Category Archives: Contributors

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – The Barnes & Noble Review

Do not imagine that you have understood the concept of “antifragility” right away, merely because the neologism might readily bring to mind the famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who formerly explored unpredictability in refreshingly unpredictable fashion in The Black Swan, demolishes — or at least fruitfully unpacks — that stale rubric in just one of the myriad pithy, ideationally rich, hand grenade-style mini-chapters that constitute his new book, which is a bathyscaphe-deep descent into an unexplored sea of contrarian wisdom. He has so many more insights into this concept that Nietzsche vaguely adumbrated, and so much more utilitarian advice derived therefrom, that Antifragile’s 400-plus pages are barely enough to contain all his passionate exegesis.

via Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – The Barnes & Noble Review.
HatTip to Dave Lull

Amazon.com: N N Taleb’s review of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking…

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent exposition of overcompensation, December 9, 2012
By N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”
This review is from: The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust Hardcover
I read this book after completing my exposition of overcompensation, how a stressor or a random event causes an increase in strength, in excess of what is needed, like a redundancy. I was also looking for evidence of convex reaction to stressor, or the effect of a mathematical property called Jensen’s inequality in domains and found it exposed here in other words, why a combination low dose most of the time and high dose rarely beats medium dose all the time. The authors presents the evidence for the phenomenon in the following: 1 acute stressors cum recovery beat both absence of stressors and chronic ones; 2 stressors make one stronger post traumatic growth; 3 risk management is mediated by the deep structures in us, not rational decision-making; 4 winning causes an increase in strength the latter are more complicated effects of convexity/Jensen’s Inequality.Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one should seek the familiar.Bravo!

via Amazon.com: N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”‘s review of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking….
HatTip to Dave Lull

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – digested read | Books | The Guardian

Forget everything you ever learned from Harvard drones and Nobel laureates, for in them lies no salvation. They think only in the sort of teleological heuristic iatrogenics that would appeal to a Seneca or a Nero. The world is really composed of Triads: the Fragile, the Robust and the Antifragile. Now abideth these three. And the greatest of these is the Antifragile. Don’t just take it from me. Look at this bar chart that shows how everyone else is very stupid, and I am right about everything. Case proved.

A week or so ago, I was bench-pressing 250kg in the luxury gym in the basement of my Manhattan condo, when I was interrupted by Nelson Mandela who wanted to know why I kept repeating the triadic dualistic mantra of fragile and antifragile. “Dats simpul,” I replied, using the voice of Fat Tony from Brooklyn, a character I created who never fails to make me laugh out loud. Though he may not have the same effect on you. “Becoz I’ve nuttin more to say and 400 pages to say it.”

via Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – digested read | Books | The Guardian.

What I say is HERE and HERE ONLY

This is the fact that should make sympathetic readers of Taleb pause: we have had at least two major global crises in recent years – the financial crisis in 2007-08 and the European banking crisis in 2011 – and yet the payoff to option buyers from those events has not even covered the carrying costs of the strategy in the last several years, much less the costs incurred from buying anti-fragility (option gamma) during the prior decade. It’s not just that options are not underpriced in light of “black swan” risks: they’re dramatically overpriced.

via Why Taleb is Wrong About Markets and Uncertainty | Condor Options.‏

@EpicureanDeal Excellent work. Highly recommended. RT @CondorOptions: Why Taleb is wrong about markets and uncertainty.
http://condoroptions.com/2012/11/26/why-taleb-is-wrong-about-markets-and-uncertainty/

@ModernistAlpha sorry,but this critique of Taleb’s prescriptive ideas is a straw man.Taleb opposes blind faith,not measurement

@nntaleb What I say is HERE and HERE ONLY. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Ilmanen.pdf

via Nassim N. Taleb (nntaleb) on Twitter.