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

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.

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

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.

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…

“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

[...] The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Th… [...]

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

[...] 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 [...]

[...] Foundation in February on “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought” (mp3, summary), and at PopTech in 2007 (mp3, [...]

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.

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?

[...] 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 [...]

[...] 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. [...]

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.