Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought”

February 7th, 02008 by Stewart Brand

Nassim Taleb

Dispatches from Extremistan

A “black swan,” Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event.

Examples: Viagra, 9/11, Harry Potter, First World War, Beatles, the PC, Google, and the rise of any successful religion. History is dominated by sudden, lasting changes wrought by deeply unexpected events.

Part of the problem is that we ignore the “silent evidence” of the nonobserved and nonobservable…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 02008 at 10:52 am and is filed under Seminars.

  • Jim

    Fun fact: Arthur C. Clarke actually wrote an essay entitled “How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time”, about neglecting to patent the concept of the geosynchronous telecommunications satellite.

  • http://web.mac.com/thomasedwardfisher Tom

    Brilliant! Great talk that was extremely insightful and very entertaining. It’s given me loads to think about.

  • Ahmed Fasih

    Actually, Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan wrote a book called “What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars” in 1994. An Amazon search for the title returns The Black Swan at #3.

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  • http://losingamillion.com Brendan Moynihan

    “What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars” is actually reference in “The Black Swan”, on page 105. The book is available at http://www.LOSINGAMILLION.com

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  • Craig Overend

    It would be nice if these blog entries link back to the recordings.

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  • Stephen Marino

    Just finished reading The Black Swan the recorded (chandler) version and found it very insightful.
    I only wish I had read something like it during my 47 years with the Bell System. Many of the stories he referred to I experienced. Including the Long Term Capital Management meltdown that occurred in my home town (Greenwich) where I trapped muskrats in a pond where their headquarters was built.

  • Newbie

    Though very, very interesting, the above entry contains a fallacy.

    + “Mediocristan is dominated by the average— one new observation won’t change much.” (Par. 5)

    + “Extremistan is dominated by extremes.” (Par. 6)

    ≠ “Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that the main dynamic of Mediocristan is energy, and the main dynamic of Extremistan is information.” (Par. 7)

    Shouldn’t energy be Extremistan’s dynamic, and information be Mediocristan’s dynamic?

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  • Pcllefebvre

    Can you explain me a quote in the book :
    In a gaussian world, the probability of exceeding one standard deviation is around 16 percent. What are the odds of exceeding it under a distribution of fatter tails with the same mean and variance? The answer is Lower ! I don’t understand, I would like to understand with a SAMPLE of two distribution data : one in normal and another with father tail (same variance).
    my Email is pcllefebvre@gmail.com Thanks.

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