Money and Finance
-Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
- Harari On Hindsight...
From Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: "...the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another…In fact, the people who knew the period best – those alive at the...
- Nassim Taleb And Barbells...
Here's a link to a post I put up last year that included an excerpt from Nassim Taleb's Antifragile that I think is extremely important--probably even more so in a market environment like we are in today--and worth reviewing every now and then....
- Taleb’s Fragile World
How fragile we are. Five years on from the Lehman Brothers collapse, political and regulatory errors have made the world’s financial system even more fragile. This alarming line of thought comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, best known for The Black Swan,...
- Nassim Taleb Quote (forecast Error Example)
“While forecast errors have always been entertaining, commodity prices have been a great trap for suckers. Consider this 1970 forecast by U.S. officials (signed by the U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury, State, Interior, and Defense): “the standard...
- The Economist Magazine - The World In 2036: Nassim Taleb Looks At What Will Break, And What Won't
Paradoxically, one can make long-term predictions on the basis of the prevalence of forecasting errors. A system that is over-reliant on prediction (through leverage, like the banking system before the recent crisis), hence fragile to unforeseen “black...
Money and Finance
Nassim Taleb quotes (prediction)
I had this quote saved to post later, but it seemed to go well with the Tetlock article, so here it is now. THIS paper written by Taleb and Tetlock may also be worth reading (or re-reading)
"I insist on the via negativa method of prophecy as being the only valid one: there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today. Now, I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge—something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability—with all due respect to your imagination.
"I insist on the via negativa method of prophecy as being the only valid one: there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today. Now, I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge—something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability—with all due respect to your imagination.
...
An interesting apparent paradox is that, according to these principles, longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event. On the other hand, typical predictions (not involving the currently fragile) degrade with time; in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy. Your error rate for a ten-year forecast of, say, the sales of a computer plant or the profits of a commodity vendor can be a thousand times that of a one-year projection."
-Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
- Harari On Hindsight...
From Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: "...the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another…In fact, the people who knew the period best – those alive at the...
- Nassim Taleb And Barbells...
Here's a link to a post I put up last year that included an excerpt from Nassim Taleb's Antifragile that I think is extremely important--probably even more so in a market environment like we are in today--and worth reviewing every now and then....
- Taleb’s Fragile World
How fragile we are. Five years on from the Lehman Brothers collapse, political and regulatory errors have made the world’s financial system even more fragile. This alarming line of thought comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, best known for The Black Swan,...
- Nassim Taleb Quote (forecast Error Example)
“While forecast errors have always been entertaining, commodity prices have been a great trap for suckers. Consider this 1970 forecast by U.S. officials (signed by the U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury, State, Interior, and Defense): “the standard...
- The Economist Magazine - The World In 2036: Nassim Taleb Looks At What Will Break, And What Won't
Paradoxically, one can make long-term predictions on the basis of the prevalence of forecasting errors. A system that is over-reliant on prediction (through leverage, like the banking system before the recent crisis), hence fragile to unforeseen “black...