| I'm not very fond of Taleb, but well -- anything by Taleb Yeah, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan were both pretty good. I haven't necessarily thought of them as significantly overlapping with the HTMA stuff up until this point, but now that you mention it I can see a connection. I should probably go back and re-read both, and read Antifragile. maybe those Stafford Beer papers about the Viable Systems Model? Hmm... never heard of "Viable Systems Model" before, so I'll have to go read up on that. Thanks for the pointer. Exercise books for Fermi estimates like Guesstimation, etc I'll take a look at Guesstimation. Thanks for the pointer on that as well. But you'll always be safer if you keep rich qualitative models and treat quantification as gravy on top of that. I can buy that. I'm a fan of using approaches like Hubbard's to quantify things to a point. I do think his approach can supply a bit of extra rigor and some useful bounds to things that otherwise seem impossible to quantify at all. But it's not a perfect system by any means. The two biggest risks, so far as I can tell, would be leaving a variable (or more than one) out of your model completely, or using the wrong probability distributions for the various variables when doing the simulation part. |