Tag: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Bookmarked How I write – INCERTO – Medium (INCERTO)

Preface to the 15th year Italian edition of The Black Swan

In the preface to the 15th year Italian edition of The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb reflects on writing books for the past as a means of remaining read in the future.

If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.

Bookmarked The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System (The New Yorker)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”

Bernard Avishai explores the argument that the current pandemic is a random event. He unpacks the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his seminal book Black Swans. Taleb explains that the current crisis is an example ‘Extremistan’ where there is a need to panic early.

Indeed, if Taleb is chronically irritated, it is by those economists, officials, journalists, and executives—the “naïve empiricists”—who think that our tomorrows are likely to be pretty much like our yesterdays. He explained in a conversation that these are the people who, consulting bell curves, focus on their bulging centers, and disregard potentially fatal “fat tails”—events that seem “statistically remote” but “contribute most to outcomes,” by precipitating chain reactions, say. (Last week, Dr. Phil told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that we should open up the country again, noting, wrongly, that “three hundred and sixty thousand people die each year “from swimming pools — but we don’t shut the country down for that.” In response, Taleb tweeted, “Drowning in swimming pools is extremely contagious and multiplicative.”) Naïve empiricists plant us, he argued in “The Black Swan,” in “Mediocristan.” We actually live in “Extremistan.”

For Taleb, the answer to the current situation is to be more fractal.

Taleb adamantly opposes the state taking on staggering debt. He thinks, rather, that the rich should be taxed as disproportionately as necessary, “though as locally as possible.” The key is “to build on the good days,” when the economy is growing, and reduce the debt, which he calls “intergenerational dispossession.” The government should then encourage an eclectic array of management norms: drawing up political borders, even down to the level of towns, which can, in an epidemiological emergency, be closed; having banks and corporations hold larger cash reserves, so that they can be more independent of market volatility; and making sure that manufacturing, transportation, information, and health-care systems have redundant storage and processing components.

Time will tell as to how such ideas are taken up in the ‘new normal’ or is the world’s dependency on China too difficult to break?

Watched Why it’s better to panic early: Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Yaneer Bar-Yam from YouTube

Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Yaneer Bar-Yam discuss the reaction to the corona virus

Nassim Nicholas Taleb speaks with Yaneer Bar-Yam about going hard early. This correlates with much of what those like Dr. Norman Swan is saying.

📓 On Writing

Craig Mod quotes Philip Roth on really reading:

If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.” Meaning: To truly read (and, I might add, write) is to commit and maintain focus long enough to live fully within the world of the book (as opposed to ten second dips in and out, as we mostly do with much online media).(source)

This has me thinking about Philip Glass’ discussion at the end of Words with Music where he talks about different worlds and whether reading is such a place?

Discussing Black Swans, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about literature and the essay not having boundaries:

Literature should not have explicit boundaries: the confines of the subject are internal and may remain elusive and hard to express in words. Nor should literature have institutions formalizing and commoditizing things. And I wanted to do my own version of what is called literature. Literature must be idiosyncratic.

Mason Currey shared Slavoj Žižek’s process of tricking himself into writing:

I have a very complicated ritual about writing. It’s psychologically impossible for me to sit down [and do it], so I have to trick myself. I elaborate a very simple strategy which, at least with me, it works: I put down ideas. And I put them down, usually, already in a relatively elaborate way, like the line of thought already written in full sentences, and so on. So up to a certain point, I’m telling myself: No, I’m not yet writing; I’m just putting down ideas. Then, at a certain point, I tell myself: Everything is already there, now I just have to edit it. So that’s the idea, to split it into two. I put down notes, I edit it. Writing disappears.

Source: Slavoj Žižek on his writing – How does he trick himself on YouTube

Replied to

This is one of the challenges I have with Taleb’s Black Swan. It would seem you cannot have your cake and eat it to.