13 ms·
The World in 2036: Nassim Taleb looks at what will break, and what won't (2010)
- magicsmoke 6y ago"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." This here is crucial. Investment in capitalism resolves around predicting future profits and committing yourself to those predictions via debt and leverage. However, the heavier your commitments or the further the future swings from your predictions, the more of today's production you've wastefully dumped into a hole.
- chrisco255 6y agoInvestment of any kind revolves around prediction of future benefits. That's not unique to capitalism. Risk is inherent in nature.
- magicsmoke 6y agoTaleb's works usually revolve around how people making those investment decisions offload the risk onto others instead of eating the entire cost themselves, and as a result don't have an incentive to moderate their risk taking.
- ed312 6y agoThat is precisely the point of limited liability companies. We have decided, as a society, that we like the benefits of these over the risks. We could certainly have a discussion around scoping the limits to liability but the fundamental fact is society wants the benefits of risky projects.
- abakker 6y agoI think Mervyn King's take in "The end of Alchemy" is a better approach from a practical perspective than Taleb's though. Essentially that we just need to stop kidding ourselves that we can predict the tails, and to build greater buffers into all our assumptions from the beginning. He calls this "Radical Uncertainty" which I think is better as a practical foundation than attempts to model black swan events. Definitely worth considering both, though.
- raihansaputra 6y ago> Essentially that we just need to stop kidding ourselves that we can predict the tails, and to build greater buffers into all our assumptions from the beginning. He calls this "Radical Uncertainty" which I think is better as a practical foundation than attempts to model black swan events. I haven't read The End of Alchemy, but Taleb also doesn't even think modelling black swan events is possible or even useful. Any attempts that claims can predict black swan events is assumed as harmful. And he would also propose the same to build greater buffers into assumptions or even assume that it will fail in time. Antifragile is the book that explores this more on how fragile are predictions and it's far more useful to know where is the risk exposure and compensate for that instead of calculating the risk and trying to avoid it.
- meow_mix 6y agoPaywall
- errantmind 6y agoBypass Paywalls: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- playingchanges 6y agoI’m about 3/4 the way through Taleb’s ‘Antifragile’ after having already read ‘The Black Swan’ coincidentally only a few months before Covid hit. Must read material for understanding the world we are living in / entering right now in my opinion.
- lowdose 6y agoI read both of them twice. I found the concept in the Black Swan more distilled and polished. I started with the Black Swan for the 3th last week. I still come to new insights because what Taleb writes cuts also today straight through reality. Its like an extra set of razors, a timeless tool.
- ipsum2 6y agoAgreed - Antifragile wasn't as organized or edited well. I've read all of his Incerto series, and I prefer his older books Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoThirded. Black Swan and Fooled cover a lot of material. I don't think there were any huge additions in thought or context in Bed of Procrustes, though there some clever aphorisms.
- henrik_w 6y agoI really liked Antifragile. Reviewed it on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1GJ1RXSS8ZXME/ https://www.amazon.com/review/R1GJ1RXSS8ZXME/ and it made me think of how it applies to software development: https://henrikwarne.com/2014/06/08/antifragility-and-software-development/ https://henrikwarne.com/2014/06/08/antifragility-and-softwar...
- motohagiography 6y agoTaleb's message has been consistent. His offhand remark about pandemics overlooked how many of those old family owned businesses would be wiped out by one though. Leveraged and globalized companies are still doing fine. His prediction on gold backed currency still has some runway left, as the de-dollarization of the global economy is well underway, and last I checked some 5-7 years ago, China had accumulated enough physical gold to launch a gold backed international settlement and reserve currency with only about 30x leverage.
- nickff 6y agoThe thing about leveraged companies is that they look fine until they collapse; they might still have revenue coming in and be able to sell bonds, but once their shareholders' equity hits zero, they are done. This kind of bankruptcy is likely to peak at the end of the crisis, not at the beginning or the middle, and we haven't reached the end yet.
- xhrpost 6y ago> the de-dollarization of the global economy is well underway Interesting, can you mention by chance what major data points you see that are suggesting this? Thanks.
- csomar 6y agoThe opposite is actually happening with the IMF pumping "free" money to 3-rd world countries. The CNY has lost ground to the USD in the last year and even during the pandemic.
- anttifoobar 6y agoNot GP, but this is an informative piece: https://amp.ft.com/content/f3ee37e0-b086-11ea-a4b6-31f1eedf762e?__twitter_impression=true https://amp.ft.com/content/f3ee37e0-b086-11ea-a4b6-31f1eedf7... Specifically on major data points, FT writes “if foreigners want to hold American liquid assets in vast amounts, the US must run a huge external deficit, unless its private sector wishes to load itself up with riskier foreign assets on a comparable scale“ which doesn’t seem very sustainable in longer term. (We’re operating in the current system effectively since 1971.) (The piece further mentions the possibility of the current system “destroying the open world economy” which does indeed seem a bit gloomy.) (It doesn’t look very good for Euro either: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-22/ecb-looks-to-defuse-german-legal-timebomb-threatening-stimulus?sref=61mHmpU4&__twitter_impression=true https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-22/ecb-l... )
- dvt 6y agoI used to like Taleb (maybe due to my disillusionment after 2008), but it's becoming more and more clear to me that he doesn't really contribute that much to the intellectual landscape; he's very much in the same vein as someone like Jordan Peterson. His Twitter machismo and pseudo-trolling is also pretty telling -- if I were a millionaire, I'd probably be fishing off the coast of Malta, not picking internet fights on Twitter. I read his entire Incerto, and it was an absolute slog. Endless chapters just about how he's smarter than other Wall Street guys. Antifragile is probably the best book in the series, but the concept itself could be relegated to an essay -- not a whole book. As far as the article itself is concerned, it's typical doomerism. His entire post-Wall Street career revolves around doom and gloom (his main claim to fame being "black swan" events), so of course it makes sense that, from a Talebian perspective, the world will end by 2035.
- mjburgess 6y ago> if I were a millionaire, I'd probably be fishing off the coast of Malta Becoming a millionaire isn't like winning the lottery. For those who achieve it through passion & work, they are self-selectively not the people who will wake up one morning and "go fishing".
- Apocryphon 6y agoAnd how is getting into Twitter spats any preferable to a self-made millionaire?
- devit 6y agoEgo gratification, acquisition of narcissistic supply.
- harry8 6y agoYeah it is. Maybe you get some more tickets through passion and work but that's the full extent of it. You can be brilliant, passionate and set new levels of hard work and not have your number come up. Most vastly wealthy inherited. Don't kid yourself. Risk is risk. The only inevitability is death. (Remember when that used to be "Death and Taxes." We should go back to when taxes were in that list).
- aerodog 6y agoI like Taleb but he was off on voice-only telephones :D
- WA 6y agoWhy? They still exist and are used by many.
- fergie 6y agoHow do we get around the Economist’s paywall these days?
- BatFastard 6y agohttp://archive.is/ http://archive.is/
- breitling 6y agoI'm using brave browser and never see a paywall on economist. So I guess the answer is to block JavaScript and cookies
- martonlanga 6y agohttps://outline.com/[INSERT_URL] https://outline.com/[INSERT_URL]
- ducttapecrown 6y agoI'm using Chrome with a JavaScript toggle button and have JavaScript toggled off for the Economist. This incidentally gets past the paywall.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agoUnpaywall works like a charm https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unpaywall/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unpaywall/
- errantmind 6y agoBypass Paywalls is the best I've found, works on Chrome and Firefox: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- misiti3780 6y agoI know he doesnt seem to be popular here, but Taleb seems to be one of the most important thinkers of our time. The fact that he is such a dick in public turns a lot of people off but it seems most of his core ideas are salient. If I like Taleb, who else should be reading?
- H8crilA 6y agoWhen it comes to finance - I recommend anything that's "long convexity". For example papers by Artemis, the 100 years portfolio is quite good https://www.artemiscm.com/welcome https://www.artemiscm.com/welcome Then I'd say reading history and trying to imagine how those people thought like. I think Taleb is basically a historian that happened to trade a lot of options in his past life. I like Robert Shiller's idea of "moving back in time", where you read today's NYTimes daily but from say, 1925, instead of 2020.
- qwtel 6y agoProbably John Gray more than anyone. Taleb seems to be quite fond of him. Also, here is a list of authors Taleb himself considers to be, in classic Taleb fashion, "non BS vendors": https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1231560522157494279 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1231560522157494279
- cthalupa 6y ago>Taleb seems to be one of the most important thinkers of our time. Considering basically nothing he talks about is a thought original to him, I can't say I agree. He's good at popularizing things with the general public that were already well known within specialist circles, though. He's also quite spotty on a bunch of science related subjects, including GMOs https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
- pazimzadeh 6y agoYeah. Nassim has some great if somewhat obvious points but his take on GMOs is weak. Any technology, from fire to GMOs, can be beneficial or abused. His insistence that we should not be playing around with genes at all because we are completely over our head is silly. We have always been over our head. And you don't have to be a "Monsanto shill" to realize that. He's very trigger happy with the block button, which ironically limits his exposure to contrarian views and likely makes his ideas less anti-fragile in the long run.
- ErikAugust 6y ago"The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation."
- csomar 6y agoHere is something funny: The USA "doomers" happen to live, surprisingly in the USA or somewhere else doomed (Europe). > https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1204827396999929857 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1204827396999929857 Last time I checked, Taleb lives in NYC. Surprise! That's where the "doom" will happen once the USD is hyper-inflated and the USA is bankrupt. Someone is not following his own advice. I'd also bet that Taleb is using in his daily-life more big corp products than small-family owned ones. I'm really wondering where this cognitive dissonance is coming from since many "high-profile" people seem to be suffering from it.
- 0xCMP 6y agoI think his biggest mis-read here was decentralization. If anything everything is becoming increasingly centralized to the point that we NEED to decentralize to keep things stable, but not to the level he is saying. I just think the worst case here we're really going towards Dystopian Sci-Fi "one world government and super corporations" rather than city states.
- ur-whale 6y agohttp://archive.is/8hR2P http://archive.is/8hR2P
- cs702 6y agoSo far, right on 2 out of 9 predictions. Here are the nine predictions and their current status: > The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians' misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence. 1. So far, NOT TRUE. Nation-states still dominate the global landscape, and a majority have annual budget deficits (i.e., there is no "fiscal prudence"). > Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America's Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold. 2. So far, NOT TRUE. AFAIK, no national currencies are pegged to gold nor to some other "currency without a government". Currencies created by government fiat dominate. > Companies that are currently large, debt-laden, listed on an exchange (hence “efficient”) and paying bonuses will be gone. Those that will survive will be the more black swan-resistant—smaller, family-owned, unlisted on exchanges and free of debt. There will be large companies then, but these will be new—and short-lived. 3. So far, NOT TRUE. Most companies that are large, debt-laden, and exchange-traded are still around in their current form, though many have been supported by government largesse during the covid-19 pandemic. > Most of the technologies that are now 25 years old or more will be around; almost all of the younger ones “providing efficiencies” will be gone, either supplanted by competing ones or progressively replaced by the more robust archaic ones. So the car, the plane, the bicycle, the voice-only telephone, the espresso machine and, luckily, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be with us. 4. So far, TRUE. > The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation. 5. TRUE on the biological front!!! 6. So far, NOT TRUE on the electronic front. > Religious practice will experience a revival, seen as a conveyor of robust heuristics, cultural values and rituals. 7. So far, NOT TRUE. See, for example: https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/ https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ... > Science will produce smaller and smaller gains in the non-linear domain, in spite of the enormous resources it will consume; instead it will start focusing on what it cannot—and should not—do. 8. So far... MAYBE? I mean, we have seen remarkable advances in AI (vision, NLP, speech, etc.), distributed systems (e.g., blockchains), quantum computing (Google, IBM, others), space exploration (Tesla, Blue Origin, others), green energy (Tesla again)... I'm inclined to say, as of yet, NOT TRUE. > Finally, what is now called academic economics will be treated with the same disrespect that rigorous (and practical) minds currently have for Derrida-style post-modernist verbiage. 9. So far, NOT TRUE. Academic economists still seem to be treated with about as much respect as in 2010.
- dang 6y agoA tiny thread from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940661
- haltingproblem 6y agoYeah, Taleb is a tough one. His books and ideas have done more to change my thinking than almost anything else I have read. I recently got through Skin in the Game (finally!) adn it was head exploding especially in the light of Covid-19. I would rank it above his other books though he ranks Anti-Fragile as his most important work. Some reasons Taleb comes off as so intransigent and just obstinate in real-life is two fold - 1) He sees as profoundly evil the privatization of profits and socialization of risks (banks) and sees "no consequence" professions - economists, experts, bureaucrats, war mongers, politicians and intellectuals as deeply unethical and predatory. 2) He went through a phase which he talks about in Anti Fragile, after the publication of Black Swan that he actually had to get security and was broadly shunned by the financial and intellectual elite which went against them. He is also independently wealthy and has learnt to inoculate himself to the circular congratulatory world of honors, awards, citations etc. Taleb has been right about a lot of things and obviously wrong about few. However that is a difficult yardstick to measure on when the events he is talking about unfold once every 100 years or longer. It takes immense courage to make a stand on things that might never happen in your lifetime. For example he has been talking about the risks of pandemics for years and wrote a very prescient piece on Covid-19 in Jan. Now, China could have very well stopped Covid-19 in its tracks like they did SARs and we would have been spared and he would have looked like a fear monger. However it was the right call for Taleb to make and that is true courage. I began reading Taleb when Fooled by Randomness came out in the early 200s. Read The Black Swan and then stopped because I did not find his work prescriptive. Recently got through the rest of his books and wished I had read them much much earlier. Now I plan to re-read them every two years. Most intellectuals, including the general population of HN, have an almost allergic reaction to Taleb. They find him pompous, insufferable, unscientific, unoriginal and the rest. To each his own but it would behoove anyone who generally cares about how the world works to give the Incerto a read with an open mind. BTW he is hugely bullish on the value of startups to both individuals and society (Anti-Fragile and Skin In the Game).
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Most intellectuals, including the general population of HN, have an almost allergic reaction to Taleb. Taleb is one of the most frequently positively cited public intellectuals on HN. Certainly, there are also negative reactions to him, but claiming the general population of HN has an “almost allergic reaction” to Taken is a ridiculously hyperbolic display of “my preferred viewpoint is persecuted here.”
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoYou know what? I really like Taleb, despite certain aspects of his personality that might irritate most "normal" people. There's just one single thing that I very strongly disagree with (his take on inequality [0]), which is because I can't really understand but a tiny fraction of what he writes or says. Can you imagine how beautiful that is? When I'm bored, I take a look at his twitter account and get inspired by things I would hardly find elsewhere. Ah, on the inequality part: you would deserve a proper explanation, but in summary: I'm Italian, living in San Francisco for the past decade; when he says there's more inequality in Florence than in the US, I have a deep gut feeling that he's completely wrong. I know Florence and I know San Francisco, in terms of inequality I would always pick Florence (in terms of being a fairer system). I just need to pick outside my window to see several homeless people, and that's only scratching the surface. [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46 https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
- H8crilA 6y agoThat's because inequality is not really the problem. Insecurity is the problem. People in Florence are secure (their basic needs are met), while SF has an open defecation problem.
- redisman 6y agoWhat causes the insecurity if not inequality?
- H8crilA 6y agoImagine (at current buying power of the $, including rent and everything; not saying that this is or isn't realistic) that everyone who's employed makes at least $100k/year, and unemployment is below 5% again. But at the same time there are pockets (perhaps even sizeable pockets) of people that make shit ton more. Do you think so many would be angry at the system? The point is while "technically" (via some precise mathematical measure involving the entire wealth or income distribution) the inequality may be huge, if you can feel safe you'll not be very angry. "Safety" involves really basic things: shelter, healthcare, food, social purpose.