What is a "Black Swan?"

[Rajiv]

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses the central theme of his bestselling book, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable."

5 min

Atheists and the Stock Market (3 min)

Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives his take on beliefs, religion, and stock market analysts.

The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (1h 28min)

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses his book, The Black Swan in relation to predicting the future, learning from the consequences of the unknown, and the power of randomness.

[petertribo]

Re: What is a "Black Swan?"

A podcast of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought is available at:

http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

There are also a number of other very interesting podcasts available at that site. As someone who read and tried to implement The Whole Earth Catalog and its contrarian, alternative messages, it is fascinating to see this new generation of alternative material being produced and disseminated.

[Spartacus]

Re: What is a "Black Swan?"

(warning: repeat rant)

I like an respect Taleb, but I'm wondering how much energy and attention to give him. First things first, right?

When people cannot apply the simplest rule of fraud-busting like

"if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is ..."

and thousands are getting scammed every friggin minute by 3 card monte players, and people are still drawing bollinger cans on top of heads and shoulders while their Uranus is ascending through a butterfly straddle on futures puts, why concentrate on the one guy who got "taken" by a once-in-3-generations event?

Especially since NT himself concedes there's little one can do to prepare for these.

First things first ...

Look at this for good examples of scams:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Hustle
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m8mf
http://video.google.ca/videosearch?h...um=5&ct=title#

for the links above I basically lifted the fist 3 hits from here:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=...=Google+Search

The whole show is on the torrents, rapidshare and eMule, by the way. Legal for me (for now, til hollywood buys off another few members of parliament) but check your local laws ...

[don]

Re: What is a "Black Swan?"

Tangentially, if the US wasn't so politically correct, we would have had a Barack Obama Black Swan political cartoon by now. Talk about unexpected

[Rajiv]

Re: What is a "Black Swan?"

My own take is that Taleb is chasing a mirage. He makes a basic assumption that the models that are extensively in use are in fact correct. I believe that most models used today are based on incorrect assumptions see my post refering to "Models and Pseudo-models: Economists' Artifice"