Sunday, November 8, 2009

Tell 'em Taleb!

Nassim Taleb has a working paper, Common Errors in the Interpretation of the Ideas of The Black Swan and Associated Papers
The point of The Black Swan is that both empirical knowledge (i.e. extrapolating statistics) and a priori theories fail in the tails and it is vital to "robustify" against it using the concepts of "the fourth quadrant". The point has been garbled by members of the economics establishment that claim mistakenly "we know that" and "we know about fat tails" or "power laws". This is both wrong and not my point. The paper presents corrections to the misperceptions.
I'm looking forward to reading it.


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