Venture Capital, Catastrophism, & The Redemption of Immanuel Velikovsky

Slide 1: Venture Capital, Catastrophism, & the Redemption of Immanuel Velikovsky Paul Kedrosky Oct. 24/2007

Slide 2: Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. J. Tukey (1962), Annals of Mathematics and Statistics 33:1-67

Slide 6: First things first

Slide 15: Why?

Slide 16: If I am interested in, say, the distribution of the intensities of hurricanes, I cannot just “collect data more frequently”: I will just have to wait for the next hurricane to arrive. Source: R. Rebonatto, Plight of the Fortune-Tellers (2007)

Slide 17: Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism

Slide 18: With correlations growing across all strategies, alt asset firms are in a social network ... they just didn’t know it.

Slide 19: The trouble with normal

Slide 20: A putative 100 mile long by 10 mile wide (160 × 16 km) wildfire reported in 1889 was reconstructed to an area of chaparral 40 times smaller… Source: Goforth and Minnich, 1996, Ecological Applications, p. 779- 790

Slide 26: Tiger Woods & .400 hitters

Slide 30: Blind spots, predictability and the right wall of human performance

Slide 33: Errors of Nature, Sports and Monsters correct our understanding in regard to ordinary things, and reveal general forms. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum