OYENTE

Edgar Hertwich

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Skin in the Game Audiolibro Por Nassim Nicholas Taleb arte de portada

A long rant

Total
2 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 06-30-24

Disappointing. Does not manage a coherent argument. Earlier, I thought his belittling of established groups ironic and funny. Here, any hint of irony is lost and the author appears as a megalomaniac. His repetitive rants about always the same groups become dead boring.

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The Black Swan, Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility&qu

Important message, lots of distractions

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 01-02-23

Nassim Taleb’s bestseller, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is enjoyable and enlightening as it contains an important overarching message, but it also communicates a problematic theory of knowledge.

Taleb emphatically makes a very important point: The outsize impact of high-impact, low-probability events in the development of the economy and society, and our tendency to disregard those events. He distinguishes two worlds, medriocistan and extremistan. Medriocistan corresponds (mostly) to the physical world, where things are normally distributed and exceedingly unlikely to more than three deviations from the mean. In extremistan, distributions have long tails, or cannot be described at all, which means that extreme events are more likely and further away from the mean. It applies mostly to social phenomena or events. Take a room of hundred men. No individual will present more than 3% of the mass of those present. However, one individual may as well represent 50% of the wealth, or even 90% or 99%. However, our intuition builds on experiences from the physical world and social sciences including economics apply normal distributions. We are much more likely to experience future extreme events that lie outside the range of historical observations. Events such as the 2008/09 financial crisis were not foreseen by economists because their methods and frame-of-mind directs them away from outliers, but the consequence of those outliers is much larger than the regular events economists’ study.
Taleb’s writing style is very entertaining, as he uses anecdotes to good effect to illustrate his points, and he makes amusing but irrelevant and sometimes distracting remarks on all sorts of persons, institutions, issues, and events. In some of his digressions, he makes statements about issues well investigated by science but far outside his own field of expertise, such as dieting and exercise, where he profs his opinion without checking the underlying scientific evidence. In general, he seems to have a rather poor opinion of academic research and the systematic development of knowledge.

Taleb argues for a radical empiricism and against the use of hypotheses and models. However, such a model-free science is neither possible nor meaningful. For the first, our whole system of cognition is based on a hypothesis-forming-and-revising machine, the human mind (Stanislav Dehaene). For the second, scientific progress is not possible without the generation and testing of hypotheses. I simply refer to the writings of Karl Popper on the issue. Taleb draws the conclusion that instead of directing science systematically, one should allow ‘stochastic tinkering’, a random discovery process. I am not quite sure what he means by that, I would be agree that some of the standards applied in the peer review process used for scientific proposals tends towards conservatism and incrementalism, but I would be troubled if a scientist proposes to conduct investigations that are not informed by any hypothesis.

With Taleb, we meet a fundamental challenge to our knowledge-acquisition. If events are too rare to be frequent, they may not be amendable to experimentation. Because of their large impact, it would be unwise to ignore them, and Taleb tells us to prepare. I can follow the logic in some of his advice, but it is also problematic. For example, his barbell investment strategy suggests we should put whatever we depend on in the future into secure assets and invest the rest into very risky assets with potentially high payoffs. But how do we identify save assets? Is my home save, or government bonds?

While I was listening to Taleb, I thought of Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why. I have not explored the connection systematically, but it strikes me that the approach of Bayesian networks would be able to investigate some of the phenomena described by Taleb. If so, it could also be at least a partial answer to the question of how we can obtain knowledge on extreme events.
Finally, I would like to note that Taleb in the Black Swan predicted a coming pandemic. He did argue for restricting contacts before the Corona virus spread already in January 2020 and later chided decision makers for reacting too slow, multiplying the impact. I argue that he could foresee the impact of the pandemic because he had a model of causality for the spread of the viruses which was informed by science.

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Bloodlands Audiolibro Por Timothy Snyder arte de portada

History of WWII I wish I had learned in school

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 12-23-22

Snyder provides a new and more accurate account of the events up to, during and after WWII in the region of Ukraina, Poland, Belarus, the Baltics where most civilians were killed, many by deliberate policy rather than as bystanders of a military conflict. Important insights that have not been fully available when I was in school. Without this knowledge, we cannot understand the current war in the Ukraine.

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#EducationForFuture Audiolibro Por Gerald Hüther, Marcell Heinrich, Mitch Senf arte de portada

Super zweiter Teil

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 09-02-20

Marcell Heinrich und Michael Senf haben eine wichtige Nachricht für uns alle, die mit dem Aufwachsen von Kindern und vor allm Jugendlichen beschäftigt sind. Sehr gut geschrieben, gute Beispiele, die aufzeigen, dass es wichtig ist, dass Kinder und Jugendliche eigene Erfahrungen machen und sich dadurch selbst kennenlernen. Diese Erfahrungen passen nicht ins Schema eines konventionellen Unterrichts. Deshalb braucht es andere Arenen, und die Schule ist nicht alleinig wichtig. Die Herren haben selbst Institutionen aufgebaut, die Jugendlichen eine Arena bieten und sie dazu anleiten.
Herr Hüther hat eine lange, polemische Einleitung beigetragen. Ich empfehle, diese zu überspringen.

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