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The Black Elephant in the Room
The Black Elephant in the Room ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT YOU MEAN NOW WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT BLACK SWANS That unexpected event, which upends all the plans you had and turns your life – or everyone’s – upside down. An apparent surprise, but which, once the event has happened, is rationalized, making it seem predictable and giving […]
Global Financial System Is A Big Rube Goldberg Machine
Global Financial System Is A Big Rube Goldberg Machine While pondering the current economy that is becoming more of a conundrum every day, I stumbled upon an analogy I would like to share. The global economy is like a giant “Rube Goldberg” machine. It is a ridiculously complicated contraption built to perform what should normally be a […]
How Anti-Fragile are you?
How Anti-Fragile are you? I arrived back home to Puerto Rico late last night after traveling back from our Total Access event in Las Vegas. It was probably around 11:15 pm when I climbed into bed. And, within minutes, just as the sound of the waves outside was carrying me off to sleep, the whole […]
To Save Lives, We Need More Conflicts. And a Strong Economy Needs More Failure.
To Save Lives, We Need More Conflicts. And a Strong Economy Needs More Failure. How could more conflicts be a good thing? Well, imagine 50 wars among city-states that each kill 30,000. That is a staggering 1.5 million deaths. Or one war among nation-states, say World War II, which killed an estimated 60 million people. Call […]
Nassim Taleb Explains How The Global Economy Is More Fragile Today Than In 2007
Nassim Taleb Explains How The Global Economy Is More Fragile Today Than In 2007 In what was incredibly appropriate timing given the ‘shocktober’ market blowup, Bloomberg News invited “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb to its set on Halloween for a discussion about the increasingly fragile market ecosystem in which we all reside, and the mounting […]
Sustainability Boils Down to Scale
Sustainability Boils Down to Scale Only small scale systems can sustainably impose “skin in the game”– consequences, accountability and oversight. Several conversations I had at the recent Peak Prosperity conference in Sonoma, CA sparked an insight into why societies and economies thrive or fail: It All Boils Down to Scale. In a conversation with a […]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Has Never Borrowed a Cent in His Life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Has Never Borrowed a Cent in His Life The author of The Black Swan and Skin in the Game on what it’s like to have true financial freedom. Redux People ask me my forecast for the economy when they should be asking me what I have in my portfolio. Don’t make pronouncements […]
Why Nassim Taleb Thinks Leaders Make Poor Decisions
Why Nassim Taleb Thinks Leaders Make Poor Decisions Why do experts, CEOs, politicians, and other apparently highly capable people make such terrible decisions so often? Is because they’re ill-intentioned? Or because, despite appearances, they’re actually stupid? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher, businessman, perpetual troublemaker, and author of, among other works, the groundbreaking Fooled by Randomness, says […]
The Controversy around Skin in the Game
The Controversy around Skin in the Game Skin in the Game is another addition to the Incerto, now volume 5; I avoided duplication by referring to where in the Incerto some points were developed such as via negativa or monoculture of forecasters or expert problems. You simply don’t repeat in chapter 23 what was said in […]
Ruin is forever (revisited): Why your death isn’t as bad as that of all humankind
Ruin is forever (revisited): Why your death isn’t as bad as that of all humankind It should be obvious that the death of an individual human being isn’t as bad as the death of all humankind. But that’s only true if you accept the following premise laid out by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his upcoming […]
Bull in a China Shop
BULL IN A CHINA SHOP “So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder “Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.” – […]
Something is Broken in the UK Intellectual Sphere.
Something is Broken in the UK Intellectual Sphere. The BBC did some kind of educational cartoon on Roman Britain and represented “diversity” in terms of someone looking African in the show as representative of “diversity” at the time. The BBC was effectively applying quotas retroactively (I mean, really retroactively). Any dissent from the statistical errors […]
“Reform” won’t solve our biggest problems
“Reform” won’t solve our biggest problems “You never cure structural defects; you let the system collapse.” As I contemplated this proposition taken from a recent piece by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I realized what profound implications accepting it would have for all those engaged in attempting to address our current social, political and environmental ills. If […]
On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects
On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects Excerpted from the preface of Skin in the Game Skin in the Game is necessary to reduce the effects of the following divergences that arose mainly as a side effect of civilization: action and cheap talk (tawk), consequence and intention, practice and theory, honor and reputation, expertise and pseudoexpertise, concrete […]
The Intellectual Yet Idiot
The Intellectual Yet Idiot What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to […]
