He often seems to interrupt himself halfway through a sentence in order to start a quite different thought. He skips many steps in reasoning. He flips by a graph without explaining its dimensions. Yes it’s often nearly incomprehensible. I’d like to see him teach an Econ 1 or Decision Theory 1 class where uptake on the part of the audience and reasonable pace of learning objectives are essential to the purpose.
I'd recommend watching more videos by him. This video is certainly not the best introduction, the ideas are presented too quickly, almost fragmented. But he is a genius imo, if you get into it, you won't regret, it's life changing stuff.
Maybe it has something to do with English being his second language? In any case, he's quite a smooth writer, so good job he decided to write the book. A really refreshing read!
I'm glad sheeple love this guy. The random walk theory and it's proponents are hilarious. I'm glad they exist. Those who see the bigger picture and understand the secret that lies in the humble broccoli are year in and year out making a killing in the market. Up or down there's money to be made.
@Ratoscruvy When mixed martial artists or boxers learn how to fight what to they do? They practice fighting each other. This is beating each other up. They are becoming stronger.
Sometimes we're too much loss averse. We should take risks, but as Taleb says, risks that have small downside and big upside. In other words, we should take less credit and flirt more. We tend to be careless for the former and so afraid of the latter. So I wouldn't trust our aversions too much, or to put it better, our aversions need more regulation from reality, to understand where risk is worth taking and where it's not.
If you assume the numbers in this example significant, you missed the whole point ... you are most probably very young and have very little or no idea what an abstraction means. You could try to accept the idea of Nassim Taleb (big is very different from small in some situations - like social phenomena - if is 100x or 1 mil.x smaller depends on the situation). Maybe later you will get the intuition not to mix the everyday meaning of a million (like something very big) with the abstraction...GL
I think he makes a couple good points, but I don't really understand what he's trying to say through most of it. I've never heard of him or any of the people there. I'm just watching this for school. But can someone explain to me what the basic point is or what the heck he means in the "black swan" explanation? I'm really not sure and very confused.
RiAMaU From what I gather there are a couple of different basic points: 1) black swan events, even tough they are unpredictable, are not rare/outliers: eventually they will happen, so any system that is not anti fragile will eventually go bust, 2) you know a system is fragile when the risk to the system grows exponentially vis à vis another growth metric of that system e.g. a company decides to increase its ROI by investing with borrowed money, risks going bankrupt if a negative event impacts their business and are unable to repay their debt (I.e. the more debt you take on, the greater the risk of bankruptcy when something negative happens= company is fragile), 3) often systems (e.g. a company) become more fragile the bigger they become, 4) complex systems (e.g. the economy) resemble more organic systems (e.g. a cat or a human) than a machine (e.g. a washing machine), meaning that they need stresses to become stronger (e.g. if you go to the gym, you put stress on your body so that your body becomes more resilient. If you don’t work out, your body becomes weaker). On the other hand, a washing machine will brake if you put it under stress (e.g. you throw it). Macro economists often make the mistake of thinking they need to ‘stabilize’ the economy (I.e. make sure that the economy is not put under any stress), thinking that this is good for the economy, but effectively making the economy weaker for negative events (e.g. black swan events)
@@Maximus02020202 Oof. That doesn't make sense at all, especially in the context of my class, but alright. I did well on the piece I had to write on it anyway. Thanks for trying to explain. Economics is NOT my cup of tea, haha.
Muscles only grow with stress. Bones only get denser with impact. But as Taleb says, it has limits: if you pull a fighter's eyes out of his face, it won't grow new ones.
I'll admit Taleb is amusing to listen to at times, but he doesn't give any information you can act on practically. He invents new words, terms, and repeats phrases fragility antifragility and risk risk risk but in the end his lectures are just to pass time.
He is precisely the opposite of what you describe. There is absolutely no living intelectual that is more pragmatic and gives ideas as practical and grounded as Taleb.
These ideas are ridiculously good for making a lot of money in the markets. If you simply understand Taleb and why modern finance is wrong it's almost impossible not to make huge amounts of money with low risk.
8:34 too bad he's not a smooth speaker. He's halting, choppy, and aesthetically annoying to follow, unfortunately. It detracts from his message. Imagine if he could speak like Bob Costas? Why doesn't he try? C'mon, learn something new.
Why say ad hominum when there was no fallacy? Why use Latin at all unless you are trying to impress? But it backfires on you and makes you look foolish, like you have a misunderstanding of logic, as if you think apt adjectives for how someone speaks is a fallacy. You are a good example of the dangers of college -- it creates a lot of pompous dummies. I think Taleb would agree with me. If this comment gets a thumbs up, it's him, I bet.
What kind of flows do you mean? Changing the numbers does not change the idea ... why are your's 100 times better than his' 1 million? Because you are more used to small everyday numbers? If someone's grandmother jumps 1 meter 1 time she may hurt herself beyond remedy - so not the exact numbers are the point here ... Does the word abstraction mean anything to you? I find your argument absolutely weak, if it is an argument at all ...
Ha, your argument is preposterously weak. You commit the fallacy of accident with the grandma example. They don't jump often anyway. Picture any high school kid instead. And no one going to jump a million times to illustrate any point! So it's an unnecessarily impractical example. That is the more ridiculous abstraction to embrace. You missed the point twice, first with the 1 meter part then with 1 million. Maybe lay off the wine before posting next time.
@ 1:39, bad example of jumping a million times, because it's unreasonable and impractical and not necessary to prove the point. Why choose a ridiculous example when you have a simple one instead? Say, "If you jump 100 times for 1 meter, you won't be harmed." This shows one of his flaws. His judgment for examples is poor, as is his judgment for when to add humor. He adds it at bad times, when the mood calls for being serious, so humor is unwelcome. Otherwise, good.
