As luck would have it, Elaine sent me an article about a chap called Nassim Nicholas Taleb who is a philosopher of randomness about the fallibility of human knowledge, and (according to the article) “now the hottest thinker in the world” (he has a $4m advance on his next book, and gives about 30 presentations a year to bankers, economists and traders for $60 000 a pop).

As a trader, Taleb has said he took a skeptical and anti-mathematical approach to risk and uncertainty and had a severe distrust of models and statisticians and a contempt for finance academics, especially economists. He accurately predicted the current market crisis – and made a fortune (estimated at half a billion dollars) from it.

Fooled by Randomness,  the title of one of Taleb’s books, has also become an idiom in English used to describe when someone sees a pattern where there is just random noise.

In his other book “The Black Swan“, he rejects the distinction between non-fiction and fiction.

Here’s  Taleb’s Top 10 life tips, drawn from Appleyard’s article:

1.  Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2.  Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3.  It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4.  Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5.  Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6.  Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7.  Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8.  Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9.  Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW, but you need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10.  Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Extreme events do happen and have a big effect. Examples abound, including September 11th. The Internet with its various effects was scarcely anticipated, and it is a development that has had a significant effect. The effects of extreme events are even higher due to the fact that they are unexpected.

So, in short, I think Taleb’s teachings can be summarized simply as “expect and prepare for the unexpected”. I’ll be sorting out all my insurance posthaste!

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The promise of “portable profile” is just that. You can use one profile across the web, and sign into sites without having to fill out all the usual registration stuff.

Of course, this raises major privacy concerns. Each site that you use your portable profile on will have access to your full profile information, as well as possibly knowing what other sites you’re registered with.

As a website owner, there are benefits to allowing users to register with their portable profile:

1. You can personalize their experience by knowing more about them,

2. There’s a  lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic.

3. It lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.

There are a number of companies offering portable profile, internet ID, and single sign on services already such as Verisign, OpenID, and my favourite Chi.mp

However, Facebook Connect seem to be leading the way with regards to the promise of taking your network of friends and connections around the web with you. There are, of-course, concerns about whether we should trust a commercial enterprises with our precious identity. Nevertheless, I’ll highlight Facebook Connect as the principle is important.

From the Wikipedia page on Facebook Features:

Facebook Connect is a single sign-on service that competes with OpenID. The service enables Facebook users to login to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from such sites with their Facebook friends. 

The following presentation illustrates the potential of Facebook Connect, but could just as well apply to Chi.mp if you used that as your hub.

Here is Facebook’s own list of all the sites that have implemented Facebook Connect (partially only) with a full scale implementation of it at Brainfall.com

The price of Personalization is Privacy. I don’t mind sharing my information if it’s going to get me more relevant information and personalized service, but I would expect to be able to control what different people (and sites) can see on my profile. Another concern with single-sign on is the danger of someone getting hold of your one password that opens the doors to your life online. I guess these are the risks we all have to live with. I’d like to get Dominic White’s perspective on this.

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Of course, the people inside these companies probably don’t appreciate their access to these sites being curtailed. I, for one, think these things enhance my productivity. But I’m obviously a bit strange.

Of course, someone has created a support group for these people, on Facebook, ironically.

The group, called “I hate IT departments who block MSN, MySpace & Facebook” could be big, but only if it’s target membership can actually access it!

Anyway, some interesting commentary is coming from the group:

We have found a way to access the book at work – hee hee ….. www.logmein.com… basically download the free software to your pc at home – leave it running while at work – and you can access your pc from work and facebook ALL DAY …. WICKED!!!

An IT guy had this to say:

We (The IT Guy) is not the enemy we do as we are told and what security procedures we have to follow… But what the boss doesn’t know wont hurt him!

And:

Make friends with the IT guys they have basically your office world at their finger tips…

Where there’s a need, there’s a Facebook group. What are your thoughts on this?

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