Tag Archives: Medium

The UK’s Coronavirus Policy / Corporate Socialism

Leave a reply

The UK’s coronavirus policy may sound scientific. It isn’t  (The Guardian)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Yaneer Bar-Yam
Wed 25 Mar 2020

Our research did not use any complicated model with a vast number of variables, no more than someone watching an avalanche heading in their direction calls for complicated statistical models to see if they need to get out of the way.

Corporate Socialism: The Government is Bailing Out Investors & Managers Not You (Medium)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb with Mark Spitznagel
Mar 25, 2020

Why should we spend taxpayer money to bailout companies who spent their cash (and often even borrowed to generate that cash) to buy their own stock (so the CEO gets optionality), instead of building a rainy day buffer? Such bailouts punish those who acted conservatively and harms them in the long run, favoring the fool and the rent-seeker.

 

Bitcoin – It may fail but we now know how to do it | Medium

Leave a reply

Bitcoin – It may fail but we now know how to do it

Which is why Bitcoin is an excellent idea. It fulfills the needs of the complex system, not because it is a cryptocurrency, but precisely because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it has now a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right.

 

An Expert Called Lindy | Medium

Leave a reply

An Expert Called Lindy

Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has been known for the fifty or so years of interpretation by physicists and mathematicians of the heuristic that developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted, say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy Effect.

We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We talk about Religion | Medium

Leave a reply

We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We talk about Religion

People rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion”, nor do they realize that they don’t mean the same thing. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals –the word religio was a counter to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East. Law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing, and early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its foundations, had an uneasy relation with it. For instance, even during the Inquisition, a lay court handled the sentencing

Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin, Says Black Swan Author — The Physics arXiv Blog

Leave a reply

Taleb and co focus on two examples. The first is nuclear energy. They point out that many people are justifiably concerned about the risk associated with nuclear energy. Scientists are well aware of the harm that can be caused by radiation release, core meltdown and the disposal of radioactive waste and these risks have been studied extensively.

While the potential harm from a nuclear accident can be large, it is generally scale dependent and far from global. So when it comes to making decisions about whether to use nuclear energy on a local scale, the risks involved can be managed using appropriate safety measures that have been carefully considered.

Taleb and co contrast this to the case of genetically modified organisms. They argue that the risk from genetically modified organisms is a potential for widespread impact on the ecosystem and widespread impact on human health. In other words, it is scale independent.

via Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin, Says Black Swan Author — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium.