Implies the finished work will be a hefty 450 pages!
NOTES, AFTERTHOUGHTS, BIBLIOGRAPHY. The only part of the book that felt like work. May still have mistakes.
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notes.pdf
via NOTES,….
Get it while it’s hot! (I do not save local copies to the site. If NNT removes the link, it’s gone.)
Friends, a graphical presentation of ANTIFRAGILE one of 3 appendices. Hope it is clear
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/appendix1.pdf
Conclusion [Rewrote; now going to rest for a while. I am done!]
As usual at the end of the journey, while looking at the entire manuscript on a restaurant table, someone with a Semitic culture asks me to summarize my book standing on one leg. This time it was Shaiy Pilpel, a probabilist with whom I’ve had two decades long calm conversations without a single episode of small talk. It is hard to find people knowledgeable and confident enough to like to extract the essence of things, instead of nitpicking.
With the previous book, one of his compatriots asked me the same question, but I had to think about it. This time I did not even have to make an effort…
…It was so obvious that Shaiy summarized it in the same breath. He actually believes that all real ideas can be distilled down to a central issue that the majority of people in a field, by dint of specialization and emptysuitedness, completely miss. Everything in religion come down to applications and interpretations of “don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do to you.” And this was a true distillation, not a Procrustean bed.
Shaiys’s summary was: fragility is what loses from volatility. Everything in life gains or loses from volatility. The glass on the table is short volatility.
I calmly looked at the manuscript with the feeling of calm elation. Every sentence in the book was an application of the short maxim…
While we’ll have to wait for the release of the book to read about Antifragility in detail, Taleb’s prologue says something very interesting about the prevalence of fragility in the world today. Here’s what he writes: While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, had the downside for their actions and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending fakes, and academics with too much power, and no real downside and accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.
via Antifragility – Gaining from Disorder – Value Research: The Complete Guide to Mutual Funds. HatTip to Dave Lull.