Nassim Taleb — Meditations on Extremistan

Nassim Taleb is trader, researcher and essayist. He is the author of the Incerto, a multi-volume philosophical and practical meditation on uncertainty.

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TIMESTAMPS
(00:00:00) - Introduction.
(00:00:55) - Heuristics for knowing when you're in Mediocristan versus Extremistan.
(00:06:06) - Are certain tail exponents intrinsic?
(00:08:31) - How long before 1987 did Nassim realise that option volatility shouldn't be flat across strike prices?
(00:10:30) - Why hasn't Universa's tail hedging strategy now been fully priced in?
(00:11:52) - Does the power law distribution of startup returns mean VCs should concentrate their bets, or spray and pray?
(00:15:20) - Nassim's 30-minute take on the field of behavioural economics.
(00:48:57) - Nassim's 20-minute take on superforecasting.
(01:11:03) - The Precautionary Principle and AI.
(01:17:28) - What are LLMs doing?
(01:23:10) - War, violence, & "the empirical mean is not the real mean".
(01:39:17) - Covid, & how Western governments think about tail risk.
(01:43:38) - What's the most important thing people in social science get wrong about correlation?
(01:52:58) - How does Nassim explain the perspicacity of the Russian school of probability?
(01:55:56) - Why doesn't Hayek's knowledge argument extend to prediction markets?
(01:58:26) - If mean absolute deviation is a better measure than standard deviation, why has the latter become commonplace?
(02:01:09) - Nassim's next book, and what he's up to at the moment.