The complexity of the world increases each day, and our inability to forecast events increases as well. "Black swans", unforeseen and unforeseeable events, are impossible to predict but can drastically change results.
These essentially random factors cannot be accounted for, so how can we successfully forecast; how can we account for the unaccountable? Should we just stop forecasting altogether? Not according to Nassim Taleb. Taleb details the pitfalls we encounter while trying to predict the future and a partial solution to the problem in this talk from Pop!Tech 2005.
This talk was from the What Do We Know session at Pop!Tech. The other speaker in this session was Robert Trivers. The question and answer period can be heard at the end of Robert Trivers' talk.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an essayist principally concerned with the problems of uncertainty and knowledge. Nassim's interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, finance, literature and cognitive science, but he has stayed extremely close to the ground, thanks to an uninterrupted two-decade career as a mathematical trader.
Specializing in the risks of unpredicted rare events ("black swans"), he held senior trading positions in New York and London, before founding Empirica LLC, a trading firm and risk research laboratory. He is the author of Dynamic Hedging and Fooled by Randomness, which has been published in 14 languages. Nassim's ideas on skeptical empiricism have been covered by hundreds of articles around the world.
Nassim holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris and is Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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This free podcast is from our Pop!Tech series.
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