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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"The Brown Swan"

15 Comments -

1 – 15 of 15
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Taleb says in an online inteview that this crisis was a white swan, that it was obvious it's gonna happen. The 1987 crash was a black one.

Wikipedia:
On a Charlie Rose show Taleb said that he was pleased that none of criticism he received for "The Black Swan" had any substance as it was either unintelligent or ad hominem/style over substance, which convinced him to "go for the jugular" with a huge financial bet on the breakdown of statistical methods in finance.

1/5/09, 3:46 PM

Anonymous David Davenport said...

Steve,

Sorry, but your opinion about Nassim Taleb, which you have gotten at second hand, is incorrect.

Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the source of Taleb’s mathematical ideas, has been saying for many years that both the so-called Black-Scholes model and the Capital Asset Pricing Model are wrong. Mandelbrot’s claim is that many natural events, including stock market events, follow a power law probability distribution instead of a Gaussian distribution. A two-sided power law distribution looks similar to the Gaussian bell curve, except that the power law distribution is somewhat narrower at the shoulders and wider at the tails or right and left skirt edges. Fatter, wider tails imply more extreme, outlying events are likely to happen than one would predict from the Gaussian distribution.

These outlier events may be big tornados or Nile River floods or financial crises. All are more common than one would infer from Gaussian statistics.

Mandelbrot and Taleb give Wall Street villains an excuse only in the sense of Keyne’s aphorism that mad dictators who seem to be distilling their frenzy from the air are actually parroting the bad ideas of defunct economists.

1/5/09, 4:30 PM

Anonymous dearieme said...

People who wear sunglasses find it hard to see black swans. It's their fault for wearing sunglasses.

1/5/09, 4:49 PM

Anonymous David Davenport said...

Check out "Taleb gets upset at the economists":

http://www.stephenkinsella.net/2008/10/13/taleb-gets-upset-at-the-economists/

Embedded Video

This being iSteve.com, I'll point out that Nassim T.'s ethnicity is Lebanese Christian.

1/5/09, 5:09 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope you get the credit for the definition of a "Brown Swan". That has to be the best new expression in years!

1/5/09, 5:24 PM

Anonymous tommy said...

Or consider history. Taleb, who is from the affluent Christian upper class of Lebanon (his grandfather was deputy prime minister), saw his homeland devastated when a 15-year-long civil war broke out while he was a teenager. For anyone who remembers the post World War II era, when Lebanon was universally viewed as the Switzerland of the Middle East, that was a black swan indeed.

Taleb goes too far. It was precisely this sort of example that turned me off to the book. If he were making the weaker case, he would have been right. It certainly would have been hard to predict exactly when or even if Lebanon might descend into civil war. However, Taleb seems to argue that since conventional wisdom saw Beirut as the Paris of the Middle East, no one could have predicted Lebanon might have been more of a powder keg than a country like Finland. As your own piece on Lebanon illustrates, it may just be that the dispensers of conventional wisdom are deluded.

To argue that "black swans" prove that bell curves don't work is a little like arguing that since you might find an autumn day that is cooler than a given winter day, this disproves the notion that we say that the winter is cooler than the fall. It's confusing the particular with the general.

I think Taleb's greatest mistake is conflating the notion that people often forget about the tail ends of bell curves with the idea that the curves themselves don't exist.

1/5/09, 7:11 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Agreed with the above poster, I also hope you get wide recognition for this. If the Black Swan explanation obscures the depression's human capital aspect it will be a national tragedy. The "Brown Swan" is a wonderful phrase--it is accurate and renders silly those who are obfuscating the truth.

1/5/09, 7:17 PM

Blogger TGGP said...

I haven't read Taleb's books but I made the same point about the crash not really being that improbable a coincidence of events (or singular event like 9/11) in the comments to this GNXP post.

1/5/09, 7:26 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

When a big flock of brown swans converge, it can look just like a shit storm.

- Fred

1/5/09, 7:56 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

THE BROWN SWAN would be a brilliant choice of title and topic for a book-length treatment. The, um, brownwashing process described by the term is ubiquitous and goes well beyond the current financial meltdowns.

1/5/09, 11:22 PM

Blogger Bill said...

In effect Taleb gave the elites that screwed up on a monumental scale an easy out For example, “yes, I’m head of risk for Merrill and some say I should have seen it coming, but surely you have read ‘The Black Swan’ and now understand how that would have been impossible.” In short, Taleb has given all of finance the copout they need when they most needed it (i.e., everyone - practitioners, academics, regulators, etc.).

I would interpret this differently. Rather I would compare them to Otto from a A Fish Called Wanda

Otto: Don't call me stupid.
...
Otto : Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it!

1/6/09, 6:36 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Brown Swan" - I love it!

1/6/09, 6:43 AM

Blogger Freddie said...

Sigh.

Most subprime mortgages went to white people, Steve, and most went to middle class people, Steve. Why can't you ever tell the truth when it doesn't conform to your limited hobby-horse?

1/6/09, 6:57 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ahem.

Let me also restate my submission: the Truffle Hunt.

As in, when Malcolm Gladwell and Nasim Taleb go on a truffle hunt to unearth that politically correct gourmand's delight (the Aztec physicist, the Muslim social democrat, the monogamous and conservative gay couple, etc.) so we'll construct government policy around the rare and delectable truffle instead of all those mushrooms everywhere.

--Senor Doug

1/6/09, 11:09 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Freddie:

You have no data, yet you call someone else a liar? You have brass balls. Guess what, the truth's out there. See sample link below, or simply have the common decency to google "site:isteve.blogspot.com minority subprime" before talking nonsense.

Cuz this isn't the Atlantic no more, Freddie. It's the *real* reality-based community, and we are not bound by tired lies. You want to go to the statistical mattresses? Bring it pardner!


http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-new-vdare-column-big-enchilada.html

Federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data dug up by reader Tino suggests that the recent American Housing Bubble was, more than anything else, a Hispanic Housing bubble, as total mortgage dollars handed out to to Hispanics more than septupled from 1999 to 2006! (Is "septupled" even a word?)

Moreover, in 2006, according to Tino, 51% of subprime and other "higher priced" mortgages (for purchasing homes and for refinancing older mortgages) went to minorities. The higher priced mortgages are, of course, where most of the unexpected defaults have shown up.

1/6/09, 6:26 PM

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