Shared by JohnH

From Bloomberg Markets 50. HatTip to Dave Lull Hoping some audio or video of the panel comes available. NNT and Danny Kahneman on the same panel!

Taleb stated that “black swans” can’t be predicted. He pointed out lessons from the ancient world and the need for heuristics, or the experienced-based techniques of problem solving and learning.

“Technology has side effects,” Dr. Taleb said. “We don’t understand how things that don’t work. Do we implement more regulation or don’t regulate at all?”

He alluded to the ancients, who focused on preventative medicine as a way to keep human error in check—make the penalty for wrongdoing stiff enough and “risk is greatly reduced.” In the modern world, Dr. Taled said, “There will be more rogue traders, more government waste.”

Shared by JohnH

Open to the public, but ‘technical’.

Date: 09-26-2011

Start Time:
6:15pm
End Time: 8:15pm
Speaker: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Polytechnic Institute of NYU
Location: 417 IAB, Altschul Auditorium

I don’t invest in the stock market because I think it’s a sucker’s game. I make my money and I put it in a repository [of value]. Or sometimes I just do these bets for entertainment, nothing else, so I can have a conversation with someone once in a while on a train or on a plane. That’s the only reason. So I stayed in cash, for years, and then realized that the value of my cash became monstrously high after the crisis. The last 12 years, the stock market did nothing, and cash yielded 40, 50, 60 percent.

Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of
the best-selling book “The Black Swan,” said he’s more
concerned about prospects for the U.S. than Europe because the
country lacks awareness of its fiscal woes.

“The difference between Europe and the U.S. is the
consciousness of the problem,” Taleb, a New York University
professor, said today at a news conference in Tokyo organized by
Bank of America Corp. “There’s no consciousness in the U.S.”
about the fiscal deficit, he said.

Shared by JohnH

NNT has posted some recent papers including a link to the downloadable 217 page Technical Works. Not sure how long this will be up, it seem to be related to a class he’s teaching.

Papers

The detection heuristic

Errors as counterfactuals

Class Material

Technical Works (complete book )