N N Taleb's Probability Questions

You are Hiring a Person Not a Subcontinent: A Basic Error in The Interpretation of Statistics.

12K views · 2mo ago · 4:16

Outlining a basic error in statistical interpretation: statistics works on aggregates, not individual instances. You can only use statistical properties when dealing with groups not individuals --except when the variance is zero --in which case why use statistics? Even if IQ worked outside of severe deficits, it wouldn't be applicable to decisions concerning single individuals. Applies to President Biden's pancreatic cancer.

Alexander Taleb: Why Do Planes Crash?

7K views · 1y ago · 2:49:10

Guest: Alexander Taleb

Alexander Taleb, aerospace engineer, lectures at the #RWRI summer school 2025 (#RWRI 20) on plane safety. The lecture has close to 2 hours of Q&A.

Stephen Wolfram visits RWRI 20 (The Real World Risk Summer School, 2025)

14K views · 1y ago · 2:10:53

The great Stephen Wolfram spends 2 hours discussing the ruliads and computational irreducibility at the Real World Risk Institute Summer School.

Discussion with Pierre Zalloua on 'Ancestors'

10K views · 1y ago · 21:02

Guest: Pierre Zalloua

A discussion with Pierre Zalloua about his book Ancestors on the Genetic & Cultural History of the Levant. It is the first scientific history of the area, which debunks many historical accounts.

MINI LECTURE 19 - Conditional Probability & A Fallacy in Cardiology Concerning LDL

27K views · 1y ago · 3:24

People with normal Lp(a) have much lower risk factors. We tend to overmedicate them. The normal levels of LDL should be revised upwards for them.

Does the Ketogenic Diet Work for Brain Cancer? Finding Signal in a Small Sample.

16K views · 1y ago · 4:47

Does the Ketogenic Diet Work for Brain Cancer? Doctors find it hard to do a trial so many make you believe that it does not work rather than simply claiming "it is just untested" (conflating the absence of evidence for evidence of absence).

The IQ debate, a conclusion

40K views · 1y ago · 5:39

Just to show, in conclusion to my article "IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle", that psychologists arguing with it proved that IQ doesn't explain up to 99.5% of things it is supposed to explain. It's not my data, but theirs that they did not interpret correctly.

Universa's Bernoulli for Portfolio Simulation: Correcting the Empirical Distribution

21K views · 2y ago · 30:56

The empirical distribution is not empirical, full of Turkey problems. "Real tails" do not show in past samples because of their property under fat tails. Empirical distributions are, by design, interpolating; we fix by extrapolating and extending the tails. Note the dispute: In French, Bernoulli is pronounced "Ber-noo-yi" not "Ber-noo-li", much like consigliere is pronounced "consiyyere".

Scott Patterson's Chaos Kings, Part 4

7.9K views · 2y ago · 1:02:53

Scott Patterson's Chaos Kings, Part 3

9.3K views · 2y ago · 1:05:24

+ Why Ilmanen-style "simulations" of tail performance are both theoretically and empirically flawed because of 1) need to extrapolate extremes, and 2) The Niederhoffer problem. + The birth of the Non-Naive Precautionary Principle in East Anglia, in a pub discussion with Rupert Read.

Scott Patterson's Chaos Kings, Part 2

13K views · 2y ago · 1:06:34

+The Turkey Problem + Meeting Mandelbrot & discovering a wealth of processes generating grey swans + Meeting Kahneman + The 3-day meeting with the Harvard geneticist George Church, involving Elon Musk, Anne Wojcicki, Larry Page, Richard Thaler, & others that triggered the non-naive version of the precautionary principle.

Scott Patterson's Chaos Kings, Part 1

28K views · 2y ago · 1:09:42

Scott Patterson discusses with Nassim N Taleb his book Chaos Kings, chapter by chapter. This is Part 1.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM VISITS RWRI 19, SUMMER SCHOOL 2024

11K views · 2y ago · 1:56:34

TOPICS: 2nd law, generative AI, computational Irreducibility, climate modeling. Stephen Wolfram's discussion with participants at the Real World Risk Institute Summer School 2024, with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Robert Frey, Raphael Douady, and others.

MINI LECTURE 18: How to build a positive definite correlation matrix for Monte Carlo simulations

7.8K views · 2y ago · 4:23

How to build by tinkering a positive definite correlation matrix for Monte Carlo simulations for a given dimensionality.

MINI LECTURE 17: Maximum Ignorance Probability (a bit more technical)

13K views · 2y ago · 5:03

What do you do when you must estimate a probability and there is ZERO information? A surgeon did 60 operations with 0 failure. What's her or his failure rate? I didn't realize that the trick wasn't in the literature until John Hughes wrote a paper in Statistics and Probability Letters based on my blog post presenting the idea.