8 ms·

What Nassim Taleb can teach us

94 points by yusufp 9y ago

chollida1 9y ago
I love Nassim Taleb as an academic and philosopher. I think he has a Peter Thiel like quality of being able to thinking differently, but in a very applicable way. Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's had so much success that this is probably my fault. If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of his pieces are written in easily digestible formats. https://medium.com/@nntaleb https://medium.com/@nntaleb I've re-started trying to read the Black Swan about 10 times and IMHO if you just read the first 3 chapters then you'll get about 95% of what you would if you had read the entire book. I think the problem with his books that I have is that he considers himself not just an author but a modern day philosopher, and with that comes a level of rigor in his writing that brings me back to my measure theory and real analysis courses. If you really want to read his books, then start backwards. Antifragile is awesome, but still very wordy, and builds on top of all his other works. It almost seems to be the culmination of the idea's he's been writing about since the black Swan. As a side note, for anyone who wants to learn about options trading with a focus on how a trader would view them, ie from a mathematical perspective, then check out one of his first books...... Dynamic Hedging of Options. http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803.html http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803... As a second side note........ His latest concept of “Skin in the game” is the best form of risk control that we've found for reigning in traders. Once traders are required to 1) keep the vast majority of their bonus in the fund for a few years 2) take part of their bonus in the form of non liquid securities if they want to hold more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in non liquid assets we have found they pay alot more attention to the liquidity of their portfolio and the long term profitability of their portfolio, both of which are good for the long term success of the fund.
- stretchwithme 9y ago
  Or bonuses should be based on what happens during a long period of time. Say you lead a company from 2015 to 2020, but your bonus is based on how well the company does from 2020 through 2025. And if the company fails before you get your bonus, too bad for you. I haven't read his books but find his ideas as presented in videos and podcasts to be valuable.
  - ISL 9y ago
    That's precisely what points 1 and 2 do, for a trader.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    That's exactly the idea. Your bonuses 2015-2020 are invested in the company every year, and you can only cash them out after five years, in 2020-2025. If the company tanks in 2020 your bonuses for 2015-2020 are retroactively zero.
    - stretchwithme 9y ago
      I think companies should be rated by how much skin in the game its leaders have. Companies run by founders that still have a substantial percentage of their wealth in the company would get the highest rating. And professional managers getting stock-based short term incentives would be on the low end.
- hoodwink 9y ago
  I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I couldn't help reply to your comment about starting backwards: I completely disagree. Fooled by Randomness, in my opinion, is Taleb's seminal work. Reading it changed the course of career (I work in finance), much more so than Antifragile or Black Swan (even though both books are excellent).
  - sambe 9y ago
    Couldn't agree more. Little-mentioned relative to the others because it wasn't connected with the narrative of the financial crisis, but most of the others seems like repetition of ideas from FbR.
qubex 9y ago
I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable. However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he's been engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in this at an intellectual level (personally, I'm more on his side than not), the tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and unacceptable. [1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  Have you read his books (not just the summary but all the chapters)? While he has good points, he is so egotistical, self-absorbed, and full of pseudo-scientific theories (e.g. that one should go between gorging themselves on food and fasting) that it makes it hard to actually extract out the good parts.
  - darawk 9y ago
    Ya, it's really a shame. He's got some very interesting stuff to say, but he's such a completely insufferable jackass. It's really unfortunate. I manage to ignore it and enjoy his books anyway, but he's a pretty easy person to hate.
    - jcahill 9y ago
      if you start from a position of disdain instead, you'll be able to move past thinking his works have enough value to suffer the bullshit antics and be well on your way to never thinking about him again except in passing social context. taleb is ultimately just another LARPer. people get the impression that he's something more for ~4 basic reasons: 1. he's more verbal than them. 2. they don't know stats too good. so, given a crisis of confidence in all statistical orthodoxy plus a guy who really really seems to talk like he knows about stats a lot, and whom others — who also don't know stats, but want social proof of reading & shit — say knows about stats, they have no choice but to remain agnostic or go along with taleb's dogmatic-sophist-monkey-dance. 3. they fail to appreciate that his depth of extended expertise is never more than ankle-deep, and breadth very agonizingly chosen so as to min-max in terms of knowledge required to signal learnedness to the unlearned. he'll say some poncy shit like « flâneur » out of context just because his readers are unfamiliar with it. he'll go on seeming deep-dives about language evolution and community segregation in the spinning of statistical fables — and it'll be utter horseshit, but nobody reading him will suspect that, and anyone with the requisite expertise to debunk it line by line doesn't give a shit about him and has no incentive to do so: why debunk a LARPer whose entire shtick is being a cleverer obscurant than most with an institutionally-enabled gish gallop lifestyle? 4. academic culture is so actively pathetic and conflict-avoidant that it's trivial to come across as some sort of masculine breaker-of-chains figure merely by not sucking in the majority mould — sucking differently is sometimes sufficient, at this point. just look at jordan peterson. i don't intend to imply that he sucks, but look at him, presentation-wise. dude's basically a couple slices of ham held up by suspenders wrapped in a blazer, mouth-hole cut out so wind can blow through, and he's hailed as some kind of triumphant anti-establishment figure simply because culture wars shit has gotten so farcical. wonks are thrown off by taleb's eagerness to be crass in the middle of otherwise frou-frou discourse, and that's the only thing that gives it any influence — because he discards all epistemic norms in the process. he won't circle back for them if they wait it out, or otherwise re-engage like a good lad. he doesn't choose to be vulgar for shits and giggles while nevertheless maintaining soundness of argumentation, he does it simply as a short-circuiting mechanism. the posturing is slumming to him: he's aping a working class affectation without the life experience of having an epistemic peer+ interrupt the ritual to physically dickslap him and then resume reasoned discussion. you see it with the powerlifting posturing as well. i mean, nobody gives a shit what some physically unremarkable old man lifts. not young girls who don't wanna fuck unremarkable old men, nor young powerlifting guys who don't wanna have their sets interrupted by some old poseur pretending to do a 2016 election exit poll so he can inevitably find that HIGH T ⇒ TRUMP VOTER LOW T ⇒ HILLURRY LUK, A BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT ⇒ IMRITE AND IT'S A PICTURE SOOOOO… YOU CAN'T USE IT W/O TRANSCRIBING IT DESPITE ALREADY KNOWING IT'S BULLSHIT HEE HAW AREN'T I SUCH TROLE GLOBALIST CUCKS BTFO BY #BLACKSWAN (yeah, this refers to an actual thing⁽¹⁾ he did on twitter) in fact, the only possible audience for such effete anti-intellectual snobbery is Young Male Scholars™, pencilneck NYU Stern dandies who can project aspirations onto such a transparently less-than-nothing caricature as taleb in the same way that lots of young guys get really into BEING LIBERTARIAN as a social posture & gender identity. so taleb, then: a brand for dullwits, a statistician who squandered nigh-unsquanderably fortuitous career timing to shitpost about things he just read a single wikipedia entry on, a guy who needed to be spanked a lot more as a kid, gist him however you like. it doesn't really matter how you do it, because he doesn't matter ____________________ ¹ https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984
emtel 9y ago
Taleb holds that essentially all journalists are fools, and the articles they publish are "noise". He says "to cure yourself of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers". There's wisdom in this: the importance of the news of the day can't be immediately apprehended. What seems important at the time can quickly fade into irrelevance. Larger stories are often completely missed or gotten totally wrong. Buuuuuut apparently what Taleb means is that no one but him can figure out the importance of things immediately. The guy tweets, apparently believing that he understands the lasting importance of what he's tweeting about. And hey, maybe he does... except, among other things, he's in (or was in) a twitter war with JK Rowling! The guy is a loon who has figured a lot of things out, and now believes he knows everything.
- cmac2992 9y ago
  He totally lost me when he started talking about Michael Flynn being one of the great military minds or praising The Mooch's rant and "being direct, natural, and nononsense". Seems like a smart guy but...
blueyes 9y ago
How to be a blowhard...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rtx 9y ago
I see more people are now against hims since he stopped virtue signalling.
grey-area 9y ago
Does he even lift?
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  300 lbs deadlift baby!! ...which is not actually that great for any healthy male that trains, but considering he got into it late, it's pretty good and probably better than 98% of males his age.
questerzen 9y ago
The Black Swan has a good point to make about reliance on over-simplified mathematical models, but Taleb's macho anti-intellectualism is ultimately nihilistic since he denies even the possibility of achieving a deeper mathematical understanding of risk. But what I really have a problem with is that he has created a band of idiot Twitter acolytes who can be counted on to heap brainless abuse at anyone who Taleb chooses to disagree with, which these days seems to be almost everyone with even slightly diverging views to his. He will not attempt reasonable debate, especially when he is faced with superior erudition: in this regard Mary Beard is only the latest of his many victims. The guy is a pure and simple thug.
- ukj 9y ago
  I followed the drama around it and my end conclusion (to paraphrase somebody's tweet) Mary Beard is respectable, well educated and gracious. Taleb is right.
maxthegeek1 9y ago
Jeff Deist, the author of this article is a crypto white nationalist. You can pick up a hint of this from the article above, "He understands that globalism is not liberalism, that identity and culture matter" A quote from another article, "Jeff Deist, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a right-libertarian think tank for promoting Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and the Austrian School of economics, said of the Alt-right that he found their writings "interesting...and somewhat refreshing".[20] In 2017, Deist concluded a speech at the Mises Institute titled 'For a New Libertarian' with the words, "In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_Sta... Note that "blood and soil" refers to the nazi phrase "blut and boden".
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Why is he a 'white nationalist' and not just a 'nationalist'? Do you have any indication that, so long as people conform to his idea of what his country's culture should be, that he wouldn't accept black, asian, etc people?
  - maxthegeek1 9y ago
    I just brought up his use of the nazi slogan "blood and soil". Also, listen to this. It's Jeff Deist's take on Richard Spencer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6kJNHZvanI&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6kJNHZvanI&t=1s Within the video Deist advocates for what he calls a "Benedict Option" whereby a white ethnostate would secede from the US. Overall the tone of the video is that Deist disagrees with Richard Spencer's economic stance, but that he doesn't take issue with Spencer's views on race.
- qubex 9y ago
  Thanks for bringing that up, the idea of questioning the objectives and leanings of the ”Mises Institute” in general, and the author in particular, didn't occur to me (doh!). (N.B. I'm not the original poster of the article.)

94 points by yusufp 9y ago

I love Nassim Taleb as an academic and philosopher. I think he has a Peter Thiel like quality of being able to thinking differently, but in a very applicable way. Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's had so much success that this is probably my fault. If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of his pieces are written in easily digestible formats. https://medium.com/@nntaleb https://medium.com/@nntaleb I've re-started trying to read the Black Swan about 10 times and IMHO if you just read the first 3 chapters then you'll get about 95% of what you would if you had read the entire book. I think the problem with his books that I have is that he considers himself not just an author but a modern day philosopher, and with that comes a level of rigor in his writing that brings me back to my measure theory and real analysis courses. If you really want to read his books, then start backwards. Antifragile is awesome, but still very wordy, and builds on top of all his other works. It almost seems to be the culmination of the idea's he's been writing about since the black Swan. As a side note, for anyone who wants to learn about options trading with a focus on how a trader would view them, ie from a mathematical perspective, then check out one of his first books...... Dynamic Hedging of Options. http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803.html http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803... As a second side note........ His latest concept of “Skin in the game” is the best form of risk control that we've found for reigning in traders. Once traders are required to 1) keep the vast majority of their bonus in the fund for a few years 2) take part of their bonus in the form of non liquid securities if they want to hold more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in non liquid assets we have found they pay alot more attention to the liquidity of their portfolio and the long term profitability of their portfolio, both of which are good for the long term success of the fund.

stretchwithme 9y ago
Or bonuses should be based on what happens during a long period of time. Say you lead a company from 2015 to 2020, but your bonus is based on how well the company does from 2020 through 2025. And if the company fails before you get your bonus, too bad for you. I haven't read his books but find his ideas as presented in videos and podcasts to be valuable.
- ISL 9y ago
  That's precisely what points 1 and 2 do, for a trader.
- mseebach 9y ago
  That's exactly the idea. Your bonuses 2015-2020 are invested in the company every year, and you can only cash them out after five years, in 2020-2025. If the company tanks in 2020 your bonuses for 2015-2020 are retroactively zero.
  - stretchwithme 9y ago
    I think companies should be rated by how much skin in the game its leaders have. Companies run by founders that still have a substantial percentage of their wealth in the company would get the highest rating. And professional managers getting stock-based short term incentives would be on the low end.
hoodwink 9y ago
I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I couldn't help reply to your comment about starting backwards: I completely disagree. Fooled by Randomness, in my opinion, is Taleb's seminal work. Reading it changed the course of career (I work in finance), much more so than Antifragile or Black Swan (even though both books are excellent).
- sambe 9y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Little-mentioned relative to the others because it wasn't connected with the narrative of the financial crisis, but most of the others seems like repetition of ideas from FbR.

qubex 9y ago

I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable. However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he's been engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in this at an intellectual level (personally, I'm more on his side than not), the tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and unacceptable. [1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.

jdavis703 9y ago
Have you read his books (not just the summary but all the chapters)? While he has good points, he is so egotistical, self-absorbed, and full of pseudo-scientific theories (e.g. that one should go between gorging themselves on food and fasting) that it makes it hard to actually extract out the good parts.
- darawk 9y ago
  Ya, it's really a shame. He's got some very interesting stuff to say, but he's such a completely insufferable jackass. It's really unfortunate. I manage to ignore it and enjoy his books anyway, but he's a pretty easy person to hate.
  - jcahill 9y ago
    if you start from a position of disdain instead, you'll be able to move past thinking his works have enough value to suffer the bullshit antics and be well on your way to never thinking about him again except in passing social context. taleb is ultimately just another LARPer. people get the impression that he's something more for ~4 basic reasons: 1. he's more verbal than them. 2. they don't know stats too good. so, given a crisis of confidence in all statistical orthodoxy plus a guy who really really seems to talk like he knows about stats a lot, and whom others — who also don't know stats, but want social proof of reading & shit — say knows about stats, they have no choice but to remain agnostic or go along with taleb's dogmatic-sophist-monkey-dance. 3. they fail to appreciate that his depth of extended expertise is never more than ankle-deep, and breadth very agonizingly chosen so as to min-max in terms of knowledge required to signal learnedness to the unlearned. he'll say some poncy shit like « flâneur » out of context just because his readers are unfamiliar with it. he'll go on seeming deep-dives about language evolution and community segregation in the spinning of statistical fables — and it'll be utter horseshit, but nobody reading him will suspect that, and anyone with the requisite expertise to debunk it line by line doesn't give a shit about him and has no incentive to do so: why debunk a LARPer whose entire shtick is being a cleverer obscurant than most with an institutionally-enabled gish gallop lifestyle? 4. academic culture is so actively pathetic and conflict-avoidant that it's trivial to come across as some sort of masculine breaker-of-chains figure merely by not sucking in the majority mould — sucking differently is sometimes sufficient, at this point. just look at jordan peterson. i don't intend to imply that he sucks, but look at him, presentation-wise. dude's basically a couple slices of ham held up by suspenders wrapped in a blazer, mouth-hole cut out so wind can blow through, and he's hailed as some kind of triumphant anti-establishment figure simply because culture wars shit has gotten so farcical. wonks are thrown off by taleb's eagerness to be crass in the middle of otherwise frou-frou discourse, and that's the only thing that gives it any influence — because he discards all epistemic norms in the process. he won't circle back for them if they wait it out, or otherwise re-engage like a good lad. he doesn't choose to be vulgar for shits and giggles while nevertheless maintaining soundness of argumentation, he does it simply as a short-circuiting mechanism. the posturing is slumming to him: he's aping a working class affectation without the life experience of having an epistemic peer+ interrupt the ritual to physically dickslap him and then resume reasoned discussion. you see it with the powerlifting posturing as well. i mean, nobody gives a shit what some physically unremarkable old man lifts. not young girls who don't wanna fuck unremarkable old men, nor young powerlifting guys who don't wanna have their sets interrupted by some old poseur pretending to do a 2016 election exit poll so he can inevitably find that HIGH T ⇒ TRUMP VOTER LOW T ⇒ HILLURRY LUK, A BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT ⇒ IMRITE AND IT'S A PICTURE SOOOOO… YOU CAN'T USE IT W/O TRANSCRIBING IT DESPITE ALREADY KNOWING IT'S BULLSHIT HEE HAW AREN'T I SUCH TROLE GLOBALIST CUCKS BTFO BY #BLACKSWAN (yeah, this refers to an actual thing⁽¹⁾ he did on twitter) in fact, the only possible audience for such effete anti-intellectual snobbery is Young Male Scholars™, pencilneck NYU Stern dandies who can project aspirations onto such a transparently less-than-nothing caricature as taleb in the same way that lots of young guys get really into BEING LIBERTARIAN as a social posture & gender identity. so taleb, then: a brand for dullwits, a statistician who squandered nigh-unsquanderably fortuitous career timing to shitpost about things he just read a single wikipedia entry on, a guy who needed to be spanked a lot more as a kid, gist him however you like. it doesn't really matter how you do it, because he doesn't matter ____________________ ¹ https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984

emtel 9y ago

Taleb holds that essentially all journalists are fools, and the articles they publish are "noise". He says "to cure yourself of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers". There's wisdom in this: the importance of the news of the day can't be immediately apprehended. What seems important at the time can quickly fade into irrelevance. Larger stories are often completely missed or gotten totally wrong. Buuuuuut apparently what Taleb means is that no one but him can figure out the importance of things immediately. The guy tweets, apparently believing that he understands the lasting importance of what he's tweeting about. And hey, maybe he does... except, among other things, he's in (or was in) a twitter war with JK Rowling! The guy is a loon who has figured a lot of things out, and now believes he knows everything.

cmac2992 9y ago
He totally lost me when he started talking about Michael Flynn being one of the great military minds or praising The Mooch's rant and "being direct, natural, and nononsense". Seems like a smart guy but...

blueyes 9y ago

How to be a blowhard...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rtx 9y ago

I see more people are now against hims since he stopped virtue signalling.

grey-area 9y ago

Does he even lift?

oh_sigh 9y ago
300 lbs deadlift baby!! ...which is not actually that great for any healthy male that trains, but considering he got into it late, it's pretty good and probably better than 98% of males his age.

questerzen 9y ago

The Black Swan has a good point to make about reliance on over-simplified mathematical models, but Taleb's macho anti-intellectualism is ultimately nihilistic since he denies even the possibility of achieving a deeper mathematical understanding of risk. But what I really have a problem with is that he has created a band of idiot Twitter acolytes who can be counted on to heap brainless abuse at anyone who Taleb chooses to disagree with, which these days seems to be almost everyone with even slightly diverging views to his. He will not attempt reasonable debate, especially when he is faced with superior erudition: in this regard Mary Beard is only the latest of his many victims. The guy is a pure and simple thug.

ukj 9y ago
I followed the drama around it and my end conclusion (to paraphrase somebody's tweet) Mary Beard is respectable, well educated and gracious. Taleb is right.

maxthegeek1 9y ago

Jeff Deist, the author of this article is a crypto white nationalist. You can pick up a hint of this from the article above, "He understands that globalism is not liberalism, that identity and culture matter" A quote from another article, "Jeff Deist, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a right-libertarian think tank for promoting Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and the Austrian School of economics, said of the Alt-right that he found their writings "interesting...and somewhat refreshing".[20] In 2017, Deist concluded a speech at the Mises Institute titled 'For a New Libertarian' with the words, "In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_Sta... Note that "blood and soil" refers to the nazi phrase "blut and boden".

oh_sigh 9y ago
Why is he a 'white nationalist' and not just a 'nationalist'? Do you have any indication that, so long as people conform to his idea of what his country's culture should be, that he wouldn't accept black, asian, etc people?
- maxthegeek1 9y ago
  I just brought up his use of the nazi slogan "blood and soil". Also, listen to this. It's Jeff Deist's take on Richard Spencer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6kJNHZvanI&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6kJNHZvanI&t=1s Within the video Deist advocates for what he calls a "Benedict Option" whereby a white ethnostate would secede from the US. Overall the tone of the video is that Deist disagrees with Richard Spencer's economic stance, but that he doesn't take issue with Spencer's views on race.
qubex 9y ago
Thanks for bringing that up, the idea of questioning the objectives and leanings of the ”Mises Institute” in general, and the author in particular, didn't occur to me (doh!). (N.B. I'm not the original poster of the article.)