daeus 's review for:

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

5.0

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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."