Nassim Taleb on risk, ruin & the precautionary principle
For Taleb, the first rule of risk is to survive: judge a repeated activity rather than a single episode, and never take a bet that can wipe you out. Steady earnings often mean someone is quietly short an option on a rare event, as banks, Fannie Mae and single-supplier firms learned. Under uncertainty about something that can spread, he says caution should win: a few simple rules, acted on early, like the lazarettos that stopped plagues.
16 points · 6 appearances · 2008–2024
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2013–2020 · changed view
“Hammurabi's rule, and it says the following: if the architect builds a building and the building collapses and kills the owner of the building, what should happen to the architect? It should be put to death. I mean, it was Babylon 3,800 years ago, so they were not, you know -- didn't have a very sophisticated legal code, all right. And then of course if it kills the firstborn, the firstborn son of the architect is put to death. So they're really looking for symmetry. Now what was the idea of Hammurabi's code? It was not eye for eye -- eye for eye limiting damages, you know, and making things balanced. No, it was that you cannot walk away from risks you've created for others. You should own your risks. That's the idea of Hammurabi's code.”
2008–2024 · changed view
“Problem of most theorists, problem for universities, is you go from theory to practice, the degrees of freedom from theories of practice are considerably narrow, small. The reverse is monstrous. So let me give you this for: if I leave in a small piece of ice cube on the floor, okay, you can easily get someone in second year physics students to write the equation to tell you what's going, hard to predict, how that ice cube will melt. Okay, it's a very simple thing, the second rate student could do it. All right, right, know someone from Boston that is can do it. Okay, so the, yeah, so you can predict. So, but now, conditional on seeing water on the floor, is it easy to reverse-engineer the ice cube? No. You have an infinity of ice cubes.”
2013–2023 · changed view
“Please mishandle. So something that is fragile, if you map it properly mathematically, you'd realize that the fragile is what does not like disorder. It doesn't want mishandling, it doesn't want volatility, it wants peace and predictability. So the opposite of that would be something that love volatility.”
2008–2024 · changed view
“So there was an expression until we saw Australia, and effectively one, the sighting of a single bird destroyed millennia of confirmation. So it was a post as a logical problem, by showing that there's no reason, you cannot rule out a Black Swan because you haven't seen any. Okay, my problem is not a logical question. My Black Swan is an event, it's not a bird. So, and it's an event that has three properties.”