Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought”
February 7th, 02008 by Stewart Brand
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, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under Seminars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on February 7th, 2008 at 11:17 am
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.
Posted on February 23rd, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Brilliant! Great talk that was extremely insightful and very entertaining. It’s given me loads to think about.
Posted on February 25th, 2008 at 5:33 am
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.
Posted on March 26th, 2008 at 3:46 am
The turkey and the butcher…
Just wanted to get this little ditty out: I was listening to a very interesting Long Now seminar by Nassim Taleb, about his insight into randomness, predictability, and the like. If you don’t know who he is, Taleb wrote a…
Posted on April 10th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
“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
Posted on August 5th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
[...] The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Th… [...]
Posted on October 7th, 2008 at 4:08 am
It would be nice if these blog entries link back to the recordings.
Posted on November 1st, 2008 at 5:20 pm
[...] maintains 50% of the wealth. 50% of the world lives on $2.00 a day. As long as a system allows for this type of imbalance, it becomes a system destined to comply to power-law distributions. Disproportionate concentrations [...]
Posted on November 11th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
[...] Foundation in February on “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought” (mp3, summary), and at PopTech in 2007 (mp3, [...]
Posted on December 28th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
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.
Posted on January 1st, 2009 at 10:46 am
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?
Posted on April 12th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
[...] what are the “Black Swans” that Friedman missed? That’s the hard part, of course. Taleb would say that Black Swans defy prediction. Jetliners slamming into skyscrapers on a sunny September day. A tsunami off the coast of Georgia. A [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2009 at 4:02 am
[...] During a Long Now seminar, Nassim Taleb notes that low probability events are the most dangerous, in that they are the most unpredictable. The error term for an event with few observations is higher (the tails of any probability distribution); smaller n → larger ε. I began to ponder. My current occupation seems to be predicated on the notion that it’s possible to infer the future. But it’s sort of a joke: I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow, much less years from now. [...]