With The Grain

Predictions

Informações:

Sinopse

Throughout The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb bemoans the prevalence of Gaussian functions, perhaps known best graphed as characteristic bell curves. Much of the natural world sorts itself into a bell curve (see also the 80/20 “rule,”) but if we expect everything to fall within a Gaussian framework, we will be continually surprised by real life. Consider my previous discussion of casino risk management. The games are all statistically reliable and predictable, but the biggest risk to its business come from non-gaming threats. The desire to fit nature into a probabilistic straight-jacket has infected the Nobel Prize in Economics, much to Taleb’s chagrin: …True, the prize has gone to some valuable thinkers, such as the empirical psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the thinking economist Friedrich Hayek. But the committee has gotten into the habit of handing out Nobel Prizes to those who “bring rigor” to the process with pseudoscience and phony mathematics. After the stock market crash, they rewarded two