capitalism; they are in a strange situation of having upside without downside, no skin in the game. As an additional insult to the taxpayer, bankers paid themselves the largest bonus pool of their history in 2010 — thanks to Troubled Asset Relief Program…
via We Need to Stop This Banker Bonus Madness – NYTimes.com.