Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Crazier Future

Black swan

you're sooner see a black swan

Australia

an event not a bird

very difficult to predict, based on prior information

a tie

I world war

low predictability, high consequence

illusion of predictability post factum

History of the turkey - that gets fed for thousand days

Dynamic Revision "palimpsest"

you don't remember what you actually predicted, but you revise your memory to adapt your prediction to current outcome

Domains

Mediocristan

Weigh thousand people and add one person that is the heaviest you can think of

When sample is large, exceptions can happen, but they will not screw with the result

The law of large numbers

dominated by the collective

paid by the hour

Extremesitan

Weigh thousand people and add one person that is the wealthiest you can think of

Whenever you take a large sample, a small number of observations in that domain will represent a big share of a total

dominated by the exceptions

Ignore experts

Mathematicians

small number of equations is useful

Mediocristan is easily mathematized and will be mathematized

Tunnell

Phillip Tetlock

processed 27 000 predictions

2 rules

Never ask barber if you need haircut

Never take advice from someone wearing suit and tie

Robert Tivers

we're not good at predicting wars

Why are we suspicious of the bishop and be a sucker when it comes to an economist

Subtopic

Silent evidence

I world war - tension between England and Germany

you don't look at episodes of tension that do not let to the war

probability problem

we compute probability on those who survive, not all

we take only pool of information and dicard the rest

people don't write biographies - "how I lost one million dollars"

Neil Fergusson

fun with data

wrote a paper although we think IWW predictable the bound market did not predict it

overcausation

Black swan in History/Philosophy

Hume's Problem

Philosopher's through time got domain dependent

Doctor's - Empiricists

Karl Marks

Uncertainity principle

Ludic fallacy

we take risks - because we don't know we take them - we're blindfolded