He lives in a four-bedroom Tudor with twenty-six Russian Orthodox icons, nineteen Roman heads, and four thousand books, and he rises at dawn to spend an hour writing. He is the author of two books, the first a technical and highly regarded work on derivatives, and the second a treatise entitled “Fooled by Randomness,” which was published last year and is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were to the Catholic Church.”

What can I say Malcolm rocks and he liked this guy back in ’02

Malcolm noted that even then “Taleb, by contrast, has constructed a trading philosophy predicated entirely on the existence of black swans. on the possibility of some random, unexpected event sweeping the markets. He never sells options, then. He only buys them.” this is well before the cuirrent book was published.

“I just had to withdraw a piece from publication. The copy editor wanted to “improve” the sentences. I pulled it out immediately upon hearing claims that she represented the “general public”, with the assumption that she knew what the “general public” needed –not realizing that she was talking to an empiricist who despises impressions (based on anecdotal evidence) & pompously stated superstitious.

There is an expert problem with copy editors particularly when they are self-appointed representatives of the “general public”. (“Advice” from book editors reminds me of Warren Buffet’s comment about people in limos taking stock tips from people who ride the subway). Fooled by Randomness was not copy edited (with close to 200 typos in the hardcover edition). My next book (post-TBS) will NOT be edited. An edited text is fake. Really fake. It is as shameful as ghostwriting.

Raw literature used to resemble speech, in its messiness, idiosyncrasy, (& charm). Spelling was only made uniform very late, by printers, not by authors –which explains the idiosyncrasies of medieval authors.

This ethical stand means that I will not be able to publish Op-Ed, book reviews, etc. in the “general public” and academo-philistine press. I am now left to myself –and the web.

from http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm just above no.48 in his very arcane list of meanderings

Could Google blow up? Who knows. I think Black Swans tells us that anything is possible and as a former trader myself i can attest to that. So far though the sun still comes up every morning…at least i hope so

Perhaps his publisher wants to crank up the “long tail” and also stimulate sales of his first book which seems much better by comparison “Fooled by Randomness”. Thanks again

Financial markets are ‘open’ and ‘inductive’in character, which makes them difficult to predict. It is obviously a mistake to treat something as ‘closed’ and ‘deductive’ when it is actually ‘open’ and ‘inductive’.There are problems however I think in treating financial markets as pure mathematical systems. This approach leaves out ‘economic fundamentals’.

Taleb claims that “This is an essay expressing a primary idea; it is neither the recycling nor repackaging of other people’s thoughts”.As both his central metaphor of ‘black swans’ and the turkey story suggest, this is not the case. He appears to be simply re-warming the old philosophical problem of induction, which has much concerned philosophers since David Hume. Taleb might also do well to remember the down-to-earth definition of risk offered by a Nobel Prize winning economist: ‘Risk means more things can happen than will happen’.”