Newton Leroy Gingrich is an American politician and author who served as the 50th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. A member of the Republican Party, he was the U.S. representative for Georgia's 6th congressional district serving north Atlanta and nearby areas from 1979 until his resignation in 1999. In 2012, Gingrich unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb that deals with the fallibility of human knowledge. It was first published in 2001. Updated editions were released a few years later. The book is the first part of Taleb's multi-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled the Incerto, which also includes The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018).
Irrational Exuberance is a book by American economist Robert J. Shiller of Yale University, published March 2000. The book examines economic bubbles in the 1990s and early 2000s, and is named after Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's famed 1996 comment about "irrational exuberance" warning of such a possible bubble.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
In economics, Knightian uncertainty is a lack of any quantifiable knowledge about some possible occurrence, as opposed to the presence of quantifiable risk. The concept acknowledges some fundamental degree of ignorance, a limit to knowledge, and an essential unpredictability of future events.
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Rolf Dobelli born in Luzern, Switzerland, is a Swiss author and entrepreneur.
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist, until they were discovered in Australia in 1697, and it then became reinterpreted to mean an unforeseen and consequential event.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a former options trader. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. Taleb calls this the Black Swan theory.
In economics and finance, a Taleb distribution is the statistical profile of an investment which normally provides a payoff of small positive returns, while carrying a small but significant risk of catastrophic losses. The term was coined by journalist Martin Wolf and economist John Kay to describe investments with a "high probability of a modest gain and a low probability of huge losses in any period."
Epilogism is a style of inference used by the ancient Empiric school of medicine. It is a theory-free method that looks at history through the accumulation of facts without major generalization and with consideration of the consequences of making causal claims. Epilogism is an inference which moves entirely within the domain of visible and evident things, it tries not to invoke unobservables.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms is a philosophy book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb written in the aphoristic style. It was first released on November 30, 2010 by Random House. An updated edition was released on October 26, 2016 that includes fifty percent more material than the 2010 edition. According to Taleb, the book "contrasts the classical values of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness." The title refers to Procrustes, a figure from Greek mythology who abducted travelers and stretched or chopped their bodies to fit the length of his bed.
Newt Gingrich has declared his position on many political issues through his public comments and legislative record, including as Speaker of the House. The political initiative with which he is most widely identified was the Contract With America, which outlined an economic and social agenda designed to improve the efficiency of government while reducing its burden on the American taxpayer. Passage of the Contract helped establish Gingrich's reputation as a public intellectual. His engagement of public issues has continued through to the present, in particular as the founder of American Solutions for Winning the Future.
To have "skin in the game" is to have incurred risk by being involved in achieving a goal.
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder is a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb published on November 27, 2012, by Random House in the United States and Penguin in the United Kingdom. This book builds upon ideas from his previous works including Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), and The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), and is the fourth book in the five-volume philosophical treatise on uncertainty titled Incerto. Some of the ideas are expanded on in Taleb's fifth book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018).
The Lindy effect is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy. Longevity implies a resistance to change, obsolescence or competition and greater odds of continued existence into the future. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. Mathematically, the Lindy effect corresponds to lifetimes following a Pareto probability distribution.
Constantine Sandis is a Greek and British philosopher and entrepreneur. Having worked on philosophy of action, moral psychology, David Hume, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in 2013 he became Professor of Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University. He is currently Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, a Founding Director of author services firm Lex Academic and Chief Operations Officer of lexacademic.science.
The volatility tax is a mathematical finance term, formalized by hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel, describing the effect of large investment losses on compound returns. It has also been called volatility drag, volatility decay or variance drain. This is not literally a tax in the sense of a levy imposed by a government, but the mathematical difference between geometric averages compared to arithmetic averages. This difference resembles a tax due to the mathematics which impose a lower compound return when returns vary over time, compared to a simple sum of returns. This diminishment of returns is in increasing proportion to volatility, such that volatility itself appears to be the basis of a progressive tax. Conversely, fixed-return investments appear to be "volatility tax free".
Ergodicity economics is a research programme aimed at reworking the theoretical foundations of economics in the context of ergodic theory. The project's main goal is to understand how traditional economic theory, framed in terms of the expectation values of ensembles, changes when replacing expectation value averages with time averages. In particular, the programme is interested in understanding the effect of non-ergodic processes in economics, that is processes where the expectation value of an observable does not equal its time average.
An antilibrary is a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read. The term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The concept it describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku.
