To my surprise, Taleb emailed me back a link to a PDF of a draft of a chapter of his new book. If you’re used to Strunk and White-style economy in prose I’ll warn you to focus on the ideas and ignore Taleb’s intentionally ? meandering style. Taleb emphasizes using stressors to make sure something is resilient; and I’ve wondered if he tests his work by including doses of insult, stereotyping, and health advice. Anyway, I don’t mean to praise with faint damning. An excerpt:

Let us start as usual with a transportation problem, and generalize to other areas. Travelers typically do not like uncertainty —especially when they are on a set schedule. Why? There is a one way effect. I’ve taken the very same London-New York flight most of my life. The flight takes about 7 hours, the equivalent of a short book plus a brief polite chat with a neighbor and a meal with Port wine, stilton cheese and crackers. I recall a few instances in which I arrived early, about twenty minutes, no more. But there have been instances in which I got there more than two and three hours late, and, in at least one instance, it has taken me more than two days to reach my destination. Because travel time cannot be really negative, uncertainty tends to cause delays, making arrival time increase, almost never decrease. Or it makes arrival time just decrease by minutes, and increase by hours, an obvious asymmetry. Anything unexpected, any shock, any volatility is much more likely to extend the total flying time.

via Nassim Taleb and Infrastructure | Price Roads.