Category Archives: Contributors

Academia.edu | Black Swans, the Brain, and Philosophy as a Way of Life : Pierre Hadot and Nassim Taleb on Ancient Scepticism | Michael Chase

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One of the most interest books I’ve read recently which, while not “ about ” Scepticism,embodies and preaches a Sceptical world view, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestsellerThe Black Swan:the Impact of the Highly ImprobablePenguin 2007. Taleb, an economist andsecurities trader by profession, sets out to show the power of the unexpected in contemporarylife, particularly in economics. The most important factors in history are what he calls BlackSwans5, that is, extraordinary events that are unpredictable by their very nature, but have atremendous impact on economic, social and cultural events. Yet since they cannot, bydefinition, be foreseen, neither can future developments as a whole, either in finance or in anyother field. Taleb espouses Sceptism as the only philosophy adequate to the contemporaryworld, because the quantity of what we do not know always vastly outweighs what we do orcan know. Pointing to the falsity and/or inanity of almost all economic or political predictions,Taleb preaches an epistemic humility that leads us to withhold judgment. What he appreciatesin such Sceptics as Sextus Empiricus is their anti-dogmatism : they “ doubted theories andcausality and relied on past experience in their treatment ”, “ relying on seeminglypurposeless trial and error ” p. 46, a methodology Taleb sees as ideal for dealing with BlackSwans, that is, minimizing exposure to negative ones and taking advantage of positive ones.

via Academia.edu | Black Swans, the Brain, and Philosophy as a Way of Life : Pierre Hadot and Nassim Taleb on Ancient Scepticism | Michael Chase.
HatTip to Dave Lull.

NASSIM TALEB: Here’s Why Governments Always Miss Their Own Budget Deficit Targets – Business Insider

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The pdf is actually called Econfragilize

(The book isn’t actually out until late November, but Taleb posted this appendix, entitled WHERE MOST ECONOMIC MODELS FRAGILIZE AND BLOW PEOPLE UP, on his website today.)

The problem is that the economic data forecasts the government uses to plan its budget around – like where unemployment will be a year from now, for example – are pretty much taken as a given, instead of looked at as mere likelihoods with some given probability.

When the government plans its budget this way, it tends to underestimate the damage when things get worse than they initially expected.

Taleb illustrates how this mistake causes governments to continually underestimate the size of their budget deficits and miss their targets:

Say a government estimates unemployment for the next three years as averaging 9 percent; it uses its econometric models to issue a forecast balance B of a two-hundred-billion deficit in the local currency. But it misses (like almost everything in economics) that unemployment is a stochastic variable. Employment over a three-year period has fluctuated by 1 percent on average. We can calculate the effect of the error with the following:

Unemployment at 8%, Balance B(8%) = −75 bn (improvement of 125 bn)

Unemployment at 9%, Balance B(9%)= −200 bn

Unemployment at 10%, Balance B(10%)= −550 bn (worsening of 350 bn)

The concavity bias, or negative convexity bias, from underestimation of the deficit is −112.5 bn, since ½ {B(8%) + B(10%)} = −312 bn, not −200 bn.

In this example, Taleb identified that since unemployment typically varies around 1 percent, one should take estimates of what happens when it goes 1 percent lower than expected and when it goes 1 percent higher than expected.

via NASSIM TALEB: Here’s Why Governments Always Miss Their Own Budget Deficit Targets – Business Insider.

Just talking about money…

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Just talking about money makes people poor.A practical definition of wealth: one is wealthy in inverse proportion to the mentions of “money” whether positive or negative during the course of one’s year. This also applies to societies: hunter-gatherers were most certainly the wealthiests of all the world was their property, social climbers and unemployed bankers the poorest by far.

via Just talking about… | Facebook.

I am watching with depression…

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I am watching with depression the Syrian events & how intractable they are, looking for historical analogs & I just realized that it was only recently that a “civilized” state and one that boast being the paragon of civilization did worse atrocities, with the Algerian war of independence causing 1,000,000 victims mainly Algerians, close to a tenth of the population, 30 times what we have had in so far Syria. By then there was no Youtube to convey the vivid stories the elaborate “gegene” to torture rebels and the radio was controlled by the French state. And, what’s worse, people like Francois Mitterand were in on it, then led careers lecturing the rest of the world on humanitarian values. And, what was remarkable, America sided with the rebels.

via Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

FOR HISTORICAL SPECULATION

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FOR HISTORICAL SPECULATION– let’s discuss

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm

150 The Stickiness of Languages

Many Greek Cypriots still speak the language called “Cypriot Maronite Arabic”, that is, 12 centuries after their settlement and integration in the Greek side of the Island. Languages are stickier than we think People tend to associate languages with states, when the correlation was low before 1917: around the Mediterranean, particularly in Asia Minor, languages had no link to the rule Armenians spent thousands of years in the area between Cilicia to Aleppo, way past the lifetime of some “Armenian State”;etc.. It is only today that the Cypriot Arabic language has weakened , thanks to Facebook and intermarriage. Semitic languages being based on the triplet of consonnants –using vowels mainly for declensions — are very stable the drift in Cypriot Maronite Arabic appears very small.

(continues)
via FOR HISTORICAL… | Facebook.