Comments on: Three Emails About Nate Silver http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/551 Improvisation for Business in the Networked World Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:09:56 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Ethan Bauley http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/551/comment-page-1#comment-594 Ethan Bauley Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:44:29 +0000 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/?p=551#comment-594 Killer examples, but they sound like a family of elitists...so therefore I hate them. I think fivethirtyeight is very cool (and other statistical prediction markets, etc), but bear in mind that the enamor with probabilistic, "mathematically-grounded" financial models is what blew up our financial system. (i.e. the models that led to the conclusion that selling CDS against banks was a no-brainer) Check out Nassim Taleb's piece here: http://edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#taleb Good for low-downside things; not so good for high-downside things ;-) Killer examples, but they sound like a family of elitists…so therefore I hate them.

I think fivethirtyeight is very cool (and other statistical prediction markets, etc), but bear in mind that the enamor with probabilistic, “mathematically-grounded” financial models is what blew up our financial system.

(i.e. the models that led to the conclusion that selling CDS against banks was a no-brainer)

Check out Nassim Taleb’s piece here:

http://edge.org/documents/archive/edge257.html#taleb

Good for low-downside things; not so good for high-downside things ;-)

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