OVERQUALIFICATION AS CONVEX ANTIFRAGILE HEURISTIC
A general convex Antifragile heuristic: In your hobbies, be underqualified; when it comes to work with others, and delivering services to them be overqualified.Written that way, it looks trite but it looks like the modern environment drives people to the exact opposite. We are aware of the need for margins of safety in engineering (robust redundancies) but not in professional careers (outside of engineering and intelligent professions).
There is nothing more stressful (and fragile) than operating professionally at one’s qualifications level, rather than below, prone to terminal and humiliating mistakes: like, say, a professor teaching an advanced subject rather than one for which he is sufficiently overqualified, or writing to the general public about a subject one does not master fully (and being vulnerable like Pinker to the point of having to defend oneself from people like me, or Robert Merton in spite of his “Nobel” having to lobby to defend his reputation against Derman, Haug, and I). Or, worse, writing a book review (say Michiko Kakutani or Julian Baggini) on a topic over one’s head, hence making mistakes that stay forever on one’s record. Now, competitive sports, journalism, and competitive academia are just that: persons and groups both vulnerable to reputational changes and pushed to the limit of their competence, sitting in a state of insecurity as one single error can wreck their careers, yet needing to operate at that margin because of the competitive framework.A professional convex heuristic is to 1) never write or teach about anything one has to look-up in a library or a book, 2) under-argue (prove in words things that has been derived more rigorously in math outside the books) and 3) to open oneself to nitpickers in a way to learn to make errors of small consequence. My personal rule is to publish no confirmatory “empirical” work: all arguments should be grounded in logic, mathematical inequalities, and disconfirmatory empiricism. After 1700 pages of the INCERTO and 1145 of technical work, and many, many powerful (and/or tenacious) enemies, I haven’t encountered yet a mistake that cannot be reversed from within the sentence. (The Black Swan was written below the needed level, in words not math & there was the buffer of all these mathematical arguments to support the claims, so those who tried to fuck with it have been humiliated).

Barbell: Be aggressive in private, be robust in your public work. You will sleep well at night.

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