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Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
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Jun 7 • 3 tweets • 1 min read
Elon Musk illustrates my #FooledbyRandomness point: solid financial success is largely the result of skills, hard work, and wisdom. But wild success (in the far tail) is more likely to be the result of reckless betting, extreme luck, & the opposite of wisdom: folly.
1/2
2/2
 Explanation: the point is simple; for most classes of probability distributions, you get to the tail by increasing the variance (or the scale) rather than raising the expectation.
3/ Go back and check the numerous times when Tesla was on the brink of going bust.

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More from @nntaleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
Jun 6
INFLATION /n
Supermarkets A & B are in the same town.
A advertises it sells same butter brand $.53/lb cheaper than B. B advertises it sells the same detergent $.78 cheaper than A.
When gauging your own goods inflation, look at the lower bound of prices & include substitution.
2/ So the error is to anchor on specific items rather than a dynamic basket.
There has been a loss of financial sophistication w/cypto/blockchain generation. In their word salads, they don't get that "money supply" became asset inflation from low rates, largely from crypto & RE.
3) The core is optionality. The consumer does not have a rigid basket, but has the option to switch between items and substitutes as they become available via high and low technology.
I see errors made today by "professionals" that were almost never made in the past.
Read 4 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 31
Assuming it is true (it's not), this idiot is committing the standard retrospective distortion (intro of #TheBlackSwan):
+ Airlines spend $$$ on copilots, w/benefits that are "practically non-existent".
+ I spent $$$ on fire insurance, "there is no evidence" it was useful.
2) A better analogy: "we should eliminate airport checks SINCE there have been no terrorist incidents", which was actually uttered by a politician.
3) And Covid reduced life expectancy across the board by ~2 y.

medium.com/incerto/no-cov…
Read 4 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 18
Aside from narcissistic insensitivity, prbm w/ @jordanbpeterson is the pseudostatistical crap that produced IQ, Eugenics, scientific racism, & now "objective" aesthetics.
If there's a biological/noncultural preference for *some* shapes, it has a high VARIANCE across subjects.
2) Where I explain how pple [idiots like @jordanbpeterson] fail to get the law of large numbers by particularizing the general. Racism is one such example of assigning population traits to individuals.

3) The IQ piece. IQ measures unintelligence, not intelligence [NONLINEARITY]
medium.com/incerto/iq-is-…
Read 5 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 16
The Messianic illusion is that a single person σωτήρ (or, worse, a single action) will come to save the world, fix society, improve the economy, rescue the company, etc.

But advance comes from distributed progressive improvements, via negativa, mostly thanks to funerals.
2) Notes
+ Compare the French Revolution (which set back democracy more than 60 years) to the English progressive constitutional monarchy [and... it is still a monarchy]
+ What you see with the Lebanese election is largely the result that ~170,000 voters have died since 2018.
3) Notes
+ Trump came to DC on the promise of magically making things different. A lot of talk, & whatever he delivered (vaccine fast track, printing & distributing money, weapon sales to KSA) had nothing to do with what he promised ex ante and wants reckoned ex post.
Read 5 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 15
Don't give Monte Carlo a bad name
Platias & Di Maggio, econ & "crypto" specialists, gave TERRA$ no chance of collapsing from the peg simulating "1 mil. y".
1-MC works, BUT ONLY if you are using correct assumptions (tails & feedback loops)
2-No diff betw 1 mil & 1 bil years

IYIs
2) Turns out Di Maggio @ProfDiMaggio and Platias are irresponsible & must be sued for incompetence & causing pple to rely on their models.
We've known for 35 y to NEVER simulate Geo Brow Motion without stochasticizing vol to simulate tails. See my Dynamic Hedging (1997), preLTCM!
3) The precedent is J. Stiglitz and Peter Orzag, using similar Mickey Mouse simulations, putting their name on a paper showing Fannie & Freddie had no chance of going bust... just as I was saying it is sitting on barrels of dynamite.
Read 4 tweets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Profile picture
May 11
ON CLASSICAL LANGUAGES & MULTIGLOSSIA
My interpretation of Kripke-Wittgenstein: a language must have temporal & spatial consistency (memory is imperfect so your language cannot be private).
Classical languages have a property: unlike dialects, they don't vary across time.
1/n
A lingua franca is needed for science & business, so requires spatial consistency. Words must have the same meaning in Oxford & Krasnodar.

But a missed point is that it must also be read across generations. Syriac did not change a bit between Ephrem & Bar Hebraus (1000 y).

2/n
In English one cannot read a novel >200y. But between Cato I & Isaac Newton, Latin remained invariant (>1800 y).
"Classical" lang. by definition must transport across time. Class. Arabic has a span of 1700 y; attracted diglossic authors who spoke at home another lang.

3/n
Read 9 tweets

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