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.

< 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...

Today, I’m going to try to show you how and why we know that in the case of a pandemic like the one we’re in, surrounded by doubts and uncertainties, there are still a series of measures that we can and, more importantly, must take. But also, how these measures are hardly ever taken, and if they are, not in the correct fashion. This has to date led us into a ton of preventable misery and death. If only we would listen. And there’s still more we can do to prevent more mayhem, there is at every step of 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...

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,...

Shane Ferro October 17, 2014Multiplication — that's what people don't understand about Ebola, according to Nassim Taleb, the author of "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan." More specifically, Taleb explained to Business Insider that many people talking about the disease don't "have a grasp of the severity of the multiplicative process." The argument that the US should be more worried about a disease like cancer — which has more stable rates of infection than Ebola does currently — is a logic that Taleb calls "the empiricism of the idiots." The basic idea: The growth rate of Ebola infection is...

Paradoxically, one can make long-term predictions on the basis of the prevalence of forecasting errors. A system that is over-reliant on prediction (through leverage, like the banking system before the recent crisis), hence fragile to unforeseen “black swan” events, will eventually break into pieces. Although fragile bridges can take a long time to collapse, 25 years in the 21st century should be sufficient to make hidden risks salient: connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by then. The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened...

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.

Nassim Taleb is an unlikely choice to play the Jimmy Stewart role in a 21st-century remake of the Depression-era classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1]. But the tale of a naive do-gooder who tries to remind a corrupt political class of its obligations was re-enacted this week when Taleb attended the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance conference in Washington, D.C. A French- and Arabic-speaking former options trader with a taste for obscure Greek philosophers and the ambition to be seen as a literary figure, Taleb has grown famous for his book The Black Swan [2], which has sold...