Black Swan Debates

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Fooling Reviewers

Peter Taylor’s lecture exposition of the ludic fallacy (he does a better job than I did). Here is the summary.

Critique by Andrew Gelman and my responses point by point

Critique by Aaron Brown and my answers

Critique by the American Statistical Association and my reply in The American Statistician (in press, August 2007). Addendum: My Poisson Buster: Why Poisson does not work out of sample (14 Million pieces of data showing Poisson failures and unavailability of a characteristic scale). On Aug 6, 2008, the American Statistical Association had a special panel (JSM) –to my surprise ALL agreed with my main point. So I am working with members of the American Statistical Association to dispel the negative impact of my book on statisticians by showing that it is not statistics I am criticizing, but users of statistics in the wrong places –like rare events.

View from the actuary profession.

T-Shirt—a gift from Peter Bevelin: Statisticians have a hard time figuring out the difference between Absence of Evidence and Evidence of Absence outside of exam questions.

Comment about Tyler Cowen’s discussion of derivatives as predictors and technical appendix -- Unlike other, more technical critics, I do not think much of Cowen’s intellect, abilities, & understanding of probability & random payoffs, but that irresponsible fool was the first to advertise the contribution of “prediction markets” in high moment applications, heavy-tailed environment. “Prediction markets” fail in fat-tailed domains because of estimation errors. Also note a blogger who got my point about predicting in Extremistan. Update: Note that Cowen had the talent to argue that markets know how to adequately price remote events right ahead of the subprime debacle.

Note on a common error: from my Lectures in the philosophy of probability.

Elie Ayache’s two lengthy comments (a la Borges: “Elie Ayache, author of The Black Swan): first, second.

Debating Elie Ayache in NY (Balthazar, July 2008)