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.
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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:
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Taleb believes that this is a major problem with journalists:
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Ravikant added that he stopped looking at problems through the lens of Macroeconomics for similar reasons:
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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:
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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:
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This is true when it comes to listening to those talking the most about risk:
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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:
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The longer Bitcoin exists, the longer it probably will exist:
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If you want to look at these questions from a game theory perspective, you might not find it in a textbook:
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The pair ended their discussion with the concept of the "minority rule:"
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They have seen the minority rule in US beverages:
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And expect to see it in the Blockchain industry:
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They closed with a good framework for decision making:
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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/