Free Republic

Former Texas Representative Ron Paul recently told Tucker Carlson that the public must prepare for an unprecedented “Black Swan” event this year. While discussing current political events on the Tucker Carlson Show, Paul reminded the former Fox News host how he predicted the conflict in Ukraine in 2014. However, Paul said something much bigger is coming, a significant event that would catch the world off guard and plunge society in chaos. “I think we’re reaching this point where some sudden thing is going to happen,” Paul began.

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air...

< snip >In "The Black Swan"--a kind of cri de coeur--Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law. The attractiveness of the bell curve resides in its democratic distribution and its mathematical accessibility. Collect enough data and the pattern reveals itself, allowing both robust predictions of future data points (such as the height of the next five people to enter the room) and accurate estimations of the size and frequency of extreme values (anticipating the occasional giant or dwarf. The power-law distribution, by contrast,...

VIDEOOn September 5, 2021 a black swan appeared in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and attracted a lot of attention as you can see. Does this very rare appearance of a black swan in the very center of China portend a Black Swan event? By strange coincidence, on the very same day the black swan appeared in Tiananmen Square, a fascinating documentary about Black Swan Events, "The Worst Kind of Surprise: Black Swan Theory," was uploaded to YouTube. You can see a few excerpts of it in this video but I highly recommend you watch the entire documentary in the link below.The...

I've been following author Nassim Taleb for several years now.  His claim to fame was his 2007 book Black Swan which brought the term black swan event into the English vocabulary. What I've done here is transcribe and edit-down a talk Taleb gave in India (2018) where he explains the key principles in his newest book, Skin in the Game. Enjoy. Very rarely have I seen Taleb mentioned on Free Republic, but there's a lot for FReepers to like: Taleb is smart and opinionated wordsmith and historian who hates big bureacracies and doesn't suffer fools.  Perhaps he hasn't come...

Author and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers a definitive solution for how to gain from disorder and chaos, while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. Taleb argues that many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What he calls the antifragile is actually beyond the robust, because it benefits from shocks, uncertainty, and stressors, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. The antifragile needs disorder in order to survive and flourish

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about why debt leads to fragility (5:16); the importance of "skin in the game" to a properly functioning financial system (10:45); why large banks should be nationalized (21:47); why technology won't rule the future (24:20); the value of studying the classics (26:09); his intellectual adversaries (33:30); why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50); his intellectual influences (39:10); why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10); why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50); his libertarianism (47:30); and why he'll never take writing...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Skin in the Game, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book. This is the third episode of EconTalk with Taleb related to the general topic of skin in the game and how it affects decision-making and policy in an uncertain world. This episode focuses on rationality, religion, and the challenge of thinking about probability and risk correctly in a dynamic world

Where to start… A few days ago Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote, “So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth. In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and too little accountability.” On Monday, James Kunstler wrote, “But the dishonesty at work is pretty obvious, and the problem with dishonesty in financial affairs...

No Worship Without Skin in the Game Symmetry, symmetry everywhere — Belief and worship requires an entry fee — The Gods do not like cheap signaling. (Author's) Note: I am posting these excerpts from SKIN IN THE GAME as I am ending the harrying Greek-Orthodox lent period which, for the most part, allows no animal products. This diet is particularly hard to keep in the West where people use butter and dairy products. But once you fast, you feel entitled to celebrate Easter; it is like the exhilaration of fresh water when one is thirsty. You’ve paid a price. Your holiday is different from that...

Real Life is Risk Taking Chapter from Skin in the Game Life in the Simulation Machine There are many ways to convince with an icepick — Councils of bickering bishops Theosis– Why Trump will win I once sat in a dinner party on a large round table across from a courteous fellow called David. The host was a physicist, Edgar C. who was honoring an author, a former secretary of the great Borges, so, except for the fellow David, everyone was dressed like people who read Borges. As to David, he was dressed like someone who didn’t know that people who read, among...

Why Each One Should Eat His Own Turtles: Equality in Uncertainty How do turtles taste — Where are the new customers? –Sharia and asymmetry (Chapter 2 of Skin in the Game) You who caught the turtles better eat them (Ipsi testudines edite, qui cepistis) goes the ancient adage. The origin of the expression is as follows. It was said that a group of fishermen caught a large number of turtles. After cooking them, they found out at the communal meal that these sea animals were much less edible that they thought: not many members of the group were willing to eat them....

The Facts are True, the News is Fake How to Disagree with Yourself In the summer of 2009, I partook of a an hour long discussion with David Cameron, who was in the running for, and later became, the U.K. Prime Minister. The discussion was about how to make society robust, even immune to Black Swans, what structure was needed for both decentralization and accountability, and how the system should be built, that sort of thing. It was an interesting fifty-nine minutes around the topics of the Incerto and I felt great communicating all the points in bulk for the first time....

There is inequality and inequality. The first is the inequality people tolerate, such as one’s understanding compared to that of people deemed heroes, say Einstein, Michelangelo, or the recluse mathematician Grisha Perelman, in comparison to whom one has no difficulty acknowledging a large surplus. This applies to entrepreneurs, artists, soldiers, heroes, the singer Bob Dylan, Socrates, the current local celebrity chef, some Roman Emperor of good repute, say Marcus Aurelius; in short those for whom one can naturally be a “fan”. You may like to imitate them, you may aspire to be like them; but you don’t resent them. The...

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 do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define...

Sometimes, less is more, and in infamous "Black Swan" philosopher Nassim Taleb's case, summing up the chaos that is enveloping America, and its forthcoming election was as simple as the following: "The *establishment* composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent-seekers and other "well thinking" members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments." To which he appended the following 17 perfectly succinct words: "People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally,...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has little tolerance for, well, a lot of things. But, as his latest book demonstrates, he holds a particular grievance against the mediocre, the safe middle ground, and most forms of moderation. True to form, Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder, is a work of non-fiction that trades in extremes—a book that, in complete earnestness, offers thoughts on everything from the philosophy of Seneca and the structure of the Swiss government to the value of procrastination and the limits of academic research. He is just as likely to bring in Ben Bernanke and Ralph Nader as Hammurabi...

Since Tim Geithner did not predict the economic crisis, Nassim Taleb has no interest in listening to him talk about it now. The author of The Black Swan, a book about risk and probability theory, told National Journal's Matthew Cooper that he did not listen to Geithner, who preceded him at the Washington Ideas Forum.

It can't be posted on FR, apparently by a decree of the media police or that which serves the same purpose in a "free" country.But I think it's legal to link to it: '''' ''' ''''' ''''' '' '''' '''...

Taleb: Buffett's Track Record Means Completely Nothing, I Have Proof George Soros Is The True Oracle Vincent Fernando Feb. 9, 2010, 8:02 AM In an ai5000 article next to a studio shot with a stuffed black swan, Nassim Taleb makes it clear he has far more confidence in the investment acumen of George Soros than Warren Buffett. ai5000: "I don’t want to spend too much time on Buffett. George Soros has 2 million times more statistical evidence that his results are not chance than Buffett does. Soros is vastly more robust. I am not saying Buffett doesn’t have skill—I’m just...