What does Extremistan mean?

Extremistan is the area in which a value can change dramatically the sheer scale of the distribution (mean, standard deviation). For example, if you take 10 people and calculate the average of their wealth, it is very likely that if you add a 11th person, the new average will be very different.

What does Mediocristan mean?

Mediocristan is where normal things happen, things that are expected, whose probabilities of occurring are easy to compute, and whose impact is not terribly huge. Examples: Nature is full of things that follow a normal distribution. Height of humans is a simple example.

Is Nassim Taleb a good trader?

Taleb received his bachelor and master in science degrees from the University of Paris. Nassim was a profitable trader and doing quite well, but his big killing came the day of the October 19, 1987 stock market crash. He had accumulated a large position in near-worthless out-of-the-money Eurodollar futures puts.

Is Nassim Taleb Lebanese?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (/ˈtɑːləb/; alternatively Nessim or Nissim; born 1960) is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.

What is black swan investing?

A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.

What is an Incerto?

The Incerto is an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions, in non- …

Is Nassim Taleb a capitalist?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes I’m a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

What are black swans?

What is a GREY swan event?

Grey swan is a term used to describe a potentially very significant event whose possible occurrence may be predicted beforehand but whose probability is considered small. In other words, it is a risk with a potentially large impact but a low perceived likelihood of happening.

What order should I read Incerto?

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets2001
On Robustness and Fragility, Deeper Philosophical and Empirical Reflections2007The Bed of Procrustes2010Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder2012
Incerto Series/Books

What is the Bed of Procrustes?

Procrustes had an iron bed (or, according to some accounts, two beds) on which he compelled his victims to lie. Here, if a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched him by hammering or racking the body to fit.

How did the term Extremistan get its name?

The term was popularized by Taleb’s book The Black Swan. We’ll cover what Extremistan is, how it differs from Mediocristan, what kinds of events and characteristics come from the land of Extremistan, and why Extremistan often makes prediction impossible.

Are there physical characteristics that are from Mediocristan?

Physical characteristics such as height and weight are from Mediocristan: They have upper and lower bounds, their distribution is a bell curve, and even the tallest or lightest human being isn’t much taller or lighter than the average. In Mediocristan, prediction is possible.

What kind of randomness is there In Extremistan?

In Extremistan, however, randomness is wild, and deviations from the average can be, well, extreme.

Who is the extremist in the Black Swan?

Extremistan is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain the randomness and deviations from the mean of most social, man-made aspects of human society. The term was popularized by Taleb’s book The Black Swan.