E​xcellent course, congratualtion to Professor Miguel Centeno, best cpurse I have taken in Coursera

Very great course. It is the most relevant course that I had finished under "Coursera" in 2021.

I believe Professor Centeno could teach anyone anything. It was a pleasure.

This is an excelent course! I have learnt a lot

Excellent overview of systemic risk management.

Hope you give certificates next time

Excllent thoughts

Muy interesante.

Excellent

A very enjoyable course. I especially liked the interviews with various experts - they were informative and entertaining and really brought the course to life. Thanks very much to Prof Miguell and team!

for me this course was very interesting and enlightening.

Some of the material was fabulous and there were modules where the information was insightful and useful. The problem seems to be a lack of clarity. The course promotes a view that imagines central planning by smart people who know math and are 'experts' in modelling to be superior to a system where price discovery in a free market regulate decisions. The course creators ignore the fact that a good society has to be one where citizens are free and have natural rights that cannot be violated by well-meaning academics or busybodies.

Many of the statements that I heard are not supported by either logic or science and ignore the Augustinian view of human nature. Let me start with one. We know that we are now colder on average than we have been for much of the past 9,000 years. We know that when temperatures fell civilizations fell. That was what happened to Rome. It was what created the chaos during the time of the Black Death and what pushed the Vikings from Greenland. Do we really think that the cold of the Little Ice Age was preferable to temperatures today or can ignore the fact that longer growing seasons and the lower need for heating homes in the winter has made life much better for the poor? Why was Michael Oppenheimer permitted to claim that having political operative create a summary better than having scientists telling us what they know about the literature regarding the AGW claims? Why did the 'experts' ignore the fact that the IPCC's climate models ran hot or that the economists are quite clear that an increase in average temperatures of 3.5C or more is beneficial to humanity? Why is Princeton talking about sea level increases when Antarctic ice has increased in the past half century and the DMI is clear that the number of melt days has not changed in Greenland? Also not mentioned is the fact that an increasing 'average global temperature', whatever that means, would mean much higher increases at higher latitudes, mostly during the winter nights and that the lower difference in energy would make storms less damaging. If the AGW were actually true, we would have a kinder weather and a lower need for all that heating in the cold regions along with longer growing seasons and more food that offers the poor lower prices. I will end this in a moment but let me note the COVID problem. It was not the virus that shut down the economy. That was politicians. The virus was not and is not very dangerous. Fat old guys are more vulnerable but once the first wave went through the nursing homes, most of the victims that could die were no longer for us to help them. Add to this the disastrous loss of liberty that presents a systemic risk and the opportunity for objective discourse was lost.

I know that academics have a hard time taking a stand that risks their careers and reduces their incomes but I am not sure that the ethical price that has to be paid is worth the higher material gains. Independent thinkers do not follow banners and social fads. Those that have read their Bulgakov agree that cowardice is a common sin and a horrible sin. Or if you are into Dante, keep in mind where the uncommitted wound up. Heaven cast them out but Hell rejected them. That seems like a miserable way to go through life, boys and girls. Verify everything that you are told because things may not be what you are told they are.

I really enjoyed Prof Centeno's course "Paradoxes of War", and was looking forward for more. I liked the idea behind this course. It seems very relevant and how it could provide a cross functional framework for reiterating and reinforcing some important ideas. However, I found the content lacking, and I think it needs more work.

On the one hand, much of the time is spent around the introductory concepts, but on the other, most of them are given only superficial treatment, which can sometimes be somewhat misleading. To give some examples of the latter, I found the presentation of chaos theory, the trolley dilemma, and cascading failures hard to stomach, being quite familiar with the topics. The graphics on some of the slides seem curiously irrelevant which did not leave a good impression.

Most of the course content is in the interviews, which are of varying interest - I enjoyed some very much, but some of the others seemed superficial redundant.

Overall, I felt the course helped me reiterate some points, but did not provide much value. Being interested in this topic, I am familiar with the fundamentals, and that part of the course felt redundant and in many parts too sketchy. It definitely does not provide a solid foundation, but maybe it gives enough background to get people interested in further exploration. The second half of the course was interesting, but too short.

Some naivities, lots of commonplace, and irritatingly lots of speculative statements, indicated by 'in a sense': all in all, too little learnt.