Tag Archives: skin in the game

Commencement Address, American University in Beirut, 2016

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Full speech here: Commencement Address, American University in Beirut, 2016

Greed and fear are teachers. I was like people with addictions who have a below average intelligence but were capable of the most ingenious tricks to procure their drugs. When there was risk on the line, suddenly a second brain in me manifested itself and these theorems became interesting. When there is fire, you will run faster than in any competition. Then I became dumb again when there was no real action. Furthermore, as a trader the mathematics we used was adapted to our problem, like a glove, unlike academics with a theory looking for some application. Applying math to practical problems was another business altogether; it meant a deep understanding of the problem before putting the equations on it. So I found getting a doctorate after 12 years in quantitative finance much, much easier than getting simpler degrees.

‘My Friend’, Turkey, STALIN, GMOs, Arguing, Scale Dependent Properties, SKIN IN THE GAME | Facebook

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Nothing can be both boring and truly important. 7/29/16

To perpetuate a lie, you must whisper it, not shout it. 7/27/16

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The expression “my friend”: for a name dropper, it is anyone important; for a politician, anyone who does not vote against him/her; for regular people, a friend; in the mob, “a friend of ours” is another mafia member.

For me it is anyone I run into at a party and can’t remember the first name. 7/27/16

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For those of you on a hot summer day want to stroll on a beach, this is the way to do it.

It takes some training; rehearse in the privacy of your living room before doing it in public.

(Aldo Maccione, Jacques Brel, etc…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTm0X93l8vk

L’Aventure c’est l’Aventure (1972) – Claude Lelouch – Beach Scene
L’aventure c’est l’aventure is a 1972 French film directed by Claude Lelouch. It stars Lino Ventura, Jacques Brel, Aldo Maccione and Johnny Hallyday. 7/24/16

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Turkey is, after 100 years, a complete failure of top-down secularization. So are Iraq and Syria. You keep pushing religion under the rug, via bureaucrats; it comes back with a vengeance.

Iran has, somewhat, the opposite situation. 7/21/16

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STALIN AND THE FALSE NEGATIVE

An illustration of the notion of minimal type 2 error (no false negative): At the Congress of 1934, for the critical confidence ballot, a minority of the 1288 delegates (perhaps a quarter) voted against Stalin.

Stalin ended up trying to eliminating, during the great purge, not just those who were presumed to have voted against him, but all the delegates who were present. 7/20/16

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This picture is worth an indefinite amount of words.

It shows why GMOs are *not* traditional breeding. Few people trained traditionally get complex systems (i.e. those with interractions). But there is a growing number of young people who “get it”, particularly when familiar with P/NP in computer science.

Finally I looked at Monsanto’s financials and it shows GMOs are contracting; as a “technology” GMs are dying and no complicated technology survives unless it is multiplicative. Meanwhile organic is growing rapidly.

The PP page is here
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.ht…
—
Rahul Gotswani commented on the drawing by Joe Norman for our paper.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's photo.7/14/16

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Never argue with people in private (you will not convince them); argue in public to convince others. 7/12/16

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Another explanation of Scale Dependent Properties:

Some may believe that *armies create wars* but nobody sane believes that *police create robberies*. 7/7/16

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SKIN IN THE GAME
Since more and more of academia is becoming a ritualistic publishing* game that maps less and less to real research, we should force people who want to do “research” to first have a Real World day job, or at least spend 10 years as: lens maker, patent clerc, mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, uber driver, militia member, social security clerc, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high volume waiter, firefighter (my favorite), lighthouse keeper, etc., while they are doing their initial research.

It is a filtering, BS expurgating mechanism.

I for my part spent the first 21 years in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful job while studying, researching, and writing my first 3 books at night, and it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research.

*I borrow from Saifedean Ammous the apt description “ritualistic game”. 7/6/16

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Real World Risk Institute LLC Workshop Announcement. Dear friends, we have:

1) Changed location to a huge room rented from… the Masonic Lodge in NYC, on 23rd St between 5th and 6th Ave.

2) Changed the date of RWRI 3 to October 3-7 2016

3) Changed the non-Antifragile part of the program to add Information, Cybersecurity, Big Data, Complexity (in place of technical finance)

4) Added more scholarship slots.

http://realworldrisk.com

Silent Risk, Pascal’s Wager, Baal, Skin In the Game, Trump, Clinton-Malmaison, Gary Ruskin, Popper

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AN INVITATION TO CONTRIBUTE (Facebook)
Friends, I promised to deliver in the next few hours a discussion of the most neglected fragilities and the most overestimated risks. We can tell fragility when we see it… but we first need to look at it.

I won’t say for now what I came up with but would love for you to contribute suggestions. Don’t be shy, don’t be afraid to be out there, but please observe salon rules. And, for Baal’s sake, let’s all be brief.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681574436768722944

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681562381412102146

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681482579313324032

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681153169313935360

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/681128896952164352

Friends, we made a page for the precautionary principle (Facbook) with application to GMOs, with a variety of articles.

1) It looks like PR promoters/smear campaigners are so dumb that they don’t know that we know that they are dumb.

2) Calling GMOs “transgenics” (moving genes from one organism to a different one) better reflects their nature as genetic modification is too vague a designation.

http://fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.html

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680879127457624064

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680843010389741568

 

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680738137237229568

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680465658807738368

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680403721361162240

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680368473663520768

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680368178317389824

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/680063562065276929

What I think is my central piece from *Skin in the Game* (Facebook) explaining risk-loving and precaution can live together, how risk taking has a distinct logic (similar to quantum logic)… Risk management is boring, risk taking is exciting; how the two can be reconciled. How can we reconcile Aristotelian precaution and courage, both considered virtues?

www.fooledbyrandomness.com/rationality.pdf

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679701305154244610

A book isn’t just its contents; it’s a state of mind. (Facebook)
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Note: Without a state of mind, a book never survives. Also note that *almost* no book from 15 years ago has survived.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679357806407995392

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679336090583629824

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679273397340217344

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679092660427206656

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679091924859543552

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/679006823228284929

Friends, this is technical. (Facebook) Here is the “Statistical Estimators Under Fat Tails Project” and my small contribution to it during 2015 (7 papers). One can see that very little has been done to understand random events under Extremistan and there is a lot, a lot to do.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/FatTailedpapers2015.pdf

Social networks are a great place for convex optionality. (Facebook) In 2015, I met three collaborators, two co-authors (one probabilist, one economist who specializes in inequality) and one business partner on Twitter (a partner with the Real World Risk Institute). I do not think that I would have been able to initially run into these three collaborators in the physical world, no matter how many parties I had attended (I attended a lot, a lot of parties in 2015). You can tell from people’s twitter conversation whether there can be a possible technical collaboration.

Ironically these technical matches revealed themselves through arguments during fights in my antiBS crusades (such as the Pinker-BS problem). Social life (physical, that is) is too harmonious, too devoid of fights and arguments for some skills to be made apparent.

Ralph Nader, Skin In The Game, Getting Caught, Is The Pope Atheist, Flaneur, Russia Bombs

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https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/650648551182217216

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/650722365027033088

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/650986684180467712

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/651380873724579840

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/650308926014136320

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/649914746087567360

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/648899097697591297

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/649557077828988928

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/648566012942635008

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/648254210946002945

Completed Chapter on Stubborn Minority Rules: ByeBye toGMOs, explains spread of Islam, functioning of markets,etc. https://t.co/aqvZRfx0qN

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) October 4, 2015

Someone who regrets doing something wrong *after* being caught is mostly regretting having been caught.

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) October 4, 2015

Is the pope atheist? https://t.co/p38h1uKA8L

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) October 5, 2015

Could we end up with some anti-nonindependent Trump-Sanders alliance? @DavidBCollum

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) October 6, 2015

Now the NYT has caught on the idea of Flâneur: The Flâneur Discovers Paris, a Step at a Time http://t.co/kI0fr6yscc

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) October 3, 2015

The WSJ hates the Russians more than AlQaeda. The Russian bombed Al-Qaeda that WSJ describes as a “moderate” group. Despicable.

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) October 2, 2015

Thesis freely available in Saudi Arabia showing legal validity for acts of terrorism agnst minorities and infidels. https://t.co/TB4sEyjX1v

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) September 29, 2015

The dictatorship of the (stubborn) minority [those with Skin in the game] https://t.co/aqvZRfx0qN

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) October 1, 2015

Dedication of Skin In The Game pic.twitter.com/iHW87ds5sj

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) September 28, 2015

What we read leaves a permanent imprint somewhere inside of us; which is why reading nothing is much better than reading a bad book.

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) September 27, 2015

The Importance of Having Skin in the Game | The Art of Manliness

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To the skin-withholders above, Taleb adds news editors who choose clicks over credibility, managers who assume minimal accountability, and paper-pushing bureaucrats of all kinds. These societal elites and cosseted desk-jockeys invert the ancient order of honor; they attain status and influence without risk, and substitute cheap talk for action. They accept the upside of their position, without being exposed to its downside — and in fact outsource that downside onto unsuspecting others. Pundits give opinions and predictions that are trusted by the general population, but suffer no consequences if they turn out to be wrong — even if actual harm befalls those who took their faulty advice. They demand a pound of flesh from others, while protecting their own skin.

Source: The Importance of Having Skin in the Game | The Art of Manliness