Notes from The Black Swan
by Sebastian
I’m writing these down here so that you can ask me about them, thus forcing me to remember them.
- Protorandomness
- Statistical Regress Argument / Circularity of Statistics
- Fractal / Mandelbrotian Distribution
- Cumulative Advantage / Preferential Attachment / Matthew Effect
- Platonicity
- Quixotic Overconfidence and Luck, the Great Equalizer
- Poincaré’s Three Body Problem
Comments
I’ve wiki’d the Matthew Effect today, because I found it in an evolutionary paper regarding “accelerated differentiation” in social hierarchies.
And I’d very much have explained the other ones, especially the last 3.
ta-ta
E.
PS.: great to have you back bloggin’ :)
Thanks :-) It’s good to be back.
Very interesting, I’m going to email you about that.
Platonicity is our desire and heuristic to put everything in discrete, “ideal” Platonic categories – something that doesn’t exist in reality.
Quixotic Overconfidence is the blindness of (in this case) business people who start companies, thinking that they can be successful. In fact, so Taleb argues, it’s all about luck. And since anybody can be lucky, capitalism enables great equality.
The Three Body Problem is essentially about how fast things get complex the more elements you look at. It’s quite easy to calculate the way of the first and the second ball that is hit in a pool game. But when you calculate the 9th ball that is hit in a row, you have to include the gravitational pull of the person next to the table into your calculations – things get extremely complex very fast.
Heard of the first and third phenomenon before, in other contexts though. Thanks!
Available in pdf format if anyone is interested:
http://www.novrain.com/temp/The_Black_Swan.pdf
Wow. That can’t be legal. It’s great for searching purposes, though, I imagine—it seems to be fully searchable.