Why Catastrophes Happen
From Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen There are many subtleties and twists in the story … but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable …
From Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen There are many subtleties and twists in the story … but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable …
From Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us: The ubiquity of complex systems in the social world is important because it severely restricts the kinds of predictions we can make. In simple …
More on the theme of intentional complexity. Many of the products we buy today are, by their nature, complicated. If you want to buy a television or a car or a computer, you are faced with a …
Don’t imitate large firms, just because they are large. Large, prestigious, and successful firms are chosen not only on the assumption that following them will produce better results but also as …
More brains don’t necessarily lead to better ideas. When it came to leading meetings, Steve Jobs had no qualms about tossing the least necessary person out of the room. An excerpt from Insanely …
A brilliant post from brain pickings drawing our attention to Susan Sontag and the commodification of wisdom. As the interconnectedness and velocity of information continue to grow, these passages …
An eloquent explanation on the difference between mysteries and puzzles by Gregory Treverton: There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered …
Welcome to the conjunctive and disjunctive events bias. Why are we so optimistic in our estimation of a projects cost and schedule? Why are we so surprised when something inevitably goes wrong? …
In an effort to improve performance we often turn to the simple answer of trying to hire a star from another organization. This sounds like a great idea, is hard to argue with, and offers the promise …
Ted Cadsby writes “the following five books are a small sample from a longer list of must-reads, but they have two things in common. First, they forced me to confront how superficial and …
Nassim Taleb’s article, The Black Swan of Cario, (PDF) on suppressing volatility is worth a read. It’s the ultimate example of iatrogenics by the fragilista. Here are my notes. Complex …
In this brief article Nassim Taleb (of Black Swan fame) touches on information, complexity, the randomness effect, over-confidence, and signal and noise. THE DEGRADATION OF PREDICTABILITY — AND …
Information without context is falsely empowering and incredibly dangerous. As an adult, have you ever picked up a child’s shape-sorter and tried to put the square item through the round hole? …
Too Big to Fail” is a dilemma that has plagued economists, policy makers and the public at large. In Nassim Taleb’s lastest paper (with co-author Charles S. Tapiero) he takes a look. Abstract …