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Reddit mentions of The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)

Sentiment score: 34
Reddit mentions: 78

We found 78 Reddit mentions of The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto). Here are the top ones.

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Found 78 comments on The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto):

u/mrbooze · 274 pointsr/AskReddit

The Black Swan

Seriously, this is a ridiculously important book. Most people are terrible at the concept of evaluating probability/risk of rare events. Even people who think they are being good at it.

u/Autorotator · 52 pointsr/Egypt

Thank you, I appreciate your kind complement.

I would argue that the US is pushing to avoid a conflict with Iran. At least right now. IMO there won't be a war with Iran until oil price is dropped again, if ever. Iran has repeatedly violated a slew of sanctions and we know for a fact that they have been sending war materials and fighters into Afghanistan, into Iraq when it was hot, into Syria, and into Egypt most recently. The US plays it's part, saying that Iran is violating sanctions, etc. etc. and other members of the security council play their part and say hold off wait and see. But nothing happens. Nothing has happened for over 10 years of known nuclear violations. There are shadow operations like the virus, and other little artful moves meant to slow the program but no all out war. This way the UN looks deadlocked.

http://www.securitylawbrief.com/main/2013/07/un-divided-on-iran-sanctions-violations.html

I don't think this is necessarily a conspiracy, but a mutually understood set of roles nations are playing with Iran. Nobody really wants a war with Iran, but Iran is a bit of a loose cannon. The Saudis and other region nations are on board with further sanctions of Iran. Why?

Saudi Arabia is the lynch pin for all global energy politics. They produce insane amounts of oil, and have been doing so for decades. The House of Saud (royal family) controls everything in the country from oil production and profit to the military. The people are subjects, and have little real power outside of the violent, dangerous, destabilizing kind. The population of the country is a largesse state. The royal family gives everything to the people, more or less. For decades the House of Saud has been spending money hand over fist on luxuries and industrial development, but little on the actual population. About 10 years ago they switched to absolutely POURING money into building things for the people. They recognized that they had a population of wealthy, healthy people, many starting families, and nobody had a place to live, roads to get there, or any of that. It was a road to destabilization and civil unrest, and the royal family almost realized too late what was happening. They did figure it out though, so they maximized the profit margin on oil exports. You can't just pump more oil, it has detrimental effects on the oil field and long-term total production, so they are maximize the profit on what they produce and are now spending money hand over fist to upgrade the country for the people.

http://gulfnews.com/business/economy/saudi-arabia-to-spend-800m-on-land-for-riyadh-metro-1.1216763

http://persiangulffund.com/saudi-arabia-distributes-130-billion/

Happy people means the royals retain power, but the oil keeps flowing. The oil keeps flowing, WW III is averted. WW III is arguably hinged on the happiness of the people of Saudi Arabia, if you pick energy as the key to prosperity and peace globally, which I do.

So what does Iran have to do with it? Iran has been under sanction, barred from oil exports for many years now. The thing is, once you tap an oil field, you can't shut off production. The way these particular oil fields work, if you shut off the tap it might not start back up again, and if they do they will start up ad a fraction of the rate. So ever since the embargo started, Iran has been pumping. They have been pumping and storing oil. They have enough oil that they could pour it all into the market, flooding it and inflating supply to the point that oil prices drop to the level where Saudi Arabia can no longer spend the money needed to keep the people satiated. They have so much oil stored in old tankers that they have actually created a shortfall on used oil and natural gas tankers globally. Iran has them all tied up for resource storage.

http://gcaptain.com/sanctions-creating-stockpile-dozen/

http://gulfnews.com/business/oil-gas/iran-seeks-opec-consensus-on-oil-stockpile-release-by-us-1.1064765

http://marinelink.com/news/article/will-there-be-an-oil-tanker-shortage/319765.aspx

So Iran had (maybe still has?) a gun to Saudi Arabia's (and de facto the world's) head. It's the only reason they haven't been at least bombed. That and Iran seems to be playing a blustering and bluffing game. They are working hard on centrifuges and the like but it takes so much more to build a bomb than materials. What's going on in the country internally is hard to say, that's why they are the wild card. My gut feeling is that the powers in Iran know that the Iranian people don't want war. They can't look weak to the radical factions though, so they play their game. Honestly, that's just a guess.

So, the Iran situation seems to be a farce, or at least an act that can be put off for later until Saudi Arabia is stabilized for long-term production and the oil price can be brought down.

Thank you for asking though, I didn't really tie the Saudi Arabia situation in that I mentioned earlier. Iran features heavily in that script. JMO, it explains Iraq too. Saddam Hussein was a wild card that had done dumb things out of desperation before, and I think everyone truly was surprised when they didn't find massive stockpiles of radioactive material or chemical weapons. Especially given that the US sold so many chemical weapons to Iraq. With him gone Iraq is largely stable again, at least as far as oil goes. The law of unforseen and unintended consequences reigns supreme. Given how massive and complex the machine is, I don't know that peace can be maintained indefinitely. Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The spice must flow!

As to Israel, they don't want war either. They just want Iran off their necks, and their neighbors to be calm. They are the family nobody likes in the neighborhood, even though all those other families have their own feuds between them, and within them.

EDIT: There's always the wildcard of fracking too. This not only alleviates some of the pressure to maintain peace in the Middle East (Egypt will always be a feature though because of the canal, European-Asian trade hinges on it) but it also eliminates a lot of the competition between China and the US. I think that China, the US, and Russia would all like to see Russian production increase too. If only we can master fusion before we kill each other, that would be the day. Then we can fight (or walk the line trying not to fight) about something else.

EDIT2: Outdated info stricken.

u/Stubb · 16 pointsr/investing

My recommended reading list includes One Up on Wall Street, Fail-Safe Investing, The Black Swan, How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. The first book talks about picking individual stocks based on what you already know, the second about structuring a portfolio for growth while still playing defense, the third about common fallacies and hubris, the fourth about basic economics, and the fifth about irrational behavior.

If your money is sitting in a US bank account, then you're making a 100% bet on the future of the US dollar. At a minimum, diversify your currency holdings by buying sovereign and high-grade corporate debt in countries with strong currencies.

u/jsmayne · 16 pointsr/todayilearned

black swan talks about this. it's a sliding scale. if you are born you are x% likely to make it to be 1. if you make it to 1 you are x% likely to make it to 5. and so on.

good read

u/ludwigvonmises · 9 pointsr/austrian_economics

Sure there are.

  • The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel

  • Austrian School for Investors by Rahim Taghizadegan

    Although Taleb is not strictly an Austrian economist, his book The Black Swan contains a lot of Austrian insights on probability, uncertainty, risk, public choice insights (regarding govt, the Fed, and financial markets in general). He quotes Hayek and other Austrians approvingly throughout.

    Also of interest would be Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. Not an Austrian by any means, but his value-investment approach is consistent with Austrian theories on the firm and his comments about uncertainty and forecasting could have nearly been written by Mises himself.
u/Lennon__McCartney · 9 pointsr/thewallstreet

Black swan.

I've got a book for you my friend: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X

You'll like it

u/stonecipheco · 9 pointsr/Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lucas_Jr.

further reading: on basically all 4 bullets https://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Markets-Incerto/dp/0812975219/ref=pd_sim_14_2/133-0444399-0427912?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0812975219&pd_rd_r=20G8KZ7HRQTB9EV8KRMF&pd_rd_w=QI4pT&pd_rd_wg=y8262&psc=1&refRID=20G8KZ7HRQTB9EV8KRMF

further further reading on the last bullet, and the actual explanation of "black swan" that is starting to show up in crypto but totally incorrectly used https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X


you could also dig into efficient market hypothesis.

also, if you're into technical analysis/charts, this could shake your views a little but it's good to be challenged

u/Beren- · 8 pointsr/SecurityAnalysis
u/help_me_will · 8 pointsr/actuary

Against The God: the remarkable story of Risk- Outlines the history of probability theory and risk assessment through the centuries

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105434&sr=1-1&keywords=against+the+gods

When Genius Failed - A narrative of the spectacular fall of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund which had on its board both Myron Scholes AND Robert Merton (you will recall them from MFE)
https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105453&sr=1-1&keywords=when+genius+failed

Black Swan/ Antifragility- A former quant discusses the nature of risk in these controversial and philosophical books. Some parts of this book are actually called out and shamed in McDonald's Derivative Markets, one or the both of them are worth reading

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105478&sr=1-1&keywords=black+swan



Godel, Escher, Bach- Very dense look into recursive patterns in mathematics and the arts. While not actuarial, it's obviously very mathematical, a must read.

https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105497&sr=1-1&keywords=geb

Endurance- This was recommended to me by a pure mathematics professor. Again, not actuarial, but more about the nature of perseverance though problem solving(sound familiar). It's about Shakleton's famous voyage to the south pole.

https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible-Alfred-Lansing/dp/0465062881/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105520&sr=1-1&keywords=endurance+shackleton%27s+incredible+voyage

u/BaurusdB · 7 pointsr/Bitcoin

> The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
(Wiki)

From the decent book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness/dp/081297381X

u/LeonardNemoysHead · 6 pointsr/TrueTrueReddit

Find your meditative spaces. I do the dishes, I drive, I ride a bike, I take showers, I wander around in nature, I sit and watch the world pass me by. Sometimes I think about what I'm doing, or about some unimportant or asinine thing, or nothing at all. Sometimes I'm productive and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I'm self-actualizing and sometimes I'm not. That's okay. Pressuring yourself to produce is an excellent way to be unproductive.

These spaces are the only times when I formulate truly inventive ideas. They're places where I can let my mind wander and review what it knows and to bridge and connect and construct, and they're places where I feel no stress. I don't want my life to be chaotic and completely uncertain, but I also don't want the structure of my days to consist of anything more than meditative spaces and free time.

More people need to learn to walk slowly.

u/satoshiscrazyuncle · 5 pointsr/btc

It's a metaphor, an old one, more recently redefined in Nassim Taleb's book.

u/lawstudent2 · 4 pointsr/Entrepreneur

> Hi--I am considering law school and want to focus my studies on LLCs, Corporations, wealth and liability protection, etc...

You are an undergrad? If you want to be a lawyer, study an actual applied topic, now, while you can - and that means not government or english. Economics, computer science, any natural science, most social sciences, history, anthropology. Law is a tool set that without historical context, knowledge of the world at large, horse sense and business savvy is almost completely useless. So unless you are learning actual things, law school isn't going to teach them to you. If you are already out of college, it is not too late. You just have to teach yourself.

I'm exceedingly lucky to have the job I have. And I would not recommend entering this law job market. And one of the primary reasons I actually got this position is before even entering law school I had pretty deep knowledge about the types of business I cared about - I had a background in software and a very high level of financial sophistication for an early twenty something.

If you really want to go to law school, I have to say, it is not a very good investment unless you get in to a t14, get offered a near complete scholarship, have a very unique angle into an industry that you have a pre-existing matching skill set for and the passion to match, or a combination of all of the above. If you are lacking all three of the above, your money and time is far, far, far better spent doing other things.

And if you really want to learn about:

> Corporations, wealth and liability protection, etc...

You won't learn a damn lick of it in law school. You will learn the casebook method. And you will learn all about regulations, formalities, and a whole bunch of shit. But if you are interested in business strategy, which is what it sounds like you are, you can start learning about that now. Start by reading non-fiction business books. And I don't mean bullshit strategy, management or advice books. Use those for kindling. I mean read books about actual businesses, written by serious investigative journalists and businessmen. Here's a short list to get you started:

  • Business Adventures. Bill Gates' favorite business book. 'Nuff said.

  • Liar's Poker, The Big Short and Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis. You will get a real crash course in wall street.

  • When Genius Failed. The story of Long Term Capital Management, the first catastrophic failure of a major hedge fund, that nearly imperiled the world economy.

  • Conspiracy of Fools / The Smartest Guys in the Room. About Enron. Insane. Completely fucking insane. Learn what they did. Learn why it was wrong. Don't do it.

  • Black Swan. About the most recent crash. If between Taleb and Lewis you have any faith left in the wisdom of wall street, I have a bridge to sell you.

    Just get started, and keep reading. Read about real world businesses - don't read guidebooks about how to do X. See what is in the world and go read it. Are there publicly traded companies that you find interesting? Log on to Edgar and read their public filings. They tell you every goddamn detail of how the business is run, the strategy, the risks they face and how they choose to mitigate them.

    Once you get started on this stuff, you will be drawn in and be able to keep up your own research paths. Follow the people on twitter that you find interesting - a lot of VCs are very vocal. Many publish reading lists. Look them up.

    But for the love of god, don't think law school will teach you any of this. Corporate law, securities law and corporate finance will teach you the technicalities of all sorts of bullshit you will likely never apply, and, if you do, you will be as good at it as you would be at basketball after having spent three years studying the rules without ever having touched a ball.

    Good luck, dotcomrade.
u/eagreeyes · 4 pointsr/books

Check out The Black Swan if you're looking for books in that same vein.

u/aust1nz · 4 pointsr/personalfinance

http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness/dp/081297381X

I really liked the ideas presented in the beginning of the book (improbable events have big effects on our lives, but we have a hard time recognizing that) but got totally lost in a set of made-up examples that weren't clearly presented as fictional.

If you want to get a good insight into similar ideas, I'd recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow.

u/art36 · 4 pointsr/indieheads

The volatility in the marketplace has been fairly predicted in the previous months. Interest rates rose from the Fed, temporary trading restrictions overseas in China had been lifted, oil prices are plunging, etc. In general, sticking with an index like the S&P is a sound investment for longterm growth and sustainability.

I work in finance, and one of the very best books on investment is hands down A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I highly recommend it. I also recommend The Black Swan and The Misbehavior of Markets.

u/Phiwise_ · 4 pointsr/Steam

>Also just to be fair, look at where this hero-based FPS style got Quake into, there is a reason why Blizzard made the most successful game in the genre, while others suffer from lack of development and direction.

Overwatch and Quake are NOT in the same genre. AT ALL. Overwatch is just as much an arena shooter as, say, Counter-Strike or Call of Duty are; which is to say not at all. You're making the same mistake everyone else is making in starting with incredibly superficial aspects of each game, namely that they have classes, and creating "genres" based on that rather than the actually significant gameplay differences between them (And they must be based on gameplay, since none of these games have any significant story elements in their actual runtime).

Overwatch is so far removed from traditional objective shooters, namely in how efficient use of abilities plays a much larger role in success than raw shooting skill than in virtually any other first person objective game that comes to mind. A large number of the classes don't even require any "FPS" skills, and instead have analogues in asymmetric strategy games and the like.

Quake Champions may be small, yes, but it IS attracting more people than just the quake crowd. On a technical level, it's an excellent blend between an archetypal arena shooter, the sort of game design Quake invented, while reducing complexity and convolution to make it much more approachable for those with more modern shooter habits. Lawbreakers, too, hardly suffers from any "lack of direction" in the design department. It's packed to the brim with great ideas and unique takes on the "high-skill FPS" concept, and had my jaw hitting the floor with respect for its elegant gameplay several times when I started playing it.

Success has far more to do with randomness and luck than most people in this thread seem willing to admit. Quake, Overwatch, and Lawbreakers AREN'T significantly better or worse than each other. No hypothetical backfit narrative properly explains why one would have hypothetically failed or succeeded without luck. We just live in a works where the big take the whole pie and the small get nothing; in a world of bandwagoning and herd mentality caused by popularity coming from whatever just happens to gain traction early on in its lifetime.

I bought in relatively early to all of these games because I'm a shooter fan and a nut for unique game design ideas. I will admit that I like Quake the most, Lawberakers second, and Ovwerwatch third, so I do have a little voice in the back of my head that gets irritated whenever others disagree with that assessment, but we all need to learn to come away form making simple judgements between them and other games in the same boat. All of them break the mould in different and unique ways, all of them have good ideas, and all of them could have been popular, in a world where luck happened to favor someone else.

u/jenninsea · 4 pointsr/BitcoinMarkets

For candles I really like the overview on Incredible Charts.

Investopedia is a great resource for pretty much anything related to trading. Many people also recommend BabyPips for learning the basics.

I don't have any books recs from personal experience, though I see Random Walk Down Wall Street and The Black Swan recommended around here often.

Trying stuff out on a chart yourself is often the best teacher. Check out cryptowat.ch for basic tools and tradingview.com for more advanced stuff.

Good luck!

u/bobbyhead · 4 pointsr/booksuggestions

The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb

Catching the Big Fish, by David Lynch

A note on the second choice. I know it's not standard non-fiction fare, but I'm a huge Lynch fan and I really enjoy this book. It's short and I think reading it would benefit anyone. He was an Eagle Scout for Christ's sake!

u/eggplnt · 3 pointsr/askscience

I am currently Reading Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and Taleb talks at length about bell curves and the Power Law. It seems that while bell curves do occur, we have a tenancy to assume that they always occur, when in fact, the power law is at work.

I highly recommend reading... it is very interesting. Here is a brief article on Taleb's "Black Swans."

u/modern_rabbit · 3 pointsr/slatestarcodex

The Black Swan

I've seen it plugged here and on the blog, but people assume it's just for Wall Street types or the military (I think all the branches recommend it). Small business owners, backpackers, bartenders, even stay at home moms, they all gain something from it. I've started gifting copies to friends and family, and especially my bosses.

u/drivefaster · 3 pointsr/business

A random walk, the intelligent investor, and black swan are all good ones.

Are you looking for trading, internal business, etc? more detailed would be helpful.

u/DistinguishedDarcy · 3 pointsr/StLouis

> The city has been tremendously resilient and that has a lot to do with how it was built. The question may be what unpredictable change is coming that the county can't predict and is it built in a resilient way that will let it be able to survive that sort of change?

You might enjoy the book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

u/Hyppy · 3 pointsr/personalfinance

The Black Swan is a great book about the business, risk analysis, economics, and sociology of rare "black swan" events like a financial crisis.

u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/skeptic

Here are mine..

Five works by Karl Popper, who IMHO is the greatest skeptical thinker who ever lived:

u/lordbailer · 3 pointsr/worldnews

Where did I say ALL NPPs are bad? I showed why nuclear power is not safe in Japan. The combination of company/government bungling with an earthquake prone area is another potential disaster.


Basically, science_diction oversimplified the issue. Nuclear energy in Japan is NOT the safest energy technology. This isn't just,"Oh people are scared because of some bad press."


Everyone talks about how this was a once-in-a lifetime, unprecedented event. I recommend reading Black Swan concerning risk and probability. The thing is, no one even conceived that 3-11 could happen.


But it did happen. And that's what we worry about. We can't predict when something similar might happen again. This is not fear. It's a reassessment of risk. We thought our nuclear power plants were safe. We were wrong. We might be wrong again.


I live a 30 minute drive from the Hamaoka power plant in Shizuoka. It is ranked the most dangerous and was not shut down until AFTER 3/11. There's talk about starting it back up because "we need energy" for the hot summer. If they do I'm gone. 3 of my coworkers are leaving Shizuoka because of this, and I know over a dozen families in Tokyo that also left.


I hate to pull this card, I really do, but I gotta ask, would you, or anyone reading this, live next to a nuclear power plant in an area with 5 earthquakes a day? Would you raise your kids there?


And can I have a source please for the information that "Fukushima Daichi" was set to retire in March 2011? I mean, the earthquake occurred on 3/11, but it was still up and running.

u/c_a_l_m · 3 pointsr/OverwatchUniversity

I wrote this a while ago, but I really want to highlight part IV, "Make the game less random and swingy for yourself and your friends."

IMO this is THE principle that ought to be taught, without which nothing else matters. I could write a book (or, well, a blog, apparently) on how its application can take a lot of different forms, but the core principle of reducing risk is at the center of it all.

  • whenever you make a choice in game, you're making some sort of "bet" --- I bet I can stand here without dying, etc.
  • You make bets based on the situation.
  • that situation includes your allies, and your allies' bets include you. This can lead to (bad) chain reactions where you lose a bet, leading your allies to lose their bets, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
  • randomness is not your friend if you're trying to be good at the game. It makes it harder to learn (you win when you make mistakes, and lose when you do well), and it prevents you from being rewarded when you do finally git gud.

    This isn't just a "c_a_l_m" thing---Day9 has written about this, nor is it just a "gaming" thing---Overwatch, with its many variables, snowballing, and fast-paced, impactful action (compared to, say, soccer), is a complex and unstable system, like a stock market or an ecosystem. Anyone acquainted with that space knows that the cardinal mantra is risk reduction, even if that ends up meaning things that conventional wisdom thinks are risky.

    Seriously, I would rank this is as the most important thing you could teach Overwatch players. If OW had loading-screen tips, at the top of my list would be a simple "Overwatch can be chaotic! Try and make it less so for your team." It doesn't make the case for why, and it doesn't explain how, but simply knowing that it is important would go so, so far.
u/rapishorrid · 3 pointsr/UMD

If you're having trouble with 300 you might want to reconsider your major. While you can certainly avoid taking quantitative courses (325 and 326 are mostly theoretical with light math, and have massive curves anyway) - in order to make your econ degree stand out you should take as many quantitative courses as possible. Like Econometrics I and II, which are probably the hardest Econ courses available.

That said, I'm about to graduate with an Econ degree and my advice is to read this book, realize that most economists are a fraud, and then switch majors.

u/DigitalSuture · 2 pointsr/ImageStabilization

Np, glad I could help. To me it isn't as much about new ideas, man has always believed/forced that there is a unified theory, but talking oneself into a narrative fallacy. The human brain is super quick to match patterns where none exist; call it survival traits.

You might also be interested in Nassim Taleb, his book 'The Black Swan'; I especially liked it. He mentions that things are relative to the size of a dataset, which merits a good point to re-examine so called truths.

Edit: words

u/KillerLag · 2 pointsr/MyLittleSupportGroup

If you have a chance, read a book called The Black Swan.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness/dp/081297381X

It's a bit technical in some parts, but it discusses how highly improbably events can have massive changes. How people meet their spouses/significant others is a good example. One of the things that encourages these black swan events is just getting out there and meeting people. You never know when you might meet the person you end up with. It might be at a convention, work, or a chance meeting at a library where you notice someone reading a great book ;) Plus, lots more options nowadays on-line ;)

u/PolarisDiB · 2 pointsr/personalfinance

I just walked into a Fidelity office and asked them for help opening an account. Now I can access it online to look at stocks available for sale, set up stock screeners, and find their SEC filings (oftentimes I go ahead and just check the EDGAR database..

There is some minimum you have to have to start out with but I've forgotten what it is (I think $1k). I started with only $3k.

People here are going to recommend you not retail invest. Considering your statement "I'm mostly interested in companies that pay dividends like ge or intel since I want stability and low maintenance." I'm going to recommend you do some more reading and research before you start investing. If you really, truly want 'low maintenance' then you don't want to pick stocks. It involves reading long and dry financial reports and SEC filings, doing some easy but boring math, and following up every now and then with yearly and quarterly reports and shareholder voting. Technically once you get into the practice it only takes like a handful of hours a month if you're a sit-and-hold investor (which you should be), but it's a lot more work than most people are willing to do, and retail investors typically earn less than indices.

For basics of investing, check out Investopedia. Go through their tutorials; they also link to speculation games where you can purchase some stock and see how you do for a few months to a year. I'm also a huge fan of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. Another book that comes highly recommended everywhere I look but I haven't read yet (high on my to-do list) is The Black Swan. I would say if you've gone through all the work of reading these books and STILL want to stock pick, then you're good to go.

As a relatively arbitrary decision, I decided to put 10% of my income into my personal investment account (this would be after employer matched 401k and taking out another 10% for savings). My philosophy behind this being that if I lose every single cent from my personal account, I've only lost 10% of my earnings (though more than 10% of my wealth). This way I get to have some fun and still be cautious. Not saying you should follow this as a rule, just saying that before you invest in a financial asset that can possibly lose all of its value, you should know how much you are willing to lose.

Edit: I just wanted to mention, I enjoy reading the financial reports and such, actually, because it gives me a new perspective on the world around me and the sorts of things running under the products I take for granted that I otherwise wouldn't think about. For me retail investing gives me access to a realm of information most other people are not aware of, or interested in. It's made me look at products, services, and businesses differently and now I have a lot more connected view of just where this bottle of shampoo came from, where the aluminum in a Coca Cola can was delivered, and so forth. This is an intangible benefit that can't be calculated into my ROI. If you're really interested in learning where Alcoa owns aluminum mines and the states of the roads leading up to those mines, become a retail investor. Or you can just read SEC filings. Few people, ever, mention this aspect of retail investment as a benefit.

u/Emerson_Gable · 2 pointsr/fantasywriters

If we're recommending books in nonfiction, I will recommend The Black Swan by NN Taleb. It changed the way I think about thinking entirely, and probably colors most of how accepting I am of strange ideas.

u/vmsmith · 2 pointsr/math

I was a math major in college in the 70s, and in the math honor society. In my senior year we invited people in once a month or so to give talks about careers in mathematics. (Note: this being well before the mini- and micro-computer revolutions, jobs in math were not as obvious as they are now.)

Anyway, we had an actuary come in for one talk, and it kind of piqued my interest to the point that I notice articles and such about actuarial careers when I happen across them.

One thing I read quite a while back was that actuaries have one of the highest job satisfaction ratings among all professions. I don't know if this is still true, but it allegedly was in the 90s.

From what I can tell, there are a number of different ways you can go once you've actually reached a certain level with your exams. So that's probably worth checking out, too. In particular, I remember reading once that a team of actuaries helped some newly-democratic nation design it's entire economic and financial system. Again, this was a few decades ago, but maybe worth checking out (e.g., non-obvious jobs actuaries do).

But finally, you might want to read two books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Fooled by Randomness

The Black Swan

Although he's an insufferable bore as a writer, he does have some pretty interesting and compelling arguments about our flawed probability models. Essentially he says that we're like the drunk guy who's looking under the lamp post for his lost keys because that's where the light is, rather than down the block in the dark where he actually lost them. Translated: we use normal distributions to predict rare events because we understand normal distributions, but they don't actually apply to large scale human behavioral events, and we always end up getting surprised by the latest financial disaster.

Anyway, good luck.

u/SelfWrestler · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

I do believe my own advice, but it's not exactly the most upbeat advice.

Too often, people preach faith. This just does not resonate with me. Not at all. But for me, I found that my skepticism serves the same purpose as others' faith. So I preach skepticism.

Preaching faith means trying to convince someone that everything will be fine in the end. I don't believe that, and nobody's really going to convince me. When I'm depressed, I'm quite certain that everything is and will continue to be miserable. I'll bet you are, too.

Preaching skepticism means trying to un-convince someone that everything will be terrible. This is more realistic. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong -- only that you might be, because you are, like everyone other human, basically a dumbass. Your certainty is suspect, and you need to be skeptical of yourself. You don't really know the future. I don't either. But shit happens -- and occasionally good shit happens, too. You can't predict it.

Maybe everything in your entire life, everything you've observed and read about human history, supports your worldview and the model of reality you have in your head. Maybe you think that means you're right, and your model gives you predictive powers. This is almost certainly bullshit, though, for two reasons:

  1. Confirmation bias. Everybody suffers from it. Show two people with opposite views on an issue a news article about it, and both of them will come away more convinced that they're right -- they will interpret the same facts in completely opposite ways, so they support their pre-existing views. They also have greater memory for facts that "click" with their pre-existing beliefs and views than those that conflict.

  2. The Black Swan effect. Looking back on history, everything always seems to make sense. We can fit it all into a neat narrative and think "well of course! It couldn't have possibly happened any other way!" But the fact is, that's just 20/20 hindsight. Humans are much better at rationalizing and much worse at reasoning than we like to admit. Look back on the major cultural and political events of just the past 20 years: did you see any of them coming more than a year in advance? Did you predict the rise of terrorism? Seems like nobody did, and yet in hindsight it's so obvious.

    I highly recommend reading the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He expands on this thesis relentlessly and convincingly.

    People are stupid. You're a person. Therefore, you are stupid. Consider this, and question yourself. Of course, I'm phrasing this a little aggressively here; I really don't want it to sound like I'm beating up on anyone and saying "you're only depressed because you're an idiot!" Not at all. I respect your experience, I respect your views, and most of all I respect your feelings. I just mean that humans are flawed creatures and we should treat ourselves as such, and never be too confident in our own judgments.

    TL;DR: Applied toward the negative, skepticism is like faith, and doubt is like hope. I preach skepticism and doubt, because they resonate with me in ways that faith and hope have never come close to.
u/meats_the_parent · 2 pointsr/financialindependence

I see expected rates of return (ROR) being thrown out with decimal-level precision, derived from historical simulation/monte carlo outputs/talking-head pontification/"best" guesses... Without a doubt, someone, at some point, for some given period of time, will have chosen the right number. The majority, however, will not have. Now, some will have under-predicted ROR, leaving themselves happily positioned with more money (or less time to FI) than expected. With a defined goal ($x/yr. starting at year z), the flip-side (over-predicting ROR), leads to the need to either save more, work longer, or take more risk (all probably increasing levels of stomach acidity). In other words, for planning purposes, ROR is a sensitive parameter (i.e., the outcome really changes depending on what number is used). This sensitivity leads to prediction error. The impacts of prediction error, especially with the occurrence of "rare" events, means that one's goals might not be fully realized on one end; on the other end, one's goals might be entirely foregone. This is why I try to plan for a minimum FI goal (using securities that are not especially exposed to prediction error) and leave the rest open to the opportunistic returns of the market.

In part, I combine the thoughts of Michael Zwecher's ("[you] get only one whack at the cat"); Zvi Bodie's ("worry free investing" through a floor and upside approach); and Nassim Taleb's (musings on improbable events shaping history, not the "Great Intellectual Fraud" known as the bell curve and associated percentiles).

Specifically, the approach can be described through the economic theory of Life-Cycle Saving and Investing. More generally, using an amalgam of the above's thoughts, I "barbell" between ultra-safe investments as the "floor" (to provide base income) and the rest in investments that could have great upside (stocks).

In other words, I don't focus on a needed ROR, but a robust approach to meeting my minimum spending needs by a certain year while simultaneously positioning myself to reap returns if they manifest. Though, if I were squeezed to name a ROR used in my projections, I would say 2% real.

TL;DR: In part, because of susceptibility to prediction error, I try to ignore ROR when planning and instead focus on saving enough to provide for a minimum level of expenditures.

//EDIT: Added TL;DR & first paragraph.

u/birdfox · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

I'm currently reading The Black Swan and couldn't agree with you more.

u/amarkson · 1 pointr/cscareerquestions

Hard engineering is ee, bio, Chem, and so on. Easy is mech, civ.
While I know of one guy who is a CS phd, generally I normally see the more applied math guys.
As for things to read. I think you should start at the beginning and not worry about job titles ... Everything will change a few times before now and when it will be your time...
Some fun reads:
The black swan
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/081297381X/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1348162692&sr=8-2


The big short:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393338827/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1348163015&sr=8-1

u/SmokingPuffin · 1 pointr/Economics

>Not now, but the first such study was certainly interesting! How is that different from what we have here?

The first such study was useful, but not interesting.

As to the difference between this paper and the first study linking exercise and heart disease, I see a couple relevant differences:

  1. This isn't a study. Nobody gathered any real world data. Linkage to real world results is therefore unconfirmed.
  2. This is far from the first economics paper written on the topic of talent and luck that suggests that luck may have an outsized role in success. Indeed, this ground is so well covered that there aren't just papers, but books and books and books already.

    >The idea that we are solely responsible for our successes and failures already shapes social policy, so why wouldn't evidence for the contrary position do the same? At the very least, it should introduce more uncertainty and flexibility to evaluate specific circumstances.

    In my view, the theory that luck has a strong effect on success and failure has already been well established in society. The proverb that "it's better to be lucky than good" is so old that no one knows how old it is. I don't believe that social policy is grounded in the theory that people are solely responsible for their own success or failure.
u/haloshade · 1 pointr/LifeImprovement

I love reading biographies, I find them more inspiring and enjoyable to read than self-help books. Currently I'm reading Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. I highly recommend this book to anyone, prior to this book I only knew what they taught us in History class, this explores so many more aspect of his life, some of which we can all relate to (like his constant drive to improve himself).

[Meditations by Marcus Aurelius] (http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Thrift-Editions-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/048629823X) is another great book I just finished. Written by a former Roman emperor who ruled during the time of frequent war, disease, and natural disasters, it's about how he dealt with it all as a leader by following the stoic philosophy. Amazing book and helped changed my outlook on the world.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is one of those books that isn't geared to self-improvement, but to updating your view of the world. In it Taleb talks about how highly improbably events happen all the time, but we only see them as probable in hindsight. I think it's a great read since we tend to think in cause-and-effect ways, when in fact the world works more in a probabilistic way.

u/towerofterror · 1 pointr/politics

Sure. It was widely accepted before the crash that the housing market would collapse some.

But can you predict the chain reaction caused by the bursting, and that this burst balloon will fly around the crowded room, gouging out eyes and causing disoriented people to stumble around, inadvertently crashing through windows and dragging their friends with them as they fall?

Read some of Taleb's work, even if you think he's a blowhard it should make you a bit more humble.

u/jaysi3d · 1 pointr/worldnews

Read, The Black Swan, because people flying airplanes into buildings is a problem that rarely happens...

u/EwoutDVP · 1 pointr/changemyview

Well, that's asking for investment advice from some stranger on the internet, and you should obviously never take investment advice from some stranger over the internet without using your own brain.

Also, right now is a tough time anyways. As you might know the stock market jumped up (a bit at least) right after the Fed announced to keep the quantitative easing coming. This was almost "marketed" in the media as if it's a good thing, but it was almost certainly inverters "fleeing" the dollar more than anything else, as shown by the quick decline shortly after.

I guess precious metals are a pretty safe bet, or stocks in mining company's. But it will always be you vs. the market in these types of situations.

That said (and perhaps therefore) I'm a Black Swan type of guy myself. I'd rather invest in a bunch of things that might either go to the moon or crash and burn, instead of investing it all in a "certain" 3% profit a year. (Especially since there's no such thing as certainty these days.) And even then you should probably not risk more than ~20% of your net worth in Black Swans - not at the same time anyways. Probably less, even.

Right now I think Bitcoin has got to be the most promising Black Swan. It will either be worth a lot in ten years time or it will be worth nothing at all. Big risk - huge potential pay-off. I know, the word "bitcoin" brings up a lot of scepticism in a lot of people, it almost rhymes with "dotcom-bubble". But just watch the video I linked to, it's not that long.

However, whatever you do, DO NOT, invest all of your money in bitcoin, or do so at your own risk. Even 1% of your net worth should be more than enough. But most importantly, do your own research.

u/BasketDweller · 1 pointr/politics

I recommend you read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X/

The author of that book, a hedge-fund trader whose expertise is in calculating risk, says the chances of Trump winning are about 50% (in the video):

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/03/black-swan-author-nassim-taleb-you-dont-have-to-worry-about-a-trump-presidency.html

Sam Wang's model is an absolute joke.

u/joshualarry · 1 pointr/pics

My favorite Black Swan

u/LieGroupE8 · 1 pointr/rational

> What do we mean by "complex systems"? As in complex-systems theory?

Yes, complex systems theory (the study of ecosystems, economies, chaotic systems, etc).

> Got a book you can recommend?

If you read one book by him, read Antifragile. The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness are also good.

> You can suggest it in an open thread.

On /r/slatestarcodex or on the actual Slate Star Codex website?

> You can just tag him and see if he responds.

I tried this last time, but he didn't reply. Here it goes again: /u/EliezerYudkowsky

u/moleccc · 1 pointr/Bitcoin

> Who?

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X

> And yes. But that's just because that we can apply the Central Limit Theorem and assume the profits each day is normally distributed

> the central limit theorem (CLT) states that, given certain conditions, the arithmetic mean of a sufficiently large number of iterates of independent random variables, each with a well-defined expected value and well-defined variance, will be approximately normally distributed, regardless of the underlying distribution.

it's just a hunch, but models based on stuff like that might be the reason why the financial system is blowing up. When I read stuff like "independent random variables", the ludic fallacy (also from that book) comes to mind.

I can really recommend the book I linked above. Probably a good idea to write that thesis first, though ;)

u/maybe-tomorrow · 1 pointr/todayilearned

Someone is always going to argue against the common wisdom and be right. They are not geniuses, just lucky.

This Book should be required reading for anyone who relies on the opinion of "experts".

u/piyochama · 1 pointr/PoliticalDiscussion

Just to fill out the list by throwing in some right / conservative ones:

  1. Black Swan
  2. Freakonomics

    And as an absolute must, you should read this:
  3. Ascent of Money: this one is very, very conservative and gives you a good perspective on how financiers really view history.

    Also, you'd understand these books more if you had a good foundation in economics and finance.
u/chopthis · 1 pointr/poker

The better question to ask is why do you need this in the first place? If you were playing good and running good your mental game would be fine. The only thing that affecting poker player results are playing bad or running bad. Playing bad can be fixed by analyzing hands, reading good poker books and training. The effects of running bad can be lessened by understanding probability and randomness better. Running bad shouldn't really be an issue if you are bank rolled properly because if it is, then you are playing bad.

Most poker players that I know that are always frustrated or constantly tilting are almost always playing at stakes their bankroll doesn't support.
If you are using the 100 times big blind and 25 buyins recommendation, you shouldn't really have a mental game issue because you should be able to absorb the variance.

Mental Game Books

  • The Mental Game of Poker

  • The Poker Mindset

    More understanding about probability, randomness and focusing on the present can be helpful. If you understand those more it should help your mental game. I would recommend these books and at least understand their central points:

  • The Power of Now - relates to poker because the hand you are playing now is the only hand you should worry about. There is no last hand. Each hand is a clean slate. Focus on the present hand.

  • The Drunkard's Walk - relates to poker because whether you double up and lost two buy-ins could just be randomness.

  • The 80 / 20 Principle - relates to poker because 80% of your wins or losses will most likely come from 20% of hands played. Thus making hand selection important.

  • The Black Swan - one "black swan" situation could triple you up or make you lose your whole stack. Typically this means knowing when to fold big hands like AA or KK.

  • Fooled By Randomness - relates to poker because you could win the main event and millions of dollars and still not be a good poker player. The poker gods and luck could have just wanted to hang out with you for a week.




u/olimlah · 1 pointr/exmormon

I agree with the Manual for Creating Atheists book. That is an excellent one. My shelf broke in one semester many years ago when I took my first statistics class. Literally in a flash I realized that anecdotes are NOT data. Mormons are fine but they aren't healthier, happier, less cancer ridden, less criminal, etc. than other similar demographics.

You may also find The Black Swan by Nasim Taleb an excellent book and I highly recommend it. I hand that one out like candy and it works very well at getting people to think about what they "think they know" in a different light. Its great to use books like that because they have nothing to do with religion but they really do open eyes.

u/mgm-survivor · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

It's so good that your statistics override your common decency.

It's probably not cost effective to invest in addressing minority rights as well, because they are a minority... It's better to only care about people in the mainstream because that's where the bulk of public opinion lies. Right? Outliers are outliers - they don't have any human rights. The Black Swan

u/steelypip · 1 pointr/DebateAnAtheist

The universe is not deterministic - it is chock full of randomness at the quantum level and of chaos at the macro level.

Also there is no such thing as cause and effect - at least in the singular. At any given moment there are a virtually infinite number of causes that give rise to a virtually infinite number of effects. Here is an example from mathematician Michael Berry, quoted in The Black Swan by Nassim Talleb, of a ball bouncing round a billiard table using only Newtonian mechanics:

> If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry’s computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome. Now, consider the additional burden of having to incorporate predictions about where these variables will be in the future. Forecasting the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table requires knowledge of the dynamics of the entire universe, down to every single atom! We can easily predict the movements of large objects like planets (though not too far into the future), but the smaller entities can be difficult to figure out—and there are so many more of them.

Once you throw quantum effects into the mix then it is clear that the universe is not predictable even theoretically.

Look at it another way - if the universe was truly deterministic then everything that has happened in the last 13.7 Billion years was determined in the instant that the universe was created. Every birth, every death, every thought that everyone ever had was inevitable. The only way that could happen is if it was all planned out by some vast intelligence outside the universe - i.e. a god (but a deist one, since it could never interfere in what it had created). Atheism must of necessity reject the notion of determinism. It is only through the presence of randomness that we can exist - it is the driving force behind evolution and even the existence of stars and planets since if there were not random fluctuations in spacetime during the birth of the universe then matter and energy would be evenly spread out and the universe would be completely uninteresting.

u/aragorn831 · 1 pointr/worldnews

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about a similar pattern in finance. I've read Black Swan and most of Skin in the Game- it's good stuff!

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X

u/mathafrica · 1 pointr/BlackPeopleTwitter

"A couple dozen school shootings". You don't feel weird typing that?

Also how many of those under 14 died en route to school? Regardless, it's an issue and why school zones are implemented. and why parent-teacher associations and school districts try to hire more people to help kids cross safely near the school. Your entire argument makes no sense to me. Why have fire drills? How many schools burn down a year so whats the point, right? Not all unlikely things are given the same weight. In the case of preventable, violent murder of children, I think we can practice a bit to make sure less of them die? Don't you?

You should read the book 'Black Swan'. Here's the amazon link. Just read the little one paragraph blurb and you'll see how it's relevant to this.

u/Silverpeth · 1 pointr/booksuggestions

Agreed. A good follow-up to the Zimbardo book (a great read, btw!).

The Black Swan is also a good read in this vein: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X.

u/Qingy · 1 pointr/SiliconValleyHBO

Sounds familiar... are you referring to The Black Swan?

u/merper · 1 pointr/worldnews

If you can't think of any reason, you haven't been looking at all. Impossible and improbable are not the same thing.

Some recommended reading.

u/Dragonswim · 1 pointr/booksuggestions
  1. The Power of Habit- explains the science behind habits, the human brain and the "keystone" habits that can change your life.

  2. The Black Swan- will have you rethink your perception of reality and whether your choices are hardwired.

  3. Willpower Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength

  4. Brain Rules by John Medina written by a neauroscientist, awesome book read one chapter at a time.
u/inuvash255 · 1 pointr/news

>read the most recommended book by financiers, OR the most recommended book by economists

Citation needed?

I've looked through several lists- and haven't found one that supports this claim. I found this recommendation, but it's rather shaky.

Based on the top review for your Black Swan on Amazon, your stance doesn't quite make sense in context of what the book is suggesting.

I'll quote it:

>One reaction to Taleb's arguments about how little we can ultimately know and on what shaky ground our beliefs lie is to stand, like a deer in the headlights, waiting for better information. Taleb argues that this is a mistake. It might be a bit better to proceed, looking for evidence that would prove one's course of action wrong, then modify one's model of reality and repeat the process. Doing this has the advantage that one can learn quite quickly about how any problem is bounded, and get some sense for the shape of the space inside. He quotes Warren Buffet: it is a great deal better to be approximately right than it is to be precisely wrong. And when choosing among things to believe, he advises us to rank beliefs not by their implausibility but by the harm they might cause. Although there are robust methods that draw on both judgments, this is generally very sound advice.

Sounds like your guy agrees with me, oddly enough. Maybe you've gotta make the wrong decision and course-correct to the right one- not do nothing or turn in reverse.

----

> it's doubtful that you read anything longer than 2 pages

I stay up-to-date on current events and politics. I read news articles and think pieces. I listen to a lot of podcasts about a lot of varied topics. I listen to literature via audiobook.

No, I don't make a habit of reading long discussions from just one guy's point of view. Heck, I've had the audiobook for Man with a Thousand Faces on my iPhone for about six months, and still haven't quite made it through, and that's a book I'm very interested in.

Never-mind something I'm not, that's supposedly going to tell me that we should lie on our backs and wait for the world's environments to collapse before we put anymore environmenal regulations in place. You know- just to make sure nothing too surprising happens.

u/v64 · 1 pointr/BitcoinMarkets

> Normal Distribution

For what it's worth, research has shown that prices aren't normally distributed and the assumption that they are is argued to have caused an underestimation of risk that triggered the '08 financial crisis (among other market crashes). The Black Swan and the Misbehavior of Markets both discuss this for general audiences. The author of the second book, Benoit Mandelbrot, began to uncover these mistaken assumptions while researching the applications of fractal geometry to finance.

u/TheWorldOfParmenides · 1 pointr/IntellectualDarkWeb

Submission Statement: Universality fairly easily leads to the conclusion that humans anywhere out of the left tail are fundamentally the same, mentally speaking.

>In computation, universality simply means a process that can simulate all processes — including itself. By simulation, we mean copying the behavior of a process to as much fidelity as we would like. At some point, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, we stop, and consider it a duck for all practical purposes. (There, I wrapped the Turing test for artificial general intelligence in a nutshell for you.) Replace “processes” with “machines,” and you roughly see how computers work: a universal machine is a machine that can simulate all machines, including itself. You can think of a machine simply as a process that transforms an input to an output following a fixed set of rules.
>
>...
>
>Think about it: if the human species depended on exceptional geniuses who nevertheless could never communicate their exceptional thoughts to another human being, then either they are intellectual con-artists (like postmodernist “philosophers”), or we would have been doomed a long time ago. Although a few critical individuals clearly hit upon the right ideas at the right place at the right time, many other individuals need to be able to independently verify and improve upon these ideas. The real intelligence lies in human cooperation. There is no such thing as an exponentially smarter human being for the same reason as there is no such thing as an exponentially taller human being. A genius who cannot communicate his thoughts to another human is, in fact, not a genius!
>
>...
>
>As an individual, what matters much, much more than your alleged IQ is what you do with your precious, limited time on Earth. Remember, universality says that we are all capable of exactly the same ideas. That is why even differences in human languages don’t really matter. (Whether or not the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, we get for free the result that it is ultimately irrelevant.) Remember, the insidious thing about IQ — as Nassim astutely observed with his owl eye— is that there are people who fancy “their” people genetically smarter than yours, and only want to “help” you. (They are often the same people who like to mistakenly think that the “West” discovered all civilization, and that the “West” is Nordic / North Atlantic / North Europe.) At best, they are overeducated idiots; at worst, they are racialists. No matter what anyone tells you, you can learn about anything you like. Go out, and find out what you are good at, what Nature put you here to discover, and teach the rest of us.
>
>So, who should care about IQ? Nobody! Why? Because we are universal!

u/mhornberger · 1 pointr/worldnews

You'd be happier not watching the news. I haven't watched it in years. I scan the headlines online and read what is relevant or interesting.

Nassim Taleb makes a case for not watching the news in the great book The Black Swan. It just makes you unhappy, and it doesn't add depth to our understanding of "what's going on." Mostly it's just human interest stories. They're tragic, and they make the world seem scarier, but that doesn't add any understanding of anything.

u/yuppykaiA · 1 pointr/FinancialCareers

www.investopedia.com for looking up financial terms.

www.bloomberg.com for financial news.

Warren Buffet talk on youtube

Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters

Books-

The warren buffet way will help you analyse companies.

The intelligent investor the book on value investing.

Common stocks and uncommon profits the book on picking growth stocks.

The black swan useful insight into options trading.

Anything and everything by Michael Lewis, he writes so well, his books will give you insight into how the finance industry actually works and they're entertaining; Liars Poker chronicles how the Mortgage Backed Security was created and is a good start.

When you're done with all that, let me know and I'll send more your way! Studying for the CFA helps too as recommended by the other guy posting here but you by no means need a finance/business major.


u/12V_man · 1 pointr/suggestmeabook

The Black Swan sorry, no not the Natalie Portman movie

The Red Queen

Bonk

u/Dzugavili · 0 pointsr/Creation

> Darwin Devolves (Behe) is currently the #1 best seller in developmental biology on Amazon and goes into detail on why random mutation and natural selection cannot account for the modern creation myth of "single cell to man"

Yeah...it's not.

As of right now, the #1 seller is The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto). Which just sounds...really boring...

The Kindle version is beat by this book about bees.

And I don't think a freebie should ever be considered a best seller.

u/Senescences · -13 pointsr/GlobalOffensive

Use the money you made trading to educate yourself about how the big scheme of things works: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X

There are so many flaws in your logic it's staggering, I feel like I read something by a kid who, after taking one class in a business school, thinks he knows how markets work.