HEURISTIC TO AVOID METASTATIC EMAILS

We fail to realize that technology is nonlinear to dosage, that in small doses the side effects are minimal (they are highly convex), but in larger doses they take over.

For instance, to avoid email correspondence from becoming metastatic, put a lower bound of 31 days before replying to any message of noncurrent nature (such as appointments, orders, etc.) I was thus able to lower the number of message from several hundred emails a day in 2005 to an average of < 20 in 2012. The advantage of such a method is that people who are insensitive about other people’s time get offended and go away, while the thoughtful ones are pleased to see a reply several months after they sent the message, when they forgot about it.

via HEURISTIC TO AVOID METASTATIC EMAILS We… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.

You don’t eat to be “the best” taster the world, don’t take a stroll to be “the best” stroller in the world, don’t push buttons in an elevator to be the best button pusher in the world.

So if you use this marker to select your activities, you should feel liberated, extremely liberated: don’t write to be the best novelist in the world, don’t do math to be the best symplectic geometry, don’t earn to be the richest… ideally everything one does would escape this notion of rank, separated from sense of duty, of natural impulse.

And the bonus is that when you will listen to those who talk about others in terms of rank, hierarchy of achievement, performance, league tables (“he is in the top 11 in bariatric surgery”), or, worst, precedence of discovery (“he invented the lateral stroller equation”), etc., these people will sound like lower forms of life.

For both those who aim for rank and those who talk about it are lower form of life.

via You don’t eat to be “the best” taster… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.

TERRA INGOGNITA. The most worthy mission is a methodology to deal with the opaque in a rigorous way, something of course the ancients developed heuristically.
This wonderful map Brad Efron/Susan Holmes shows the borders of Terra Incognita. Properly redrawn to scale: Terra Incognita should represent 99% of the surface of the map.

Image

via Timeline Photos | Facebook.

Samir Zein brough to my attention that Arabic makes a distinction between “criticism by words”, and “criticism by action” النقد الفعلي

via Samir Zein brough to my attention that… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.