The world’s shortest man, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, greets the tallest living man, Sultan Kosen, to mark the Guinness World Records Day in London November 13, 2014.
via Photo: World’s tallest man hanging out with world’s smallest man – Boing Boing.
It’s much better to mistake a stone for a bear, than a bear for a stone.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oee4KVDy9Fs]
… As an empricist, I don’t have to understand the logic behind a system, I just take it as it is
because I’m not smart enough to understand it. I call it the opacity.
From IMD, “International Institute for Management Development,”
Don’t know how I missed having this in here. NNT lists this as one of his favorite interviews as well.
From the highly addictive and always excellent EconTalk.org. (iTunes subsrciption link here. 2007 2008)
Nassim Taleb talks about the challenges of coping with uncertainty, predicting events, and understanding history. This wide-ranging conversation looks at investment, health, history and other areas where data play a key role. Taleb, the author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, imagines two countries, Mediocristan and Extremistan where the ability to understand the past and predict the future is radically different. In Mediocristan, events are generated by a underlying random process that is normally distributed. These events are often physical and observable and they tend to cluster around the middle. Most people are near the average height and no adult is more than nine feet tall. But in Extremistan, the right-hand tail of events is thick and long and the outlier, the seemingly wildly unlikely event is more common than our experience with Mediocristan would indicate. Bill Gates is more than a little wealthier than the average. The civil war in Lebabon or the events of 9/11 were more worse than just a typical bad day in the Beirut or New York City. Taleb’s contention is that we often bring our intuition from Mediocristan for the events of Extremistan, leading us to error. The result is a tendency to be blind-sided by the unexpected.
“Randomness” by philosopher and scholar of randomness Nassim Nicholas Taleb at the 2008 IdeaFestival – proudly sponsored by the University of Kentucky a Presenting Sponsor of the international IdeaFestival.
Founded in 2000, the IdeaFestival is a world-class event that attracts diverse and leading thinkers from across the nation and around the globe to explore and celebrate innovation and cutting-edge ideas. It is a unique non-linear program designed to stretch people’s thinking, utilizing multiple venues to showcase and discuss important ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology, education, etc. The Festival is designed to appeal to a broad cross-section of people – and presenters are selected for their ideas and accomplishments, and their ability to communicate to a wide-ranging audience.