Taleb on Exercise, Leptokurtosis and the Good Life
I like Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. His criticism of risk management and the notion that we fail to notice that for every success story we see, there are many failures – don’t be fooled by randomness (so-called selection bias). At the same time he is extremely harsh towards those he criticizes and always a fun, but not too serious read.
He has a new essay up on his website where he anecdotically promotes a new form of living and exercise. Instead of working out an hour everyday and getting our healthy steady 8 hours of sleep, he suggest we should live like hunter gatherers. Fast randomly a couple of days, vary our sleeping schedule and walk low intensity a couple of hours a day, but mix that with some very intense ones, introducing stochasticity, Black Swans, and leptokurtosis into our efficent, normally distributed lives.
A few quotes:
“The only thing currently missing from my life is the absence of panics, from, say, finding a gigantic snake in my library, or watching the economist Myron Scholes, armed to the teeth, walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night.”
“walks in a stimulating urban setting, but with occasional (and random) very short sprints, making myself angry imagining I were chasing the bankster Robert Rubin with a big stick trying to catch him to bring him to human justice.”
Read it here
3 comments
Thanks for the interesting link.
…makes me get a contrarian view on how we view the quality of life in itself.
Everyone agrees that GDP up = good
- and heck, how much we have progressed over, say, the last fifty years.
What about some other indicators:
* average waist line
* average weight
* suicide rates
* diabetes rates
* divorce rates
* minimum wage rate
* median wage
* unemployment rate
* extinction of species rate
… and so the list goes on.
UN’s indicator, which Norway always scores high on, takes GDP per captia, life expectancy and the literacy rate (if I remember correctly) into consideration.
How could we make the best possible indicator? (Kinda life making a stock market index…)
Wholeheartedly agree. Furthermore, while everyone in finance is – for obvious reasons – very concerned with measuring and managing risk associated with higher returns, the same is not the case to the same extent on the macro level.
Of course, central banks play a role in moderating what goes on – but to a too large extent macroeconomic policy is more about damage control than risk management. The recent crisis is certainly example of this. In the developing world this problem is arguably far worse (see a.o. much of our professor Jan Kregel’s work).
For another angle on economic growth, see my post on Somali Piracy.
Haha. I’d like to see more research on it. :)
Here are other people who argue it’s healthy to live like hunter-gatherers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashion/10caveman.html?pagewanted=1&ref=fashion
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