📚 Halfway through Fooled by Randomness, the seeds of Antifragile. It’s all one work, all that’s missing is cross-references from earlier to latter written parts.
📚 Catching up with John, the busted high-yield trader in Fooled by Randomness.
If you are talking about a 10 sigma event you should have thought in alphas, not sigmas. There may be early hints that the data is not Gaussian but people call them outliers and brush them away.
📚 Fooled by hindsight bias. This one is for anyone who thinks lockdowns and school closures in the spring of 2020 were a mistake.
Making ex post “predictions” is infinitely easier than ex ante, and gives you a false sense of confidence to boot. Dangerous and stupid.
📚 Taleb the prophet, writing about cryptobros and the summer of 2022 back in the early 2000s.
Financial instruments come and go but human stupidity and greed are forever.
Several imprecisions in this essay on IRBs should not detract from its key point: social sciences don’t need IRB oversight, biomedicine needs it to be less byzantine and more transparent. Status quo is untenable.
Give a lecture once and you help a few hundred people (if you’re lucky). Post the lecture to YouTube and you help millions. 7 years later, I am yet to find a better guide to academic writing.
NB: it’s good to have a live audience.
📚 Re-reading Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness for the first time since covid hit. From the preface, on intellectual immodesty. There is a direct line from this to the catastrophic early response to the pandemic.
BTW, our company is called Cartesian but we are Montaignes at heart.
“Whether hot or cold water freezes faster remains unknown.”
Thus begins a wonderful Quanta Magazine article about the “Mpemba effect”, named after a Tanzanian teenager who saw something funny happen to his home-made ice cream. Reality is complicated.
“A lot of people simply won’t read a 15-page whitepaper, but will be impressed by flowcharts. By making the language of Web3 meandering and impenetrable and by building a culture that is very self-referential, investors make criticism harder to come by.”
Today’s Galaxy Brain newsletter is about Web3, but replace “whitepaper” with “manuscript” and “investors” with “researchers” and you get bad science in a nutshell.
“If you are trying to figure out a thinker and his or her defects, see if you can spot that person’s “once-and-for-all” moves. There will be plenty of them.”
Cowen is right, though we can debate whether early closure is a defect or a feature.