My first draft introducing AntiFragility (unedited)
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af.pdf
Shared by JohnH
This fellow apparently doesn’t think much of The Bed of Procrustes, or NNT for that matter, but in the interest of balance, and because the graphic is hilarious, I’m passing it along. HatTip to Dave Lull.
Illustration for the Guardian by Neal Fox.
Procrustes, in Greek myth, was the cruel owner of an estate in Attica who abducted travellers and cut off their heads to ensure they fitted his bed perfectly. Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts: faced with the imperfection of the unknown and the unobserved, we humans tend to backfit the world into reductive categories such that only someone of my immense intellect is able to point out the inherent futility of modern life.
Update: Dave sends a link to another NNT ‘hater’. This one doesn’t really warrant a quote, he’s not very clever and a quick look around leads me to conclude that hating is his MO. It also originates in the U.K. http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3651/full. Anyway, there’s been enough activity in this area lately that I’ve decided to add a ‘Hater’ category. I’ll only share the best of them.
Let me try again. In India last week dined with a sage, former economist (Indian wine Suda & Grower). We converged on the following layering: 1- talking. 2- doing. 3- being.
Corrolary: for 3, change the arrow. You are not good (or bad) because you are doing good (or bad), but you are doing good (or bad) because you are good (or bad).
What if NNT had is own show! That I’d watch.
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — New York University professor Nassim Taleb talks about his new book “The Bed of Procrustes.”
Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” also discusses the U.S. economy and financial regulation. Taleb speaks with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance Midday.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Now that we have established over the past week a straightforward notion of Unconditionality as central virtue, there is a scale for humans: 1) at the bottom, those who bend their principles for gain (opportunists), 2) at the top those who sacrifice for principles only, 3) at the center the unbribable.