What We Learned from Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Naval Ravikant
Day 2 of BLOCKCON 2018 featured a fireside chat with author Nassim Nicholas Taleb and AngelList Co-Founder Naval Ravikant. They spoke on a wide range of topics and explained key topics from Taleb's writings. To see our recap from Day 1 of the conference, you can see it here.
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050451941615009792
The first topic was around people's incentives for the actions they take. Taleb shared a lesson from a senior trader when he was a young banker:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050439677369507841
Taleb believes that this is a major problem with journalists:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050440429177454592
Ravikant added that he stopped looking at problems through the lens of Macroeconomics for similar reasons:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050441060789280768
And they both felt that economists, like Paul Krugman, should put their money where their mouth is when it comes to their opinions on Bitcoin:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050440838176600064
The next major topic was that of risk. Taleb said that over the past few decades there has been a shift in that those taking the biggest risks are not held accountable:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050443972353581056
This is true when it comes to listening to those talking the most about risk:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050445083596611584
Ravikant then started a dialogue on one of Taleb's key concepts, Anti-Fragility. He believes that Bitcoin has become more and more Anti-Fragile:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050450598351405056
The longer Bitcoin exists, the longer it probably will exist:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050451393113247744
If you want to look at these questions from a game theory perspective, you might not find it in a textbook:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050447641786515456
The pair ended their discussion with the concept of the "minority rule:"
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050453740145111041
They have seen the minority rule in US beverages:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050453740145111041
And expect to see it in the Blockchain industry:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050455794938830848
They closed with a good framework for decision making:
https://twitter.com/blockchainbeach/status/1050458412813672449
This story originally appeared on BlockchainBeach.com. You can read it at https://www.blockchainbeach.com/what-we-learned-from-nassim-nicholas-taleb-and-naval-ravikant/