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There are people with much more “intolerant” (restrictive) diets than halal and kosher, and yet, those don’t “win.” This is an extremely simplistic explanation
by baddox 6y ago
There are people with much more “intolerant” (restrictive) diets than halal and kosher, and yet, those don’t “win.” This is an extremely simplistic explanation with, I suspect, very little predictive power.
- keiferski 6y ago> This is an extremely simplistic explanation with, I suspect, very little predictive power. A fitting note for every idea Taleb has ever had.
- georgeburdell 6y agoIs it? In his book, Black Swan, he mentions his hedge fund, which did quite well during the peak of Covid https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-advised-universa-tail-risk-fund-returned-3-600-in-march https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-adv...
- keiferski 6y agoNot quite sure that COVID counts as a Black Swan event, at least according to his own definition. From Wikipedia: The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain: 1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology. 2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities). 3. The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs. From your article: Taleb, in a March 30 interview on Bloomberg Television, said a pandemic like the coronavirus outbreak was predictable and investors who weren’t hedged paid the price with steep losses. What’s impossible to predict is the timing of such an event, he said, which is why insurance must be in place at all times. So essentially his "big idea" is the concept of insurance? That doesn't quite qualify as intellectually significant to me.
- rational_indian 6y agoThey have not crossed the "threshold of winning". RTFA, please!
- baddox 6y agoRight. So the point is really “the winners win.”
- eadan 6y agoIt seems you misunderstood the article. When a minority has an intolerant stance about which the majority has no preference towards, the minority wins. For example, the majority doesn't care if all food is kosher. But, the majority would care if all food was vegan.
- snakeboy 6y agoThis point is explicitly discussed in TFA. Kind of bad faith to criticize an article so harshly that you didn't even bother to skim...