Thursday, December 15, 2016

Nassim Nicholas Taleb — The Syrian War Condensed: A more Rigorous Way to Look at the Conflict


I guess Taleb's blog is a fake news site that promotes Russian propaganda.

12 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Where is the "Pipeline" row?

John said...

Smarter than the average bear is Nicky boy, and in many fields. One of the more honest commentators too on political issues.

All the books of his I've read are superb - in actual fact close to amazing. Yet to read Antifragile though.

His view that the government should have done nothing in 2008 was not the best call. According to him a government is like a sledgehammer and the economy is fragile. He was working on his book Antifragile and was silly enough to think out loud in public. I agree with him that an economy should be constructed to be antifragile, but his Friedmanite, almost Austrian, economics is weird coming from such a smart guy.

Matt Franko said...

Well if govt intervenes they perform an abortion on his black swan...

Matt Franko said...

How is the right column going to eat if they cant sell the oil to the food producers?

Tom Hickey said...

How is the right column going to eat if they cant sell the oil to the food producers?

They haven't been having any trouble so far. The oil flows through Turkey, where it is suitably laundered.

Matt Franko said...

I'm talking about the 10's of M people in the gulf...

Matt Franko said...

Here:

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

"Still, Saudi Arabia is dependent on imports to meet 70% of its food requirements.[1]"

Probably worse in the others...

Oil/Gas up thru Syria to Europe and food comes back is the idea...

Matt Franko said...

Tom when coming upon two morons arguing, jumping in on the one side is not the move...

Tom Hickey said...

The moron in this is the US for getting involved in the first place. It was probably the worst blunder the US has ever committed and it’s a longways from over yet. In fact, this could bring the US down.

It began when Carter decided to fund and arm the mujahideen led by Osama to destabilize Afghanistan. It's escalated irrationally since.

Osama is well on the way to fulfilling his objective.

Crazy stuff.

And in the beginning it wasn't even chiefly about the oil but the USSR aka "Russia."

Ignacio said...

Too bad he is a libertarian + gold-bug and government hater. This disallows him from reaching new insights and solutions to real problems insted of we "cannot do anything!" or "let randomness fix it".

Pretty sad.

Matt Franko said...

Ignacio,

this the guy I immediately think of when I think of your 'what we dont understand we view as stochastic" theory...

Matt Franko said...

Tom most of these flows illustrated here are human life sustaining:

https://blueshift.io/international-trade-frame.html