Category Archives: Books

Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb | Farnam Street

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Farnam Street covered NNT’s Amazon Book Review Page.

Information: The New Language of Science 5 stars
If you want an introduction to information theory, and, in a way, probability theory from the real front door, this is it. A clearly written book, very intuitive, explains things, such as the Monty Hall problem in a few lines. I will make it a prerequisite before more technical great books, such as Cover and Thompson.

Free The Animal: Lose Weight & Fat With The Paleo Diet 5 stars
A charming primer on the paleo idea, with an illustration through the authors own life. I read it in one sitting. Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite:

Evolution and the Modular Mind 5 stars
This is a great synthesis of the modularity approach to cognitive science. It covers the entire field and has the right footnotes for the patches. The style is readable, & the author has an attitude with is a very good thing, but his jokes are often bland, not aggressive enough. While I strongly disagree with his treatment of morality I am deontic, I can safely say, so far, that this is not just one of the best books in cognitive science, but certainly one of the most readable.

via Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb | Farnam Street.
HatTip to Dave Lull

ANTIFRAGILE – Fall 2012, Random House (US) & Penguin (UK)

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Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, uncertainty, opacity, adventure, disorder and stressors. Yet, in spite the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call this hidden property antifragility.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness: the resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. It is behind anything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good food recipes say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac, the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance… Even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic or complex, say the human body, and what is inert, say a physical object like the stapler on your desk.

via. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Antifragile.htm

Edvin David Lemus: Essays, blogs

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Longtime reader and tipster David Lemus has a new book out.
Here’s a quote:

“So the statistics presented as the bell curve can at most work in one world. What polemic philosopher Nassim N. Taleb has called Mediocristan and Extremistan, the former domain is where statistics can be apply to physical measurements with miniscule margin of error like, say, astronomy, while the latter the bell curve breaks and shatters, the scientific tool cannot handle information data commonly acquire in social sciences. Too many stochastic variables, too many fat tails, and, furthermore, error rates, nonlinearties, dispersions: what Taleb named Fragile and the opposite his appellation Anti-Fragile; and improbable, consequential and explained by narrative, events, which cannot be predicted, I.e., Black Swans completely demolishes the statistical model; although they can be mitigated to a point by using robust heuristics as Mr. Taleb himself has suggested.”