Tag Archives: uncertainty

Nassim Taleb: Why You Should Embrace Uncertainty | The James Altucher Show

Leave a reply

The James Altucher ShowAltucher Show
DescriptionEp. 45 Nassim Taleb: Why You Should Embrace Uncertainty (MP3 audio, 40.3 MB)
September 23, 2014 11:53 AM
Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, joins The James Altucher Show to talk about technology and how different systems handle disorder.Just as humans evolve, technology is constantly being upgraded and replaced with new concepts and ideas.Today, we use technology in almost every aspect of your lives. But do we really understand the advantages and disadvantages to constantly being computerized?
In Nassim’s book, The Black Swan, he highlighted for readers the unusual and unpredictable events that underlie almost everything about our world. Now with his book, Antifragile, readers are presented with why we should embrace these uncertainties.The ideas and concepts that Nassim presents today for our listeners are beyond anything you have heard before.
Nassim and James talk about several ways that disorder in your life will actually make you stronger. As Nassim tells James in the interview, “If you don’t have variability in your life, you are not human.”
The key is to take these shocks and disruptions and become, as Nassim says, antifragile, in turn making you stronger, more creative, and better able to adapt to each new challenge you face.
Nothing is certain in this world, and this episode will have you questioning everything you thought you knew.

via The James Altucher Show.

Just as when you mix pure and impure material…

Leave a reply

Just as when you mix pure and impure material, the result is impure, uncertainty can contaminate certainty but never the other way around. When you multiply an uncertain variable by a certain number, the result is uncertain and not certain. If the multiplier is >1, the result is even more uncertain this is leverage, which compounds uncertainty.So if you are told that a result is deterministic, say by theorem, but the person saying has a small probability of having made a mistake, the result will no longer be deterministic, but random.

(Cont, More technical) Unlike with water where bad elements get eventually diluted away, and where you can reach acceptable purity, if you add to N “well behaved” random variables (Mediocristan) a single “Extremely wild” one (super-Extremistan), the total sum will be “Extremely wild”, no matter how large the N or how well behaved the other random variables.
(The wild can be a single Cauchy-distributed random variable or anything with a tail exponent <=1).

via Just as when you… | Facebook.

ForumNetwork.org – Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Impact of the Highly Improbable

2 Replies

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Impact of the Highly Improbable

May 19, 2010 51:32

Nassim Taleb professor, writer

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, renowned expert on risk and randomness, discusses The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. This bestselling book is now out in paperback with a new essay, “On Robustness and Fragility.”

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

This lecture contains strong language.