Lunch at the Labs

Two of today's most interesting thinkers had a discussion at the New York Public Library earlier this month:

LIVE from the NYPL: NASSIM TALEB & DANIEL KAHNEMAN
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/live-nypl-nassim-taleb-daniel-kahneman

Download: Video (178.4MB MP4, 1 hr 18 min)
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/live-nypl-nassim-taleb-daniel-kahneman

Although wide-ranging, it is mostly about ideas in Taleb's recent book Antifragile.
There is a nice summary in the blog post of financial advisor Robert P. Seawright:

We Suck at Probabilities
https://rpseawright.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/we-suck-at-probabilities/

I've wondered why people are so bad at dealing with probabilities and I think
this quoted excerpt may be the best explanation I've seen:

To compute probabilities you need to keep several possibilities in your mind at once. It's difficult for most people. Typically, we have a single story with a theme. People have a sense of propensity, that the system is more likely to do one thing than the other, but it's quite different from the probabilities where you have to think of two possibilities and weigh their relative chances of happening.