Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a mathematician well known in Brazil, now that marketers have learned to use his name to sell consultancies, is certainly much more than a trader. If most idiots who sell buying recommendations in the stock market had read Taleb, they would learn the following: man cannot predict the future. Taleb, whose work invalidates almost everything that has been produced in modern finance, teaches that risk calculation is problematic because it seeks to establish future behaviors based on past behaviors. And that, as usual, whenever we try to predict the future, we will be held hostage by uncertainty. It is funny, because the human brain seems induced by an uncontrollable temptation to systematize the unknown; we simply do not accept the uncertainty, the absence of logical response, and then we put ourselves to elaborate theories, to risk explanations for the phenomena that surround us, seeking an objective pattern of events’ sequence and considering that patterns necessarily repeat themselves, since the universe is governed by static laws. According to Taleb, whenever we risk forecasts and leave no margins for an unexpected event, or when we project the future based on the past, we will be fragile. Mathematically speaking, this means that we cannot consider that something will not happen just because it has not happened before. That is: the estimated probability of nothing, and absolutely nothing, can be zero, because estimates require a margin of error. Every time I read Taleb I get the feeling that betting on the unlikely can be more coherent (besides having higher payoff), and that contingency, issue already addressed philosophically with several names (uncertainty, randomness, fate, fortune…), seems to be the true driving force of the determining events of history. That is why I disdain smiling of the meteorologist and his tare for quantifying future events, while I learn to respect the Indian, who, looking impassively at the sky, knows himself hostage to his own luck.
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