Taleb: The only man who has a clue | Hacker News Reader

Taleb: The only man who has a clue

nakedcapitalism.com

20 pointsmjirv17 comments

The only thing this guy understands is marketing. I assume somewhere in his book he gets past talking about how great he is from being the first to trade a certain asset class, but I wasn't able to make it that far.

I recommend reading Fooled by Randomness (his first book) if you want the one that maximizes substance and minimizes the bluster.

Good to know, because anti fragile was unreadable. I also gave up before getting to any real content.

I had the same experience.

Black Swan I feel like does a better job. The rest of his books are okay. But the first two (Black Swan and Fooled)

That's the one I enjoyed, too.

I recommend "The Dao of Capital", which is written by Mark Spitznagel. Spitznagel also deals with risk (but in a very Austrian + Daoist + Sisu way).

Both Spitznagel and Taleb have known each other for 20 years, and Taleb is an advisor on Spitznagel's fund [1]. But Taleb always appears to be more interested in self-promotion and picking up fights, whereas Spitznagel practices what he preaches.

I honestly believe that "The Dao of Capital" should've been a 3 volume treatise because it covers so much.

1. https://youtu.be/rk6UZB8qFBc

That's a self-assessment, right?

He has certainly been proved right about black swans been way more common than people assumed. Kind a sux.

I think Taleb said coronavirus isn't one because pandemics are a known thing.

Well, what happens if there is a Chelyabinsk x whatever factor event next week? Certainly lots of people worry about such things, just like pandemics. So maybe it's not a black swan. But I think it's predictable that most people would be really shocked and completely refocus their concerns once it happened.

Anything that happens that startles people, almost certainly doesn't startle everybody. But anything that hasn't happened in a while, if ever, is going to startle most.

How can it not be? Pandemics are known events but one that gets out of control with a large economic impact is really out of the norm. Simply put we were unprepared for it because we thought it was such a small possibility that it was unlikely to happen anytime soon. The history books will talk about how it was predictable and we should have been ready. Yet, here we are, unprepared and dealing with it.

It reminds me of Pearl Harbor. History books talk about how the U.S. had warning that it was coming and that the U.S. should had known that it was coming even without warning. But as we know, no one was ready for it.

To be a little pedantic, this isn't really how I would summarize Taleb. His main idea is that Black Swan events are extremely important because of their outsized impacts, not because they are more frequent than people think.

Well if you define a black swan event as important then, sure, it's bound to be important.

"Black swan defining characteristics:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations(...).

Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'.

Third (...) we concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

No, the conventional belief is that only a very small proportion of extremely rare events have a major impact, as measured by standard criteria of the importance of impact. Taleb is arguing that a much larger proportion them do.

If asked to plot the exact distribution of events in the (rarity, impact) vector space then I'm bound to getting it inaccurate more than not.

Nope, one of his points, he has more than one, IS that Black Swans are more common than people can compute. Black Swans are unexpected outsized events that have a great impact, as he defines them.

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