Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Precautionary Principle and Genetically Modified Organisms
EconTalk
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The Probability of Dying Isn't Going to Change.
People often say in this literature that people overestimate thethe riskiness of some process. And what they mean by that, i think, is that they don't follow the expected value. This reminds me of another conflation that people make in their minds, that improving returns with lower risk. So if you worry just about the risk of rui ruin improvement, any improvement that, because it doesn't have a track record, brings some uncertainty ntot them, increases that risk of ruin. But we have to be very careful well. The left tail reacts vastly more to the scale of the distribution,. which for a galcian or log normal would be the sigma, the standard
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