IDEA #60

How to turn that black swan white

cartoon

Highly improbable events can have the biggest impact on the world.

What you need to know

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former hedge fund manager and Wall Street trader who has turned his hand to academia, decries mankind’s seemingly insatiable – but ultimately flawed – appetite for trying to predict the future. Criticising a gamut of high-profile individuals, from risk managers to politicians to Nobel laureates, Taleb has suggested that modern attitudes towards risk, uncertainty and predicting the future are worthless because they hero-worship the Gaussian normal distribution ‘bell curve’ view of the ...

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