Monthly Archives: December 2012

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Arts – The Boston Globe

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Taleb has a very important role in a society where it isn’t always easy to tell science from pseudoscience — even at the university level. There is so much dogma passing as “objective truth” in the sciences, and there are so many so-called forecasters who get things wrong over and over again without being held accountable, that a noodge like Taleb can greatly guide us toward a closer understanding of how things work. And “Antifragile’’ does have some useful, original ideas. It’s just that sometimes Taleb seems more interested in being a provocateur than in exercising the rigor he advocates so forcefully.

via Book review: ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Arts – The Boston Globe.

The press is making us mistake a mouse for an elephant…

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The press is making us mistake a mouse for an elephant, and an elephant for a mouse. Today, in the U.S., many more people are dying from overfeeding than underfeeding, many more people are killed by excessive comfort than discomfort, and for all the evil of the gun lobby, firearms harm much, much fewer people (<1%) than the corn syrup, cereal, wheat, and orange juice industries. I cannot believe that, in the 21st century, “intelligent” people would mistake the lurid for the statistical.

via Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Stabilization Won’t Save Us – NYTimes.com

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Stabilization, of course, has long been the economic playbook of the United States government; it has kept interest rates low, shored up banks, purchased bad debts and printed money. But the effect is akin to treating metastatic cancer with painkillers. It has not only let deeper problems fester, but also aggravated inequality. Bankers have continued to get rich using taxpayer dollars as both fuel and backstop. And printing money tends to disproportionately benefit a certain class. The rise in asset prices made the superrich even richer, while the median family income has dropped.

Overstabilization also corrects problems that ought not to be corrected and renders the economy more fragile; and in a fragile economy, even small errors can lead to crises and plunge the entire system into chaos. That’s what happened in 2008. More than four years after that financial crisis began, nothing has been done to address its root causes.

via Stabilization Won’t Save Us – NYTimes.com.

REPETITIVE SOUL INJURY

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REPETITIVE SOUL INJURY. If you feel more comfortable looking at trees outside the window in spite of their “mess” than at the well-organized smooth and regular structures inside the room, then you are psychologically convex to some types of variations straight from Jensen’s Inequality, the fractal ones –hence antifragile. And we can generalize to the difference between “organized” textbook-like lectures and rich conversation and fractal writing. Anything that bores you belongs to a class of linear, information-poor, reduced information …Did it ever hit you that natural settings are never ugly? Paradoxically we seem to rest better under some type of natural “mess”. My eye gets more solace looking at the “messy” Christmas tree rather than the smooth wall next to it.
We can generalize to life; just as we get repetitive stress injuries doing well-organized movements, our soul gets repetitive stress injury when deprived of fractal depth.

PS- Consider book that have survived, from the “messy” bible to Montaigne’s essays: depth has these non-businessbook-like attributes. Which is why when I was told about Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan “your books are fun to read BUT disorganized” I understood fun to read BECAUSE disorganized or fractally organized.

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