Black Swans: Stories

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A key difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan is the scalability. Something is scalable if it can grow exponentially with little/no additional resources. A massage therapist is a non-scalable profession since he/she can only serve so many clients in a day. However, a singer in the digital age is a scalable profession since he/she can perform a song once, record and disseminate it widely. Scalability can create vast inequalities, extremities and winner-takes-all situations. Top singers earn vastly more than average singers, even though they aren’t proportionately more talented. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic―L.A. in it purest, most idealized form." ― Vanity Fair So I gave this book two stars. I valued the content but it is most definitely not groundbreaking and it most definitely is not well written. Epistemic arrogance, the pretensions of “experts,” our ever-increasing access to information—all belie an incontrovertible fact: In many, perhaps even most, areas of our lives, prediction is simply impossible.

Types of uncertainty: Extremistan vs. Mediocristan Differences between Extremistan vs. MediocristanEve Babitz became one of my muses, undoubtedly, and one of my favourite female writers. There was this moment, she mentioned that when we admire an author, we think we become that same author; we believe we wrote ourselves those words. Oh my, didn’t I feel this with both of her books…? Babitz’s talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures.”— The New York Times Book Review Consider, for example, a financial analyst predicting the price of a barrel of oil in ten years. This analyst may build a model using the gold standards of her field: past and current oil prices, car manufacturers’ projections, projected oil-field yields, and a host of other factors, computed using the techniques of regression analysis. The problem is that this model is innately narrow. It can’t account for the truly random—a natural disaster that disrupts a key producer, or a war that increases demand exponentially.

Taleb, however, offers a new spin on the term. He uses it to describe specific historical events with specific impacts. These events have three salient features: Babitz’s writing is also like the jacaranda tree in glorious bloom—bewitching an entire city, but all too brief.”— Los Angeles Review of BooksEvents are unexplainable , but intelligent people are good at making explanations. The smarter they are, the better sounding the explanation. What’s more worrisome is that all these beliefs and accounts appeared to be logically coherent and devoid of inconsistencies. Any reduction in the world around us can have explosive consequences since it rules out some sources of uncertainty. You may think that Islam is your ally against the threat of communism, until they fly two planes into New York. Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. Picture a turkey cared for by humans. It has been fed every day for its entire life by the same humans, and so it has come to believe the world works in a certain, predictable, and advantageous way. And it does...until the day before Thanksgiving. There is no question here, Taleb is an erudite and intelligent scholar. His take on epistomology and the scientific method breathe fresh air into the subject and gloss it with some 21st century context.

A barbell strategy devotes the majority of resources to safe options, and a minority to highly risky options that can pay off big. How can you integrate this into your life? Her articles and short stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire magazines. She is the author of several books including Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; Sex and Rage; Two By Two; and L.A. Woman. Transitioning to her particular blend of fiction and memoir beginning with Eve's Hollywood, Babitz’s writing of this period is indelibly marked by the cultural scene of Los Angeles during that time, with numerous references and interactions to the artists, musicians, writers, actors, and sundry other iconic figures that made up the scene in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This book profoundly nasty and intellectually demented. Taleb a classic science denier; oscillating between anti-science and pseudo-intellectual arguments. When some scientist says something he likes, he misrepresents it to fit his narrative. When the scientific consensus is against him, he cries grand conspiracy theory or slanders the methods of science. His argumentation in this book is like a case study in logical fallacies and crank red flags. It is an inconvenient truth that humans’ predictive capabilities are extremely limited; we are continuously faced with catastrophic or revolutionary events that arrive completely unexpectedly and for which we have no plan. Yet, nevertheless, we maintain that the future is knowable and that we can adequately prepare for it. Taleb calls this tendency the scandal of prediction. Epistemic Arrogance The author does understand his limitation to some degree and even suggests skipping certain chapters, though to be honest, the chapters he recommends skipping I found to be the best in the book.Once upon a time there was a clever young financial professional called Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Of Lebanese - or, as he preferred, Levantine - descent but working in New York, he was an option trader and quantative analyst. Mistrusting the "bell-curve" models used by many financial institutions to mitigate risk, he wrote a book called Fooled by Randomness about the delusions of control and reliability under which labour much of Wall Street, many other businesses - and, indeed, individual human beings. This read like if Kit from Pretty Woman, or ummm Vivian, played by Julia Robert’s character in the film, wrote stories of their lives and their friends before she meets Richard Gere and goes nowhere. In Mediocristan, randomness is highly constrained, and deviations from the average are minor. Physical characteristics such as height and weight are from Mediocristan: They have upper and lower bounds, their distribution is a bell curve, and even the tallest or lightest human being isn’t much taller or lighter than the average. In Mediocristan, prediction is possible.