The more details you give people, the more they ask for details.
via The more details you give people, the more they… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The more details you give people, the more they ask for details.
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Monthly Archives: November 2014
2014 Annual Conference | Cities and Development: Urban Determinants of Success | NYU Development Research Institute
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
8:30am – 3:30pm
Rosenthal Pavilion, NYU Kimmel Center, 10th floor
60 Washington Square South, New York City2:30pm-3:30pm: “Small is Beautiful – but Also Less Fragile,” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, NYU School of Engineering
We use fragility theory to show the effect of size and response to uncertainty, how distributed decision-making creates more apparent volatility, but ensures long term survival of a system. Simply, economies of scale are more than offset by stochastic diseconomies from shocks and there is such a thing as a “sweet spot” in optimal size. We show how city-states fare better than large states, how mice and small species are more robust than elephants, and how the canton mechanism can potentially solve Near Eastern problems.
This event is co-sponsored by the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. Funding is generously provided by the John Templeton Foundation. Breakfast and lunch will be served.
“Nassim Nicholas Taleb”‘s review of Modern Aramaic-English/English-Modern Aramaic Dictionary & Phrasebook
5.0 out of 5 stars Aramaic Alive., November 5, 2014
By N N Taleb “Nassim Nicholas Taleb”
This review is from: Modern Aramaic-English/English-Modern Aramaic Dictionary & Phrasebook: Assyrian/Syriac Paperback
There is no way we Levantines can learn the language of our ancestors in an organic way except via nerds insisting on 1 grammar, 2 writing in one of the unwieldy Syriac scripts that one cannot even read on a computer screen without dowloading strange fonts. But Aramaic is still spoken, let us take advantage of it, and figure out how to say “I want to eat mjaddara” rather than memorize poetry by some dead author. Aramaic isn’t a dead language and it is the shame Levantines study Arabic instead of our own heritage.
This book in the Latin alphabet makes both Swadaya and Turoyo alive and easy to read, with all manner of real-world expressions. One can use it to supplement scholarly studies, or just to figure out how modern people speak our ancient language. There are Arabic influences, but the distance between the spoken language and, say, Bar Hebraeus is quite narrow.I would suggest the authors expand the dictionary. It would be the only one in the latin script.Most excellent, except for very few and small mistakes. “Debo” in Turoyo is not wolf, but bear.
via Amazon.com: N N Taleb “Nassim Nicholas Taleb”‘s review of Modern Aramaic-English/English-Modern Aram….
HatTip to Dave Lull
SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY OF FRAUDULENT SCHEMES
SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY OF FRAUDULENT SCHEMES
A Ponzi scheme increases in fragility over time; it requires more and more new funds to keep it going, so it collapses when one eventually runs out of suckers.*
Now it looks like it is a universal property of fraudulent schemes: you need more and more PR, lobbyists, shills, and repetitions of the narratives to keep the story going, particularly in the age of the internet. This is what I am observing with my current fraud-busting projects, with the Saudi-Wahabi government funded intolerant version of the religion, GMOs maquerade of “science” and “evidence”, the economics/macrobullshit establishment, the “education” bubble student loans helping real-estate developers, etc. You can see it particularly with GMOs as all the lobbying efforts can evaporate in the face of a single probabilistic argument; tens of thousands of comments do not measure up to a single derivation.
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*A Ponzi scheme is one by which one finds new investors to pay off old investors: think Madoff or many heavily endebted governments.
via SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISINFECTANT: THE FRAGILITY… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Is Nassim Taleb a “dangerous imbecile” or just on the pay of the anti-GMO mafia? | Genetic Literacy Project
Taleb is known for his disagreeable personality–as Keith Kloor at Discover noted, the economist Noah Smith has called Taleb a “vulgar bombastic windbag”, adding, “and I like him a lot”–and he has a right to flaunt an ego bigger than the Goodyear blimp. But that doesn’t make his argument any more persuasive.
The crux of his claims: There is no comparison between conventional selective breeding of any kind, including mutagenesis which requires the irradiation or chemical dousing of seeds and has resulted in more than 2500 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and nuts, almost all available in organic varieties versus what his calls the top-down engineering that occurs when a gene is taken from an organism and transferred to another ignoring that some forms of genetic engineering, including gene editing, do not involve gene transfers. Taleb goes on to argue that the chance of ecocide, or the destruction of the environment and potentially humans, increases incrementally with each additional transgenic trait introduced into the environment. In other words, in his mind it’s a classic “black swan” scenario.