by Henry Oliner | Feb 26, 2014 | Economy, Politics
From The Wall Street Journal Book Review: ‘The Power of Knowledge,’ by Jeremy Black The review is by Roger Kimball Excerpt: Although deeply grounded in history from the Middle Ages on down, this book also conjures with contemporary issues. Some are...
by Henry Oliner | Dec 5, 2013 | Economics
“Overconfidence leads to reliance on forecasts, which causes borrowing, then to the fragility of leverage. Further, there is convincing evidence that a PhD in economics or finance causes people to build vastly more fragile portfolios. George Martin and I listed all...
by Henry Oliner | Nov 7, 2013 | Education
“Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.3 Expert problems put you on the wrong side of asymmetry. Let us examine the point with respect to risk. When you are...
by Henry Oliner | Oct 3, 2013 | Media
“There is so much noise coming from the media’s glorification of the anecdote. Thanks to this, we are living more and more in virtual reality, separated from the real world, a little bit more every day while realizing it less and less. Consider that every day, 6,200...
by Henry Oliner | Aug 15, 2013 | Media, Philosophy
“The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in...
