Nassim Taleb believes in
probabilities, not predictions, but at times it can be hard to
tell the difference. “The real Black Swan event,” he said in
June, “is that people are not rioting against the banks in
London and New York.”

Taleb saw it coming, and his well-publicized remark may be
the only reason Occupy Wall Street hasn’t been labeled a black
swan. This once-rare bird, made ubiquitous by Taleb’s best-
selling 2007 book of the same title, now appears so often after
dramatic events, such as Occupy Wall Street, that sightings of
it have become meaningless.

Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull.

For Taleb, viewing human decision-making in high-risk environments, the central problem is not the risk but the human evaluating the risk. We masquerade opinion as fact – we hide our frailty as decision-makers behind pride and arrogance. We employ bad methods because our standing in the world depends upon creating epistemic methods and frameworks of knowledge that advantage us (and disadvantage others). This makes Taleb angry, because people with power and influence – experts, practitioners, and pundits – do more than anyone to perpetuate encourage fraudulent and dishonest beliefs about fractal risk that harm millions of innocent people.

Shared by JohnH

This is from entrepreneur Mark Cuban, weighing in on the OWS movement!

You see, in the real business world there is always a trade off between risk, reward and the law of unintended consequences. If we have learned anything from the past 12 years it should be that black swan events happen more frequently than we like and that the law of unintended consequences has a far greater negative impact than business as usual has a positive impact. 

A few months ago Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan, an influential book about the crucial importance of unpredictable, unforeseen events on our financial system was asked whether the hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in Greece was a Black Swan event. He replied, “No. The real Black Swan event is that people are not rioting against the banks in London and New York.”