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cmjustice 's review for:
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Very entertaining, densely complex and challenging to assimilate in one reading without some previous understanding. I'll be investigating some of the many books from his Bibliography. Hopefully that will bring me up top speed. I get much of the thrust of his thesis and I'm so lost in some of the details. He makes many salient points. For example;
"Life is more, a lot more labyrinthine than shown in our memory- our minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness....
We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling- very compelling- evidence to show that this is an illusion... the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors...your body gets information about the environment... through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven't discovered yet....
Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allen Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced... Measures that aim at reducing variability and swings (of mood) in the lives of our children are also reducing variability and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Global Society....If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock- in other words, if you are alive- something deep inside your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder...If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead."
"Life is more, a lot more labyrinthine than shown in our memory- our minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness....
We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling- very compelling- evidence to show that this is an illusion... the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors...your body gets information about the environment... through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven't discovered yet....
Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allen Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced... Measures that aim at reducing variability and swings (of mood) in the lives of our children are also reducing variability and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Global Society....If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock- in other words, if you are alive- something deep inside your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder...If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead."