Let me start by saying that I like Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Benoît Mandelbrot quite a lot. I don’t agree with them all the time, but that is generally true of people I like. I recall reading Mandelbrot’s book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
Below is a video segment from PBS News Hour where they interview NNT and Dr. Mandelbrot (notice how I did not use his initials? gotta show him some respect). It’s a good interview, but it cracks me up that the host clearly has Mandelbrot’s ideas confused with Edward Lorenz, the man who coined the phrase ‘Butterfly Effect.’ See 4:55 in the video for the most blatant confusion. Mandelbrot does a good job of ignoring the confusion but eventually at 6:20ish he starts to redirect the host to his true thought contribution which is that big movements are under-anticipated. To the host’s credit Mandelbrot and Lorenz have co-authored papers so it’s not like they are totally disconnected.
I can’t mention Mandelbrot without posting this great tribute song/video made in honor of his namesake Mandelbrot Set.
Shameless commerce (yeah, I stole that from those Car Talk Guys) related to this post:
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