Word: taleb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...World," I repeated. Again he nodded, this time rolling his eyes slightly. He tried distracting me, asking me if I wanted to visit the Ali bin Abi Taleb mosque or ogle the colossal white yachts lining the waterfront like beached Moby Dicks. I pointed out our route - down the creek to the harbor and into the Arabian Sea. There, three miles offshore, was a cluster of 300 man-made islands shaped like a map of the globe. Each was named after a country or a city. The massive archipelago stretched across six miles and supposedly had been constructed with more...
...depending on the company’s appetite for risk.But VaR modeling does not describe events that occur the other 1 percent of the time. In the New York Times best-seller “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” Nassim N. Taleb, who has held positions at Columbia, Wharton, and NYU, argues that these events—which he dubs “black swans”—are the most important determinants of the course of history. Models that fail to account for them are all but useless. Even...
...world should have learned anything from the worst economic downturn since 1945, it is to heed those who warn that danger is ahead - and to listen to those who argue that it is precisely the least expected catastrophe (a "black swan," as they are now known after Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2007 book of that name) that can do the most damage. That does not mean we should all live, risk averse, cowering in a cave of our own making. It does mean that it behooves us to listen to those who, based on knowledge and insight, warn...
...centuries, Europeans believed that all swans were white - until black swans were discovered in Australia. A possibly minor moment in ornithology, but one that for Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader turned philosopher, perfectly illustrates how poorly our past experience of the world can prepare us for sudden, unexpected, epochal events. His 2007 book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, gave rise to a new name for these moments, both positive black swans (the rise of the Internet) and negative ones (the 9/11 attacks). Taleb has argued that much of the recent market turmoil has been...
...seven middle-aged men sitting beside me drinking tea with a sprig of sage have endured long stretches in Israeli prisons. Twice in the past few years, bulldozers had rumbled out from the nearby Israeli checkpoint to demolish the two-story home and ancient vineyards of our host, geologist Taleb al-Harithi. Armed with an Israeli court order, he managed to turn the bulldozers away, but he fears their return at any moment...