Covered the audio version of this earlier on the blog.
The Video of the NYPL Conversation with Daniel Kahneman is posted here (with transcripts). Note this is the 2nd time I’ve posted a link to the recording of a past event. And note that Kahneman figured out who Fat Tony was.
This is an audio player from NYPL Live. (Perhaps it will turn into a video player later.) The conversation took place at the New York Public Library February 5, 2013.
You can also download the audio here.
How do we — as individuals and as communities — make decisions when faced with uncertainty, inexperience, lack of knowledge or chaos? Nassim N. Taleb and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman have both devoted their careers to explorations of the decision making process: Kahneman approaching it through psychological study; Taleb through a philosophical lens. Their groundbreaking work has profoundly impacted our understanding of the decision making process today while raising new questions about how decisions are made in a world that is increasingly more difficult to comprehend.
Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a scholar and philosophical essayist in 2006. Although he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, he self-funds his research and operates in the manner of independent scholars. Taleb is the author of The Black Swan (2007–2010) and Antifragile (2012). His work focuses on decision making under uncertainty, as well as technical and philosophical problems with probability and metaprobability; in other words, “what to do in a world we don’t understand.”
Interestingly, each man was asked to write a biography of seven words or less. Taleb described himself as: “Convexity. Mental probabilistic heuristics approach to uncertainty.” Kahneman apparently pleaded with the moderator to only use five words, which were: “Endlessly amused by people’s minds.” Not surprisingly these two autobiographies are descriptive of the two men’s bodies of work. Much of the discussion at this event, however, was not about making decisions under uncertainty, but a sort of tit for tat, with Kahneman asking probing questions and making pointed observations of Taleb. Little of the Nobel laureate’s work was discussed.