Monthly Archives: March 2014

People are natural skeptics…

Leave a reply

People are natural skeptics, but speak in shortcuts that seem categorical but are not; when they say “bureaucrats don’t have courage” they mean “a high percentage of bureaucrats don’t have courage”, which is why proverbs and aphorisms are heuristic and economical, held to be imperfect approximations.
On the other hand, when an academic writes the overly hedged statement “it appears that under some conditions, there have been historically a high percentage of bureaucrats who did not prove have courage”, he generally truly believes that “all bureaucrats don’t have courage”.
—-
I am writing this because Aaron Haspel and I noticed that when I write the aphorism “most bureaucrats don’t have courage” it is transmitted and repeated in its shorter version: “bureaucrats don’t have courage”. Many of the nitpickers on the web are after the straw man of “generalization” when a heuristic is not categorical.

via Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

SALT LAS VEGAS MAY 13 – 16, 2014 | BELLAGIO

Leave a reply

Nassim Taleb

New York Times Bestselling Author, “The Black Swan” & Distinguished Scientific Advisor, Universa Investments

Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a philosophical essayist, and researcher in probability in 2006. Although he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University, he self-funds his research and operates in the manner of independent scholars. He is also Distinguished Scientific Advisor at Universa Investments L.P., an investment manager that specializes in tail hedging as a means to enhance long-term equity returns.

Mr. Taleb is the author of The Incerto: A Philosophical Essay on Uncertainty, in Four Volumes, which includes The Black Swan (2007) and Antifragile (2012). He is also author of a series of mathematical monographs on Probability and Risk in the Real World. His work focuses on decision-making under opacity and how systems can handle errors and disorder.

Registration

via Nassim Taleb.

The Four Bs: Brain, Balls, Brawn, and Business Sense.

Leave a reply

The Four Bs: Brain, Balls, Brawn, and Business Sense.

—

You can have 4 out of 4 (Thales), 3 out of 4 (Plato, who had poor practical sense), 2 out of 4 (most great scientists and great businesspersons), 1 out of 4 (the typical “incremental” modern academics, or people you tend to find in jail), or 0 out of 4 (journalists).

(Exception for journalists who take personal risks, of course. Also the “balls” tends to be present in women at least as often as in men).

via The Four Bs: Brain, Balls, Brawn, and Business… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.