Category Archives: Contributors

Stabilization Won’t Save Us – NYTimes.com

Leave a reply

Stabilization, of course, has long been the economic playbook of the United States government; it has kept interest rates low, shored up banks, purchased bad debts and printed money. But the effect is akin to treating metastatic cancer with painkillers. It has not only let deeper problems fester, but also aggravated inequality. Bankers have continued to get rich using taxpayer dollars as both fuel and backstop. And printing money tends to disproportionately benefit a certain class. The rise in asset prices made the superrich even richer, while the median family income has dropped.

Overstabilization also corrects problems that ought not to be corrected and renders the economy more fragile; and in a fragile economy, even small errors can lead to crises and plunge the entire system into chaos. That’s what happened in 2008. More than four years after that financial crisis began, nothing has been done to address its root causes.

via Stabilization Won’t Save Us – NYTimes.com.

REPETITIVE SOUL INJURY

Leave a reply

REPETITIVE SOUL INJURY. If you feel more comfortable looking at trees outside the window in spite of their “mess” than at the well-organized smooth and regular structures inside the room, then you are psychologically convex to some types of variations straight from Jensen’s Inequality, the fractal ones –hence antifragile. And we can generalize to the difference between “organized” textbook-like lectures and rich conversation and fractal writing. Anything that bores you belongs to a class of linear, information-poor, reduced information …Did it ever hit you that natural settings are never ugly? Paradoxically we seem to rest better under some type of natural “mess”. My eye gets more solace looking at the “messy” Christmas tree rather than the smooth wall next to it.
We can generalize to life; just as we get repetitive stress injuries doing well-organized movements, our soul gets repetitive stress injury when deprived of fractal depth.

PS- Consider book that have survived, from the “messy” bible to Montaigne’s essays: depth has these non-businessbook-like attributes. Which is why when I was told about Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan “your books are fun to read BUT disorganized” I understood fun to read BECAUSE disorganized or fractally organized.

via Timeline Photos | Facebook.

The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse | Wired.com

Leave a reply

In general, the older the technology, not only is it expected to last longer – but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement. Here’s the key principle: I am not saying that all technologies don’t age, only that those technologies that were prone to aging are already dead.

It is precisely because the world is getting more technological, that the old has a huge advantage over the new.

Now let’s take the idea beyond technology for a moment. If there’s something in the culture – say, a practice or a religion that you don’t understand – yet has been done for a long time – don’t call it “irrational.” And: Don’t expect the practice to discontinue.

Some things are opaque to us humans. Those things can only be revealed by time, which understands things we humans are unable to explain. But this method allows us to figure out how time and things work without quite getting inside the complexity of time’s mind. Time is scientifically equivalent to disorder, and things that gain from disorder are what this author calls “antifragile.”

via The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

#26. A Summary of ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | New Books in Brief

Leave a reply

Conclusion: Why Nassim Nicholas Taleb Would Hate This Article

I enjoyed Taleb’s book, but Taleb would not like this article. This is not because the author would resent the effort, or think that the article is a poor summary of his book—quite the contrary. The problem is with the style. There is no randomness to speak of. Not a single digression. In other words, it is very clear that the article is the result of a plan—and a detailed plan at that. By contrast, Taleb’s book jumps around all over the place, and is stock full of digressions and asides. That is, it incorporates randomness. This is not the result of poor editing (as some have suggested). Rather, I suspect that Taleb has chosen this route for both aesthetic and instrumental reasons. The author simply enjoys randomness in all its forms (as has been made clear). What’s more, I am confident that he believes that, as complex creatures (with complex minds), we respond better to ideas when they are presented with some measure of randomness. That is, ideas sink in better when they are presented in a stochastic way. I am not convinced that this is true.

via #26. A Summary of ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | New Books in Brief.

Happy To Be Panned | matthew e. may

Leave a reply

Nassim says it best in Antifragile:

Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her. The first-order information is the intensity: what matters is the effort the critic puts into trying to prevent others from reading the book, or, more generally in life, it is the effort in badmouthing someone that matters, not so much what is said. So if you really want people to read a book, tell them it is “overrated,” with a sense of outrage (and use the attribute “underrated” for the opposite effect).

via Happy To Be Panned | EDIT INNOVATION | matthew e. may.