(2008-08-15) Taleb Interview

Amusing interview with Nassim Taleb.

• (Q) You distrust people who wear ties? (A) It correlates rather well with incompetence.

• Have you read this book called The Four Hour Work Week? It's similar to these concepts. I try to avoid drag-down work, so when I write, I don't write more than an hour in any given day. When I've done an hour, I make sure I don't write more. And I make sure I don't work hard because when you work hard, you sort of dilute yourself.

• I saw their positions in 2003, when a very smart journalist, Alex Berenson of the New York Times, came to me and said, Can I show you the risk of FannieMae? When I saw it, I almost choked. (In Berenson's August 2003 article, Taleb was quoted as saying FannieMae and other major holders of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities chronically underestimate the odds of a big move in interest rates that could decimate the value of their portfolios, over-relying on computer models that don't account for rare but devastating events, i.e. Black Swan-s.)... At a micro level, I don't have a lot of things to say, except, "Don't rescue banks." ... I think that the longer you defer the big non-BailOut, the harder it's going to get for us, because banks aren't learning. (Credit Crisis 2008)

• Economics is a tragedy for me. Because look at how the whole world now is designed according to some ideas that have not proved adequate. The whole financial system. We don't understand economic policy, do you realize that? Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates thinking it would help the economy. All it did was push banks to take risks - hidden risks. Do you realize that we don't understand Globalization? Globalization increases Extremistan. That's one problem with this Thomas Friedman guy - he (the bestselling author of The World Is Flat, which argues the advantages of globalization in the internet age) didn't seem to understand the very simple dynamics that globalization forces redundancy (Slack) out of the system. And whenever you don't have redundancy, you have Extremistan. Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up.

• Up until Semmelweis (mid-19th-century Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who, over much official opposition, introduced hand-washing with chlorinated lime solutions), there was a high Probability of a death sentence attached to giving birth in a hospital (HealthCare). But then again, Life Expectancy did not increase thanks to doctors. The big break didn't even come until 1940 when we had penicillin (Antibiotic). So what I'm saying is we're suckers. We'd go to a doctor just to have the illusion of control. Likewise, we give ourselves to pseudo-experts simply because we believe these people help us.

• For my next book, I'm calling for more Bottom-Up tinkering, less top-down theorizing. (Piece Meal Social Engineering?)

• A CEO's incentive is not to learn, because he's not paid on real value. He's paid on cosmetic value. So he's paid to be nice to the Merrill Lynch analysts or the Wall Street analysts. So this is where the problem starts.