The last aphorism is one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s favourite, or rather the one “he likes more than others”.
Taleb, a Lebanese “technical philosopher”, likes turning things on their head and, he confesses, that he is not too popular for it (especially with economists). The 50-year-old author of

the bestsellers, Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, was in Mumbai on Friday with his latest offering, The Bed of Procrustes, a book of aphorisms.

While religion and ethics might promote the idea of good and imbibe fear of retribution, for Taleb the idea is that one does good because they are good. “This is pre-Christian thought. It is part of your nature to do something regardless of the pay off. This is unconditional but these values are lost today,” said the former Wall Street trader, risk expert and practitioner of mathematical finance.

Hysteresis is indeed a path dependent property that can expressed as ratchet options –will therefore lead to antifragility and fragility. But all antifragilities/fragilities are not from hysteresis (though one can prove the reverse). [This is to answer Marcos Elias, thanks for the question]

I was using my book the Black Swan by Taleb to save seat @ church last night. When someone stopped to take its pic. Said I'd understand

Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull

Take one of Taleb’s aphorisms: ‘The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.’ A summary would seek to neutralise the potential for paradox and ambiguity: Taleb is not “against” the idea of moving between particularity and generality (this is, after all, the space in which aphorisms roam). He is merely opposed to a way of thinking that regards the particular and the general as discrete concepts; both the nerd and the fool seek to impose the form of one onto the form of another, when it is precisely the case that both universals and immediacies are essentially bound up with one another in the same instance. This relates to Taleb’s wider suspicions of the epistemological concepts with which we divide the world into normative states. It only took the discovery of a black swan to disprove the certainties of the concept ‘all swans are white’, thus disturbing our world vision.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Jamie Whyte (with whom I once had breakfast) is in the business “to dissect confused logic and nonsensical arguments” and has written many books on errors of reasoning… in others.
Let’s go through the exercise of finding the 6 critical errors of reasoning in this article.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/overrated-janfeb-11-nassim-nicholas-taleb-jamie-whyte-philosophy-lite-the-black-swan

Overrated: Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Standpoint
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