For those of you who write books, here is a statistical way to predict sales from ranking. (I did some technical work to smooth out the book tour, which is now finished).
For those of you who write books…
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Monthly Archives: December 2012
Nassim Taleb Channels Charles Darwin | Institutional Investor’s Alpha
Taleb’s new book is a study of survival of the fittest in the jungle of the 21st century. Although it is not explicitly a guide to portfolio management, many of the author’s tales offer metaphoric lessons for hedge fund managers and investors. There might be cold comfort, for example, in Taleb’s view that if the Titanic had not sunk, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. After all, hedge funds hit icebergs too. In Taleb’s view, good errors are those that help either financial or shipbuilding engineers create stronger (i.e. antifragile) systems; bad errors — banks getting overleveraged, for example — produce contagion.
Nassim Taleb Channels Charles Darwin | Institutional Investor’s Alpha.
Happy To Be Panned | matthew e. may
Nassim says it best in Antifragile:
Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her. The first-order information is the intensity: what matters is the effort the critic puts into trying to prevent others from reading the book, or, more generally in life, it is the effort in badmouthing someone that matters, not so much what is said. So if you really want people to read a book, tell them it is “overrated,” with a sense of outrage (and use the attribute “underrated” for the opposite effect).
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – The Barnes & Noble Review
Do not imagine that you have understood the concept of “antifragility” right away, merely because the neologism might readily bring to mind the famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who formerly explored unpredictability in refreshingly unpredictable fashion in The Black Swan, demolishes — or at least fruitfully unpacks — that stale rubric in just one of the myriad pithy, ideationally rich, hand grenade-style mini-chapters that constitute his new book, which is a bathyscaphe-deep descent into an unexplored sea of contrarian wisdom. He has so many more insights into this concept that Nietzsche vaguely adumbrated, and so much more utilitarian advice derived therefrom, that Antifragile’s 400-plus pages are barely enough to contain all his passionate exegesis.
via Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – The Barnes & Noble Review.
HatTip to Dave Lull
The Edge piece is up!
The Edge piece is up! Thanks friends for the help & discussions.
http://www.edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility
Understanding Is A Poor Substitute For Convexity (antifragility)
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, essayist and former mathematical trader, is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. He is the author the international bestseller The Black Swan and the recently published Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.