fuck this guy imho

how do i get into this racket

this shit makes "blink" look like marcus aurelius

Ueber-Capitalists who make a second fortune telling people how fucked Capitalism is are always hilarious. No, wait, the other thing.

"you can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity"

w. t. f.

acid's a hell of a drug

This is basically the Yuppie equivalent of rock stars who've spent 30 years getting wasted having a Damascene conversion and telling the kids not to do the drugs.

this dude sounds like a real d.b. but i like this quote - "Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing."

if life were a william gibson novel this dude would be destined for a cruel and unusual death

"you make up reasons, but it's probably just smell" is one of the most irritating, too-cute-by-half, undeservedly pleased with itself statements in an article full of them!

xpost

Newport Beach. All is clear.

Pretty sure this dude did a couple of guest verses on that Scroobius Pip joint.

he reminds me of my first boss out of college, a guy who during my job interview said, "in this company, we think in packets"

e doesnt like him cuz he hates dawkins

^ exactly what i thought!

I stopped being interested the moment i saw the words "Newport Beach"

i skimmed the article & didnt catch the dawkins thing but there are many more reasons not to like this db

haha, xp with Ned.

Elvis Telecom to thread.

He's not as much fun as George Soros.

the thing about answering emails from lower-downs first is on point i think, although half the stuff he says, including that, sounds suspiciously like it was cribbed from "the 48 laws"

i think whats most annoying about him is that he basically picked a position of extreme obvious cynicism and profits entirely as a critic
its a lot harder to stand for something than to stand against it

this is my favorite quote:

"They’re still trying to tear him down, of course; last year The American Statistician journal devoted a whole issue to attacking The Black Swan. But I wouldn’t bother. A bad but rather ignorant review in The New York Times resulted in such a savage rebuttal from Taleb on his website, www.fooledbyrandomness.com, that reviewers across the US pulled out in fear of his wrath."

"be lazy and self indulgent and everything will masgically work out" shit is just 'the secret' for economists

fuck this guy in my ho?

sorry, trying to eliminate the ambiguity and randomness of "imho"

Presumably he hates Dawkins cos god-bothering and derivatives trading rely on the same mystification techniques, incense and bullshit.

whoever wrote the article is a douche too. "getting to know taleb is a highly immersive experience." tmi!

you know its a great article when the reporter brushes aside an entire edition of a professional journal devoted to attacking this dude with a "i wouldn't bother"

i think the moral of the story here is that a mish-mash of half-remembered koans and usda-certified bullshit is like a license to print american dollars

lol his head was immersed in taleb's ass

He points out, chillingly, that banks make money from two sources. They take interest on our current accounts and charge us for services. This is easy, safe money. But they also take risks, big risks, with the whole panoply of loans, mortgages, derivatives and any other weird scam they can dream up. “Banks have never made a penny out of this, not a penny. They do well for a while and then lose it all in a big crash.”

is chillingly a synonym for "inaccurately"?

risks, big risks

filthy rich dudes who bemoan the state of the economy while doing stuff like putting "a few thousand dollars" aside for parking tickets and tea spills should just collectively stfu

“We have the ability to identify our mistakes eventually better than average; that’s what saves us.” We choose the iPod over the Walkman. Medicine improved exponentially when the tinkering barber surgeons took over from the high theorists. They just went with what worked, irrespective of why it worked. Our sense of the good tinker is not infallible, but it might be just enough to turn away from the apocalypse that now threatens Extremistan.

ahahaha "chillingly" this reporter is slater from dazed and confused y/n?

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

^^ this is the shit that reminded me of blink

this is kind of like the philosphical/business equiv of 43 yr old teenpop dudes breaking down ashlee simpson lyrics

the lex gone economist

haha Extremistan???

“You will never,” he says, “be able to control randomness.”

http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/barada/267/Siriusly/nostradamus-01.jpg

the number of times ive heard people repeat straight up incorrect shit at parties ...

"you can't see... what's not there!!"

cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties

In Newport this translates to Ruby's, the Cheesecake Factory and whereever either Dennis Rodman or Kobe Bryant is or isn't at any particular time.

lol i remember a dude telling me dan the automator was one half of the neptunes at a party once

Oh wait I forgot Carrow's.

no really, the envelope of serendipity???

"if you think you can know the unknowable," he says, "you're wrong"

In Newport this translates to Ruby's, the Cheesecake Factory and whereever either Dennis Rodman or Kobe Bryant is or isn't at any particular time

Thought Ned was talking about Newport, Gwent for a second.

i like how he is "always hungry" so he orders three salads.

lol FAKE RE VIEWERS!! for a guy who doesn't give a fuck about anything, he sure has a chip on his shoulder

"life," he says, "is like a bowl of cherries"

that is basically my exercise regimen and im like 15 lbs overweight

http://www.eatingliberally.org/files/images/gump.jpg

lol homie is straight out the dark ages

How many economists can dance on the head of a pin

oh yeah it's box of chocolates

http://www.sparrowscottage.net/STAMPcherries.jpg

Ueber-Capitalists who make a second fortune telling people how fucked Capitalism is are always hilarious. No, wait, the other thing.

-- Noodle Vague, Thursday, 5 June 2008 18:19 (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

This is the wrong end of the stick. Uber capitalist he may be but he made his first fortune exploiting how fucked capitalism is. He is making his second fortune trying to educate people in his theories. Nut ball he may be but he is consistent.

his defense of "aristocratic values" reminds me of the liev schreiber character in the daytrippers who's anti-democracy. and has written an unpublished novel about a man with a dog's head.

How he made is money and his economic theories are probably the least lunatic things about him.

I am having major roffles here. I'd love to picture him as Tom Cruise when he talks about his excercise regime. Y'know, how he runs to the mirror, ogles himself and then claps his hands and goes: "GO TALEBSTER GO!" Then I saw his picture and I was majorly disappointed. Alas he just looks like a douche bag.

Also that website of his is like logorhea set to internet. Dude, STFU, sparseness gets you places.

I wasn't saying that how he made his money or his economic theories were lunatic. I was saying they were scumbag.

Yeah, there are plenty of douchey things about this guy, and the article itself is douchetastic. But his basic points -- that economics and the behavior of markets are unbelievably complex and fragile; that a single unforeseen event or factor can totally fuck up any complex system or mathematical model, and any feelings of control we have are mostly illusory; that playing it safe should be our baseline strategy for a lot of things, and we should accept that we're not in complete control -- these are completely OTM.

dude may be a douchebag, but even he states (correctly) that the event that gets dubbed a "black swan" -- i.e., the subprime meltdown -- really isn't a black swan (precisely because it was EASILY forseeable).

plus, sometimes it takes a douchebag to properly go to battle with other douchebags (i.e., model-bound quant-heavy financial folks on Wall Street who brought about such things like the subprime mess).

Also that website of his is like logorhea set to internet. Dude, STFU, sparseness gets you places.

-- stevienixed, Thursday, June 5, 2008 6:34 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

you should email him and tell him that if he redesigns his website, he might one day become successful!

His regime works. He looks great – springy and fit. He shows me an old identity card. He is fat and middle-aged in the photo. He looks 10 years younger than that. “Look at me! That photo was taken seven years ago. No carbs!”

nah, actually he still looks fat and middle-aged?

this is seriously one of the most disgustingly sycophantic profile pieces I've read in a good minute. the "ten ways to be more like this douche" postscript really takes the cake. GO TO PARTIES GUYS

PARTIES

4real man like... this is the sunday times?? not a brian molko post on some passantino ex-girl's livejournal?

You appear to be confusing the Times with a quality newspaper.

but even shit rags like MH/GQ/Details/Esquire etc. usually manage to be slightly condescending on paper even though they completely suck up during the interview. this is like if you sent me to talk to carl craig in 1996

When this man said the Giants would win the 2008 Super Bowl, he was scorned. Now it's clear he's some kind of freaking genius.

they quoted bo jackson overdrive?

this guy sounds like my high school economics teacher

Nobody could forsee that banks lending money to people who couldn't pay it back would end badly.

Except one man.

it bears repeating

Newport
Fucking
Beach

This guy is a gala of good vibes compared to most of Newport Beach, guys. I'm not kidding.

HE WAS RIGHT... about the levees at Katrina
HE WAS RIGHT... about Walter Mondale's presidential campaign

NOW...he's predicting the decline of the American newspaper

This guy is a gala of good vibes compared to most of Newport Beach, guys. I'm not kidding.

QFT

If you listen to rumor and innuendo at cocktail parties and cafes and work on it like it's truth, you're probably going to have pretty good results in business as long as you're selling to the people you're listening to

If you listen to rumor and innuendo at cocktail parties and cafes and work on it like it's truth, you're probably going to have pretty good results in business as long as you're selling to the people you're listening to

But in fairness, this is a caricature of what he's saying, which is that (1) you can use informal conversations, like at parties, as a "filter" to help identify which events, trends, etc. are most relevant, and (2) you can often find out stuff in person, and in informal conversation, that you'll never get from a newspaper. Both things are totally true, though (1) is sort of circular, and both are also somewhat contingent on who's doing the talking, and where. In that sense, I agree with you: if you hang out with powerful and/or moneyed people, then (within the context of this game) what they're talking about is what's relevant -- at least to them.

On the other hand, saying "don't read newspapers for the news" is crap. I get the impression that this guy throws out a lot of crazy shit; when you combine that with the drippingly sycophantic tone, it only heightens the douche factor.

(But then again -- how long did it take for the media to start acknowledging that speculation, not supply and demand or Middle East politics or whatever, was the primary force driving up the price of oil?)

they still haven't

But in fairness

Why would we want to go there?

Why would we want to go there?

Because if we don't, we're tacitly admitting that we're no better -- at best -- than anyone we might criticize?

dude got lucky once, then he learned to read between the lines, now he's got people sucking up to him like they did to Stephen Leavitt. Whatever. I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell's saving grace is that he's just too actual-geeky for men's mag/tabloid jackasses to write puff profiles about him

"The media" are mostly concerned with delivering enough one-line headlines per hour to break into the "top ten news stories" on websites that carry AP and Reuters feeds. That's how political candidates are going to drop out, stay in, announce stuff, and not announce stuff five times a day, and why I know more (irrelevant bullshit) about celebrities I don't give a shit about than I should.

You're just going to get opinionated summaries of all this shit live, which is what a good newspaper or evening news anchor could do in an "objective" manner

they still haven't

It's starting to show up, though very gradually...

dude got lucky once, then he learned to read between the lines

Yeah, OTM. I lay 90% of the fault for the douchiness of this article on the interviewer/author, really.

very much agree with the subject of this thread. also fuck the author and fuck anyone who is inspired by this article.

YEAH FUCK THAT GUY

krugman disagrees with you guys about speculators being the cause of high oil prices, fwiw

Sorry, I thought this might be the new ILX gays thread.

in my humble orifice

For a guy that doesn't make predictions he sure makes a lot of predictions, although to be fair that's the authors claim:

He doesn’t make predictions, he insults people paid to do so by telling them to get another job.

-----------------------
Taleb had been vindicated. “It was my greatest vindication. But to me that wasn’t a black swan; it was a white swan. I knew it would happen and I said so.

In December he lectured bankers at Société Générale, France’s second biggest bank. He told them they were sitting on a mountain of risks – a menagerie of black swans. They didn’t believe him. Six weeks later the rogue trader and black swan Jérôme Kerviel landed them with $7.2 billion of losses.

He held options that had cost him almost nothing and that bet on the dollar’s decline.

Taleb created his own hedge fund, Empirica, designed to help other hedge funds hedge their risks by using a refined form of his options wins – running small losses in quiet times and winning big in turbulent markets.

"almost nothing" in comparison to the $35M he made, I wonder? something tells me this isn't a rags-to-riches story.

Taleb created his own hedge fund, Empirica, designed to help other hedge funds hedge their risks

http://www.kimchihead.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/vubabes.jpg

Make a lot a money.

Come to my seminar.

Of course the perversely hilarious thing in retrospect was that a couple of months after this thread he and Roubini were being quoted everywhere.