Friends, once again, gratitude for the help I got on this site. I’ve started my “book tour” misery until Dec 12, with jet lag, interviews, etc.Here are simple tricks to prevent bureaucrats, academics, bonus earners and other frauds from scamming the general public.
FROM FAT TAILS TO FAT TONY
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ECONOMIST2013.pdf
He’s throwing a party for his students the next night “to get them drunk”. With what aim? “No aim. They’re just so uptight.” He loves parties “but with close people. Not with hotshots. Not some black-tie dinner where you’re sitting next to some schmuck who’s going to tell you what he paid for his swimming pool. And not artsy fartsy. I can’t stand artsy fartsy.”
But isn’t it hypocritical to be so anti-artsy fartsy when you are artsy fartsy?
“I’m not. I’m mathematical not artsy.”
“But you go on about your private library. You say you spend at least 30 hours a week reading. You love the classics.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I’m artsy. I don’t hang around with artsy people. I have zero literary friends.”
I wouldn’t want to get into a Twitter catfight with Nassim Taleb. Or be a banker in the audience when he gives one of his talks. “They pay me tens of thousands of dollars to come and rip them apart.”
But he gives good lunch. And he does something which no interviewee in the history of interviews has ever done – he pays. Whatever else he does or doesn’t do, Nassim Taleb puts his money where his mouth is. He has skin in the game.
That, or it’s another example of “fuck-you money”. Possibly both.
Take a minute and have some sympathy for those fragile persons affected by scandals, such as Judah Lerner the writer, Petraeus, Paula Something, Monica L, Dominique S-K and, even more, their families, now on public planetary display thanks to “connectivity”. Imagine what they think when they get on the web. And think with some disrespect of these sadistic hacks who harm and are never harmed.
via Take a minute and….
John Durant @johndurant
Nassim Taleb is tweeting again: @nntaleb
Nassim N. Taleb Nassim N. Taleb @nntaleb
@johndurant Until Dec 14, my friend.
via Twitter / nntaleb: @johndurant Until Dec 14, my friend..
Antifragile aims not merely to shockproof us, and our economies, against the unforeseeable upheavals of the age. Those techniques merely belong to the pursuit of “robustness” or “resilience”, second-order virtues that in Taleb’s comically macho idiom he finds “sissy”. Rather, the holy grail of “antifragility” will mean that we grow through and profit from the random black-swan blows of a volatile and disorderly world. For Taleb, Mother Nature practises antifragility, as do her greatest interpreters: “Evolution loves disturbances… discovery likes disturbances.”
He rings colourful variations on Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” – noting bleakly that it kills off others, and thus progress occurs. From failed entrepreneurs, who merit honour as “dead soldiers”, to the “empiric” trial-and-error medicine that outperforms Big Pharma, fools have heroically rushed in to improve systems and institutions. Antifragility, the capacity to benefit from twists of fate and history, thrives on tinkering, improvisation and bricolage, not on one-size-fits-all high theories that the next storm will flatten like matchwood.
via Antifragile, By Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Reviews – Books – The Independent.