Silent Risk Is a Book on the Incerto in Certos

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The book is effectively a mathematiation of the incerto in certos. It has all the mathematical therems and back up the tiings. The great doubt of it was tha. L you're talking about, example of there can be extinction on an island. There cand be a cutting shot on a continent, exactly. Canbea local root. So nature so so much healthier for people to defalt to fat tails and provise the evidence of sintaledness than the other one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a recent co-authored paper on the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of the Precautionary Principle. Taleb contrasts harm with ruin and explains how the differences imply different rules of behavior when dealing with the risk of each. Taleb argues that when considering the riskiness of GMOs, the right understanding of statistics is more valuable than expertise in biology or genetics. The central issue that pervades the conversation is how to cope with a small non-negligible risk of catastrophe.