From: Black Swan Guy - People With Asperger's Cannot Think

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Blaming those with AS for the financial crisis????This guy sounds the same as Hitler when Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany's loss in World War one and for the Great Depression.

I was thinking the same thing but was concerned about the rule that says first person to make a comparison to Hitler loses. So I decided to use facts and logic instead.

I think arrogance is a common characteristic of the human race and I don't think NTs who lack confidence are hard to find.




Taleb gives an explanation of the Hedge-Fund weapons of mass destruction (there are others) in Black Swan.

In fact he advocates that based on what IS known about risk, the most sensible 'portfolio allocation' for the cautious investor would be;

The majority of your investment in something really risk free (like US T-Bills)
A tiny portion 'invested' so as to provide a potentially VERY large payout; this could be options (for which you pay a premium, with a maximum loss of 100%, of this portion) futures (no purchase premium but unlimited downside risk) or some other 'derivative against ALL of which insurance is in place against the downside.

The problem with hedge funds is that they did NOT insure against the 'unexpected' and more importantly, the 'safe' part of the investment was not invested in risk free assets but toxic debt, repackaged, resold and then repackaged and resold again WITHOUT any insurance.


He makes the point, which readers may or may not agree with, that the above 'portfolio' structure is inherently lower risk than a 'balanced portfolio of stocks and mutual funds.



I don't know which 'us' you are referring to when you say that Nicholas Nassim Taleb owes us an apology but I don't believe that he owes an apology to me.

I realise that mine may very well be a very small minority opinion (or even a lone voice) amongst the membership here, which I respect.

Last edited by Blindspot149 on 01 Feb 2010, 1:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for expanding on your last post and thank you for the polite way in which you did so.




I don't know enough about this kind of intentional targetting and nor have I thought about it to be able to comment

I do habitually engage in critical thinking and that IS one of the reasons I enjoy reading Taleb's work.

He challenges me and I DON'T agree with absolutely everything he writes either and I do find some of his 'middle-brow' digressions a little irritating (but I do love his references to academic 'tenure' and 'physics envy' )



YES



YES and I sincerely hope he stays there; on 'The Edge'. All great philosphers (and I am not saying that HE is great) have walked this line



I certainly have to think quite hard in places when I read his work precisely BECAUSE he does think differently to me AND the fact that I am NOT a philosopher.

It would be fair to say that he has my complete ATTENTION when I am reading his work, but he DOESN'T draw me into his way of thinking.

Just like the study of any new text book, it is necessary for me to arrange his ideas and concepts into a form that I can use and which allows me to grow AND if they don't I will, after due deliberation, discard them.

As mentioned above, I do NOT agree with everything he says.

He doesn't seem to include much (if any) provisionality in his writing, so I would probably agree with your suggestion that he probably isn't interested in opinions that differ to those in Black Swan.

This kind of black and white thinking is of course one of the hallmarks of AS and is one of the reasons that I mentioned recognising Apiesque traits in him.



Yes, duly noted

Last edited by Blindspot149 on 01 Feb 2010, 2:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

History is a fact...and I was just saying what I thought.......Although I disagree with Canada's censorship laws, what this guy has been saying, could be seen as hate speech and he could be fined by the Human Rights Commissions for inciting hatred and contempt on a minority.I just hope he doesn't cross lines with an angry Canadian Aspie or he could find himself appearing before these censorship star chambers on hate charges....That is the law in Canada. I disagree with what he says but I believe he should have the right to say it...It will be free speech that allows him to blow his hot air, but he better be prepared to be debated down by the same principles of free speech that allow us to refute it.

I am always glad to meet someone else who finds exercise and meditation useful and one who is from the financial services sector too. I have been unemployed from the financial services industry for 8 years now, though I have never been busier than of late.

Taleb’s assertions offended me because he is saying that as people with Asperger’s are blind to human intentions, we do not have a clue how human societies in aggregate behave or how abstractions of human decisions like financial markets are thus construed. Just as people who are blind often have a keener sense of hearing and touch, I have found my mind blindness actually forces me to think very hard about all things human. As a result, I am not only better able to remove myself from the manias and panics, the insights I possess tend to have a distillate quality that the go with the flow crowd never achieve.

There is a perspective that comes from being removed, and a clarity that is attained only through constant thought.

VaR is a very stupid idea. I have never understood why anyone would believe that historical prices are predictive of future values. Writing Excel VBA macros to run Monte Carlo simulations is nifty as a gauge, but to embrace any methodology as the be all and end all of risk management strikes me as intellectually bankrupt. Merely looking at risk from the perspective of price volatility strips from the understanding why prices were volatile in the first place. To me, it is the underlying reasons which lead to changes in price that matters most, and swings in market price are really secondary considerations.

But intellectual bankruptcy is what I would accuse Nassim Taleb of too. His idea that we cannot predict what the future holds is trivial. So what if he is right? Does it mean that we should stop trying to guess what tomorrow may bring? Since all human decisions actually move forward in time-space – and to me this is the essence of free will – if we accept his ideas and take them to their logical conclusions, we should all just stop thinking and doing and wait instead for the proverbial black swans to appear. But I only read his book half way in a public library and it definitely spoiled my day because I started to read it thinking that a work of such notoriety would be something of a tour de force. If I have misunderstood the great man, his acolytes (of which there seems to be a few) should feel free to correct me.

Taleb blames the current economic crisis on "systemizers", claiming that they are "Black Swan blind", while providing no hard evidence for his claim. He takes Greenspan's words at face value and never questions his motives. The same about Rubin and Bernanke. Just because they say that they didn't see the bubbles and that nobody saw the crisis coming, does that mean that they honestly believe it? What is a banker supposed to say, when creating bubbles is his job?

IMO, the financial sector is dominated by sociopaths. They have successfully separated rewards from actual performance (for evidence, just look at AIG and the bonuses awarded to banksters). When a financial institution fails, it fails for regular investors and the taxpayers, but does it really fail for the insiders? They get paid no matter what, so why should they care?

My childhood friend became a banker. It was his life long dream to work in the finance industry, because legal fraud is so easy there (his words). "Free" money is flowing from all directions. Many people in that industry are fully aware of this and are taking full advantage of it. Anything goes and whatever works in a short time horizon is good enough. Why think for long term, when in the long run we are all dead? (Words of Keynes, current god of most politicians and ambitious bankers)

My theory is that the responsability for the crisis whas the "neurotypical mentality" - it is this kind of mentality who creates "irrational exubrance"

Finnally I read the text, and came to conclusion that these don't make any sense - if aspies have low tolerance to ambiguity, the logic should be that aspies will prefer low-risk investments, not the high-risk investiments that created the crisis.

And all this talk about unpredicted "black swans" is absurd: this crisis was no "black swan" (an event that never happened in the past). It is exactly the opposite - the past was full of economic and finantial crisis. It was the financiers that were convinced that they were discoved a "black swan", that the times of the economic cycles was gone and now the economy will have a perpetual growth (if you read the economic books and articles written in the 00s, this is the talk - "we live in the New Economy; the crisis were over, etc"). And what happened in 2008 was nothing more than the return to normality".

Conclusion: Nassim Taleb is a charlatan!