We have always despised busybodies, meddlers, and gossip-artists precisely because they get involved without having skin in the game.
via We have always despised busybodies,… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
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.
via OVERQUALIFICATION AS CONVEX… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Stanislav Yurin explored his expanding coding talents by building a Nassim Taleb oriented Facebook search engine!
This place probably have become one of the largest philosophical communities all over the Internet, but the real value of it is how solid it is thanks to tremendous efforts of NNT in building the tribe.
The only real problem, at least for me, who have joined not very long ago a year or something is how hard to draw information from the depth layers of this well, since facebook have no any facilities for searching and hardly any for human-friendly browsing. And it is not indexed by any internet search engine, some more insight about it later.So, when my nerdiness eventually called myself for some programming exercise, I have chosen to solve this personal problem and have built a small tool for searching this forum archives.
Here it is
http://follownassim.stanyurin.com/Plain and simple, it requests search term and/or author name, and produces the result in I hope a slightly more valuable manner.
To show the downsides of non-existence of native facebook search, some quick examples of produced results:Not only you, my fellow NNT reader, may be confused about green lumber problem:
http://follownassim.stanyurin.com/search?searchterm=%22green+lumber%22We actually have at least two authentic Nassim Taleb persons here:
http://follownassim.stanyurin.com/search?searchterm=Nassim&author=Nassim+Nicholas+TalebYou came across a math genius in the library, so why not make a quick opinion search?
http://follownassim.stanyurin.com/search?searchterm=Doob
via I have received some encouraging… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
Fooled by Randomness has just entered its 13th year. In the end, if there is going to be a judge other than yourself, let it be time.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
“[Taleb is] Wall Street’s principal dissident. . . . [Fooled By Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s ninety-nine theses were to the Catholic Church.”–Malcolm Gladwell, The New YorkerFinally in paperback, the word-of-mou…
via Fooled by Randomness has just entered… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.
Journalists cannot grasp that what is interesting is not necessarily important; most cannot even grasp that what is sensational is not necessarily interesting.
Never buy a product that the owner of the company that makes it doesn’t use, or, in the case of, say, medication, wouldn’t contingently use.
Just realized that to politely get rid of someone people in Brooklyn say “call me if you need anything.”
Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.
We often benefit from harm done to us by others; almost never from self-inflicted injuries.
You will never know if someone is an asshole until he becomes rich.