[danans]

> A lot of this boils down to having a better understanding of uncertainty and probability, especially in terms of being non-naive when it comes to extreme volatility and risk.

After the statistical basics (don't confuse power-law distributed phenomena for normally distributed phenomena), a lot of what Taleb seems to prescribe boils down to simple skepticism of modeling the real world with games, which he describes as the Ludic Fallacy [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy

The most entertaining narrative he conjures is the contrast between "Dr John", a mathematically oriented scientist, and "Fat Tony", a clever everyman, and how Dr John gets fooled about the odds of a game of coin-flip that has so far come up with 99 heads and no tails, asserting each flip must be IID at 50-50, but Fat Tony sees the reality: that the coin is rigged.

[_0w8t]

That rigged coin story is quite known, but Taleb’s account is most entertaining, https://mobile.twitter.com/fpoling/status/929410947713728513