In fact, now I think about it, I really like a lot of what he said about certain things. Definitely made me think about what was important and significant in certain fields and what you maybe thought you could ignore but actually can't and vice versa.
Like when he's talking about a trader who followed this particular strategy which was fairly cautious but brought in approximately one million pounds of profit every year for his twenty year career. The only bad year was one time when there were these really unusual market conditions, and Talleb was saying that a lot of people will talk about that guy and say "he was successful all the time except for one time and that was a freek and so he should be seen as a good trader" and Talleb says "No, he's not good cos on that one "freak" day he lost a thousand times more than he made in the rest of his caereer. That's the important number, you can't discount it cos it only happened once cos the size of what happened means it more important than everything else he did.*
And I do think that he's right on that, people think that you can discount things that didn't happen often, but you can't if they are significant.
I gusse he makes two points about that which are related and look similar but actually. One is that when a freak event happens, even if if it is due to an incredible confluence of events it can't be disregarded or somehow not counted just cos it's rare cos it's size is so large as to make it significant even so... and the other thing which is much more obvious but which people were totally unwilling to accept is that
the models were wrong and the evidence was there, people would say that the company is safe unless the volatility goes to there and the model says that that will only happen once in a million years - and Talleb will be going well how the fuck did it happen three times in the last twenty years then?
Those are statistics and the importance was masked for some by the frequency. But II remember seeing and interview with Ashley Cole and thinking it was somehow similar - he was talking about England v Brazil and he said Ronaldinho did kinda trick me then and he got that half a yard on me, but I've figured him out, let's see him try that again. And I was thinking "yeah, but that was the word cup, he scored, you got knocked out, he don't need to try it again, that was the one, that was THE moment". He hadn't grasped that even if they met a hundred times int he future and Cole got him every time it would never make up for that one second.
I am really high but I think there may have still been some stuff worth reading in there somewhere. If not, apologies.
*Was it Brass Eye or something when it had that guy who worksd in a swimming pool recounting his career and he had this really monotonous voice going "1976 noone died, 1977 no-one died, 1978 no-one died, 1979 no-one died, 1980 noone died, 1981 no-one died, 1982 no-one died, 1983 no-one died, 1984 no-one died, 1985 unfortunately I wasn't paying attention and a busload of kids did break in and started messing around in the pool while I was on my lunch break and 215 innocent children drowned - it's literally exactly the same thing.