Nassim Taleb spoke at my university last week. Despite skipping the end of class to get a good seat, there was only space in an overflow room where, as it turned out, the audio would be faulty, and only after 3/5's of the audience had left could we hear a little bit of Taleb's lecture.
Taleb has held my fascination for the few months since hearing of him. He combines my interests in finance and risk with a sense of humour and an appreciation for nuance, all the while looking at events over the long term.
Nicholas Taleb is on the ramparts assuming an activist role in urging us "to move voluntarily into
Capitalism 2.0 by...shutting down the 'Nobel' in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers
where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a
world with fewer certainties."
"Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer
ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born
and die every day without making the news."
The themes Taleb develops in this manifesto are an outgrowth of his 2008 Edge original essay "The
Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics". (Aslo, see The Black Swan Technical Appendix.)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb09/taleb09_index.html
Although I have a sneaking suspicion that this is all quiteover my head, I believe that this is a mythology worth disecting.
Taleb's words at the talk it is worth figuring out how to fashion a system that grows stronger, more robust, after experiences stress and shocks rather than succumbing to fragility.
My thoughts went immediately to the human skeletal and muscular systems. A nursing friend suggested that archeologists are able to presuppose the professions of the once living skeletons they unearth by studying the stress and growth of their bones. As I think many of us know on some level, human bones reshape themselves in accordance to their use and their stress, as do muscles.
This seems to follow Taleb's suggestion quite well. However, friends of mine have found a strong fault to this logic: this adaptive biological structure prepares the body primarily to receive the stresses that it is accustomed to receiving. A Black Swan type event should prove a little more unlikely.
Thoughts?
(his other chief theme was the comparison of convexity and concavity, Alan, could you explain this?)
to be continued
thomas
