Wisdom in fragments

We are living through a profound era where speculative failure is simply not an option, and is fought tooth and nail by the government. This is a trap. Here I am the fool looking to fail frequently.

Hedge Fund Manager & Author of "The Black Swan" Risk Management

We know from the availability heuristic that people overestimate the likelihood of an event based on their ability to envision it—the risk of plane crash versus car crash is the best example of this. Holding that big check is easy to conjure up, but rare, deep stock market corrections not so much most of the time.

Hedge Fund Manager & Author of "The Black Swan" Risk Management

the share of the population in the top tercile is negatively associated with crime. When crime increases twofold the share of the rich tercile drops by 1.3%. In addition, we see that the share of the population in the poorest tercile increases with crime

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a doubling in crime increases the Gini coefficient by 3% to 4%

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causality runs from the latter to the former: in more unequal societies, the return to committing a crime increases, since there is more wealth to be taken away at each crime

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Globalisation is here to stay. You cannot, however, look at it as a natural phenomenon on which you have no influence- it's not like a typhoon or a cyclone. It's a process- and a process on which you can have influence.

Brazilian Diplomat & Foreign Minister under Lula's Presidency

If you see less poor people in the streets, and abandoned children, it makes you feel better- and that helps us to build a more independent attitude in foreign policy. That, again, has feedback in Brazil- making people more confident feeling that we don't always have to say yes to whatever is presented.

Brazilian Diplomat & Foreign Minister under Lula's Presidency

It is this sense of democracy which empowers us, the people of Brazil, to elect someone like Lula who- in turn- uses that same democratic power to pursue policies to successfully combat inequality. This then reflects on the psychology of the people of our nation.

Brazilian Diplomat & Foreign Minister under Lula's Presidency

One thing that really helped us was NOT following the IMF prescription, and hence I think the fact that we insisted on having growth (alongside stability) was something that made for a big change in Brazil.

Brazilian Diplomat & Foreign Minister under Lula's Presidency

In the case of Brazil, one of the most important things is the huge ethnic and cultural mixture which makes us a country with dynamism, vibrancy, and the ability to understand the psychology of other nations. We have problems, of course, but this is one of our huge strengths, and a huge foreign policy asset.

Brazilian Diplomat & Foreign Minister under Lula's Presidency

If you use a complex system approach which doesn't have a fixed period of time in the model, it enables you to start exploring what types of animals you will see! It's classifying the elephants in the room - it may not tell you which one will come, but it will give you a better idea of what is out there in terms of risk.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

This is not just about the elephant- it's about there being different types of elephants. When we have large changes in a market, they might last an hour, a few seconds, a day, a month - there's no fixed time over which they happen! Looking at the market in simplistic distribution perspectives misses the true effect, threat and risk of large movements.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

In the multi-agent model, if you feed in the real price of the market, they show that before the large dives in market prices you could see the crowding that was beginning to happen behind the scenes, even though you couldn't see it in the price.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

It's absolutely true that a lot of the time the market is indistinguishable from a coin toss. However, when the system is under some stress, when the market is undergoing changes, the coin toss model just doesn't work. The 'black swan' doesn't appear very often in coin-toss land but in agent based complex systems land, it appears quite a lot.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

The actual actions of the people in the market are the things that determine what happens next within the market. The 'standard' financial markets model is, effectively, based on a coin toss. That is how derivatives are priced and how every exotic financial instrument is seen- they are very fancy coins, where flipping creates price changes.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

All conflicts are different with their particular history and reasons. I think that inequality within societies and between regions has become a key cause for conflict, exacerbated by rapid information dissemination, as people are (now) more aware of inequalities...

Finnish President & Nobel Peace Prize Winner for Mediation Efforts