This title was released on May 11, 2010. Order Here.
I’m on my third reading, not to mention having listened to the audio book twice, so I wasn’t sure
about getting the second edition. But in his Hard Problems talk, NNT mentions having
become obsessed with robustness, and that accounting for the additional 100 pages… Sold!
It will be nice to start with a fresh copy, mine is a little worn with all the highlighter, notes,
bent pages, cracked spine etc.
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.
Shared by JohnH
Take the test here: http://messymatters.com/2010/02/28/calibration/ If you’ve been reading/listening, you’ll probably do very well ;-) [My score was 100%]
So simply put, providing confidence bands around a guess which is out of my area of experience is really hard and I’m not good at it. The biggest problem is knowing when I’m out of my domain. In both The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that the single strongest predictor for how bad someone is going to do at the confidence band game is if they hold a PhD. If anyone has a reference on the study he refers to, I’d love to see it. I’m resisting the temptation to throw stones at both actuaries and finance quants right here. And if I didn’t live in a glass house, I would!
NNT spoke in India March 12, 2010.
(Click arrow to listen) NNT India
Update 03/11 YouTube videos coming in now.
Intro and Part 0 (I think, seems to have been mislabled as Part 5)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Event CoverageDAY 1 March 12, ’10| Banking system still weak: Taleb | |||||
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 What is the power of the unknown? What can be the impact of invisibles? Well, the answer is in the realm of the unknown, according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan, philosopher and expert on risk engineering, who is now penning his thoughts on living in a world we do not understand. The management guru has no accurate answer but, based on the current risk environment, a plethora of clues on the shape of things to come. At times, revolutions like the Internet are triggered off by intentions other than initially thought of, he said. For instance, he said it was former US president Ronald Reagan’s obsession with the destruction of the Soviet Union that sparked the Internet revolution. Taleb believes that nation-states, which he describes as modern inventions, are very unstable, especially in the Western world. Already, as he pointed out, six million people are unemployed in the US and the centre of the world is moving away from the West. Addressing the widespread intellectual ferment over the stability of the current financial system, Taleb hinted that governments would be better off relying on positive revenues like household savings. The banking system is still weak and Europe and the US are hit hard by deficits. In fact, according to Taleb, the US with its high GDP and high spending is far more fragile than India and Russia. The solution, Taleb said, lies in breaking the back of the debt system. |
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“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.