An Ancient Lesson on Taking Responsibility For Decisions
“A decision is responsible,” wrote Charles Frankel, “when the man or group that makes it has to answer for it to those who are directly or indirectly affected by it.” Think …
Nassim Taleb
Five Rules to help you Learn to Love Volatility
Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder is having a profound impact on how I see the world. In this adapted piece from Antifragile, which appeared in the Wall Street …
The Problem With Information
Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets: The argument in favor of “new things” and even more “new new things” goes as follows: Look at the dramatic …
Nassim Taleb: We Should Read Seneca, Not Jonah Lehrer
For those who didn’t follow him, Jonah Lehrer has a gift for turning science into a great story. His beautiful writing made it hard to resist the narrative fallacy. The recent news about him …
Nassim Taleb: The Winner-Take-All Effect In Longevity
Nassim Taleb elaborates on the Copernican Principle, a concept first introduced on Farnam Street in How To Predict Everything. For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a …
The Noise Bottleneck: When More Information is Harmful
When consuming information, we strive for more signal and less noise. The problem is a cognitive illusion: we feel like the more information we consume the more signal we receive. While this is …
Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb
(Jan 2017) Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos Solid Book on Interventionism, Should be Mandatory Reading in Foreign Affairs. This is an outstanding book on the side …
Definition of a Black Swan
A black swan is a rare unexpected event. Black swans can be positive or negative. There are ways to account for this problem including an understanding of The Lucretius Problem, factoring in a Margin …
Intervention Bias: When to Step in and When To Leave Things Alone
When we want to improve a situation, our first instinct is often to change something. Try something new. Make adjustments. Anything other than what we’re already doing. But this approach is frequently …
Suppressing Volatility: Making the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous
Nassim Taleb’s article, The Black Swan of Cario, (PDF) on suppressing volatility is worth a read. It’s the ultimate example of iatrogenics by the fragilista. Here are my notes. Complex …
Taleb: The Fooled by Randomness Effect and the Internet Diet?
In this brief article Nassim Taleb (of Black Swan fame) touches on information, complexity, the randomness effect, over-confidence, and signal and noise. THE DEGRADATION OF PREDICTABILITY — AND …
Taleb: The Risk Externalities of Too Big to Fail
Too Big to Fail” is a dilemma that has plagued economists, policy makers and the public at large. In Nassim Taleb’s lastest paper (with co-author Charles S. Tapiero) he takes a look. Abstract …