Archive for the 'Skeptical Empiricism' Category
“Predictions Are Often Wrong, Especially About the Future”
March 7th, 2008I’m not quite sure who’s responsible for the quote that’s the title of this post, but whoever said it, I agree. I’m not even sure where I first read the quote, but I my best guess is that it was in one of Nassim Taleb’s books, which I blogged about a while back. But just because we’re bad about predicting the future, does that mean we can’t find a better way to do so?
Well, some events are easy to predict, at least. These are events that Taleb says belong to “Mediocristan”, a fictional place where everything happens …
Not Normal
September 27th, 2007One of the “inspirational people” I list in my sidebar is Nassim Taleb. He’s a trader by profession, but refuses to be pigeon-holed as such, calling himself both a philosopher and a “skeptical empiricist”. Here is the obligatory Malcolm Gladwell profile on him (Malcolm Gladwell is another “inspirational person” of mine, of course.) Besides all that, Taleb writes about and teaches statistics, which is where this blog comes in.
Taleb outlines his heretical (and extreme) viewpoints on the subject in two books of his, “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan”. I’ve read both books and greatly …