Friday Quiz. What is the unconditional mathematical expected duration between departure and time to destination between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing? How about a flight between Rio de Janeiro and Paris?
ANSWER: Infinite. A very tiny probability of crash makes the unconditional expectation infinite.
All other answers with finite duration are conditional on the plane eventually making it to destination.
via Friday Quiz. What is the unconditional… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
When you say something you think are just saying something, but you are largely communicating *why* you had to say it.
( Which is why complaints don’t just deliver complaints, they mostly reveal your weakness.)
via When you say something you think are just saying… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Nassim Taleb, professor of risk engineering at New York University and author of best-sellers ‘The Black Swan’ and ‘Fooled by Randomness,’ recently said that GMOs have a very real ability to cause “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.” Taleb’s thesis basically stems from the fact that GMOs come from laboratory alterations rather than natural processes, and that humans cannot understand that with each modified seed, the potential for “total ecocide” increases.
“There is no comparison between the [bottom-up] tinkering of selective breeding and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from an organism and putting it into another,” Taleb and colleagues say in a draft of their research.
“The planet took about close to zero risks of ecocide in trillions of variations over 3 billion years, otherwise we would not have been here.”
via GMO labeling effort in Colorado scores win in state Supreme Court — RT USA.
When you see fraud shout fraud!
INVERSE SKIN IN THE GAME/CRONY CAPITALISM. Peter Orszag is one of those Obama cronies who wrote the report about Fannie Mae being safe (while I was shouting that it was sitting on dynamite) and, thanks to absence of skin-in-the-game, or inverse skin-in-the-game, got a job in the Obama administration (Chapter 23 in ANTIFRAGILE) after Fannie Mae went bust (and had a taxpayer backup).
Now as predicted he is making >$3 million from Citibank a firm that the taxpayer saved!
Here is how his taxpayer-backed income was revealed.
Peter Orszag and ex-wife in contentious court fight over child support
The former head of OMB reveals he made more than $3 million last year.
Washington Post
via (1) When you see fraud shout fraud! INVERSE SKIN IN… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The ultimate test of freedom is whether you *have to* explain why you did something.
via The ultimate test of freedom is whether you… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.