Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
Taleb is brilliant at recognizing common sense/clear thinking (and lack of it) and bringing this to many different domains. He also seems very angry about the lack of this skill in many others. There is so much good stuff packed into this book.
Quotes
- "He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once."
- "Stalin could not have existed in a municipality."
- "It is much easier to sell: 'this is what I did for you', than, 'look what I avoided for you.'"
- "this personal or intellectual inability to distinguish noise from signal is behind overintervention."
- "What is non-measurable and non-predictable will remain non-measurable and non-predictable, no matter how many PhDs you put on the job."
- "a stoicist is a Buddhist with attitude."
- "many things we think are derived from skill come from options and well used options."
- "If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit. These illusions of contribution result largely from confirmation fallacies. In addition to the sad fact that history belongs to those who can write about it, whether winners or losers, a second bias appears, as those who write the accounts can deliver confirmatory facts of what has worked, but not a complete picture of what has worked and what has failed...they never tell you if education hurts you in some places. So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process... random tinkering (antifragile) leads to heuristics/ technology leads to practice and apprenticeship, leads to random tinkering... in parallel to the above loop, practice leads to academic theories, leads to academic theories, leads to academic theories."
- Fascinating metaphor of people figuring out how a bird flies and thinking the theory is how the bird flies and that we need to help them, "lecturing the birds on flying."
- "a dictator...will feel indispensable because the alternative is not easily visible, or is hidden by special interest groups."
- "Lack of vigilance is not the cause of the death of a mafia don. The cause of death is making enemies, and the cure is making friends."
- "In ancient times, learning was for learning's sake, to make someone a good person, worth talking to, not to increase the stock of gold... entrepreneurs, particularly those in technical jobs, are not the best people to have dinner with."
- "The more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business. Something psychologists call 'the halo effect' - the mistake....that a good chess player will be a good strategist in real life....doers do, they don't talk and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department."
- "Traders trade, then traders figure out techniques and products, then academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them, then new traders believe them, then blowups, from theory-induced fragility...."
- "Practitioners don't write, they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position."
- "No, we dont put theories into practice, we create theories out of practice.... the theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite."
- "The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than the act of reading."
- "mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence." Brilliant.
- "Conflation of events and exposure... the problem is deeply engrained in standard reactions. The predictors reply, when we point out their failures has typically been: 'we need better computation in order to predict the event better and figure out the probabilities.' Instead of the vastly more effective: modify your exposure. And learn to get out of trouble."
- "Career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love."
- "If that some has been around for a very, very long time, then irrational or not, you can expect it to stuck around much longer. And outlive those who call for its demise."
- "Pharmaceutical companies are under financial pressures to find diseases and satisfy the security analysts. They have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking for disease amongst healthier and healthier people, lobbying for reclassification of conditions and fine-tuning sales tricks to get doctors to over prescribe."
- "specialization is the response to a very stable habitat free of abrupt changes." Great point of how specialization is the result of a stable environment, it does not cause a stable environment, and often makes things worse when forced.
- "Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You'll be surprised at the difference."
- "Sucker's try to be right. Non-suckers try to make the buck. Or sucker's try to to win arguments, non-suckers try to win....it is rather a good thing to lose arguments."
- "He was under the illusion that ideas compete with each other, with the least wrong surviving at any point and time. He missed the point that it is not ideas that survive, but people with the the right ones, or societies that have the correct heuristics, or the ones, right or wrong, that lead them to do the good thing.... the wrong idea that is harmless can survive....behavior that is irrational can be good, if it is harmless."
- "Distributed randomness...is a necessity, not an option...the best way to verify that you are alive is to check if you like variations....results are meaningless without effort...and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks."
Quotes
- "He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once."
- "Stalin could not have existed in a municipality."
- "It is much easier to sell: 'this is what I did for you', than, 'look what I avoided for you.'"
- "this personal or intellectual inability to distinguish noise from signal is behind overintervention."
- "What is non-measurable and non-predictable will remain non-measurable and non-predictable, no matter how many PhDs you put on the job."
- "a stoicist is a Buddhist with attitude."
- "many things we think are derived from skill come from options and well used options."
- "If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit. These illusions of contribution result largely from confirmation fallacies. In addition to the sad fact that history belongs to those who can write about it, whether winners or losers, a second bias appears, as those who write the accounts can deliver confirmatory facts of what has worked, but not a complete picture of what has worked and what has failed...they never tell you if education hurts you in some places. So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process... random tinkering (antifragile) leads to heuristics/ technology leads to practice and apprenticeship, leads to random tinkering... in parallel to the above loop, practice leads to academic theories, leads to academic theories, leads to academic theories."
- Fascinating metaphor of people figuring out how a bird flies and thinking the theory is how the bird flies and that we need to help them, "lecturing the birds on flying."
- "a dictator...will feel indispensable because the alternative is not easily visible, or is hidden by special interest groups."
- "Lack of vigilance is not the cause of the death of a mafia don. The cause of death is making enemies, and the cure is making friends."
- "In ancient times, learning was for learning's sake, to make someone a good person, worth talking to, not to increase the stock of gold... entrepreneurs, particularly those in technical jobs, are not the best people to have dinner with."
- "The more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business. Something psychologists call 'the halo effect' - the mistake....that a good chess player will be a good strategist in real life....doers do, they don't talk and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department."
- "Traders trade, then traders figure out techniques and products, then academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them, then new traders believe them, then blowups, from theory-induced fragility...."
- "Practitioners don't write, they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position."
- "No, we dont put theories into practice, we create theories out of practice.... the theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite."
- "The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than the act of reading."
- "mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence." Brilliant.
- "Conflation of events and exposure... the problem is deeply engrained in standard reactions. The predictors reply, when we point out their failures has typically been: 'we need better computation in order to predict the event better and figure out the probabilities.' Instead of the vastly more effective: modify your exposure. And learn to get out of trouble."
- "Career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love."
- "If that some has been around for a very, very long time, then irrational or not, you can expect it to stuck around much longer. And outlive those who call for its demise."
- "Pharmaceutical companies are under financial pressures to find diseases and satisfy the security analysts. They have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking for disease amongst healthier and healthier people, lobbying for reclassification of conditions and fine-tuning sales tricks to get doctors to over prescribe."
- "specialization is the response to a very stable habitat free of abrupt changes." Great point of how specialization is the result of a stable environment, it does not cause a stable environment, and often makes things worse when forced.
- "Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You'll be surprised at the difference."
- "Sucker's try to be right. Non-suckers try to make the buck. Or sucker's try to to win arguments, non-suckers try to win....it is rather a good thing to lose arguments."
- "He was under the illusion that ideas compete with each other, with the least wrong surviving at any point and time. He missed the point that it is not ideas that survive, but people with the the right ones, or societies that have the correct heuristics, or the ones, right or wrong, that lead them to do the good thing.... the wrong idea that is harmless can survive....behavior that is irrational can be good, if it is harmless."
- "Distributed randomness...is a necessity, not an option...the best way to verify that you are alive is to check if you like variations....results are meaningless without effort...and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks."
informative
medium-paced
Despite Taleb's oversized ego and loquacious tendencies I really enjoyed this book -- as much or more than his previous two best sellers Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan. He extends his Black Swan thesis to a wider range of domains and actually doesn't apply his ideas to finance that often. The book made me think a lot about the points Taleb is arguing -- so much so that I will probably listen to it again to get a fuller understanding.
Maybe I'm biased (towards people in finance and people working with money in general), but as soon as someone bashes academia while praising the cooperate environment, I already loses 70% of my interest. By the second chapter of section one, or as the author calls it, Book I, I'm already losing 90% of my interest. The author might be very successful in his field and his methods/ideas worked in many cases, but he, in my opinion, is arrogant and full of himself.
Re-reading this makes me even more impressed with Taleb’s ideas, and even more disappointed with his most recent book Skin in the Game. Throw SITG in the trash and read this one twice—I got so much out of it the second time through. A tour de force of probability, risk taking, ethics, and decision making. Practical and erudite—really enjoyed it.
Read this book because it should make you angry. Either angry at the establishments he's against and/or angry at the author's ego. The book is filled with contradictions, and I think the author could stand to gain a lot by listening to his own advice or "putting skin in the game" and admitting his failures. A lot of criticism I've read about this book does seem to misrepresent him in ways that are easy to hate which might explain why he seems so defensive about his ideas. Hopefully, this book will actually make you "antifragile" by forcing you to check some of your assumptions.
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
This was crazy good. I recommend reading it with the same wry open-mind of one who sits with his fascinating and kind of embittered uncle at Thanksgiving after he’s had a few drinks. The one who says fantastical and irrefutable things, which you will never feel confident enough to outright contradict, but whose assertions are so ludicrous and also so intuitive, you question your own sanity.
I learned so much, and found myself laughing out loud at Nassim’s contempt for things most people just accept at face value, especially the academic. Most of it is very good but I also feel that he makes some grand leaps in logic to get at conclusions; for instance, he says that constant noise makes people dumb, with one of his examples being that people living near an airport are dumber. But wouldn’t real estate with heavy noise pollution also be cheaper? So maybe it’s just that people who grow up poor don’t test as well? Or maybe it’s the inconsistency of noise and interrupted sleep? I doubt a white noise machine or sleeping with a fan would have the same effect as frequent, inconsistent interruption. A few of these sorts of things came up, where you kind of wonder, but the major claims of the book are so fun, intuitive and interesting, I give him a pass.
I learned so much, and found myself laughing out loud at Nassim’s contempt for things most people just accept at face value, especially the academic. Most of it is very good but I also feel that he makes some grand leaps in logic to get at conclusions; for instance, he says that constant noise makes people dumb, with one of his examples being that people living near an airport are dumber. But wouldn’t real estate with heavy noise pollution also be cheaper? So maybe it’s just that people who grow up poor don’t test as well? Or maybe it’s the inconsistency of noise and interrupted sleep? I doubt a white noise machine or sleeping with a fan would have the same effect as frequent, inconsistent interruption. A few of these sorts of things came up, where you kind of wonder, but the major claims of the book are so fun, intuitive and interesting, I give him a pass.
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced