HEACH: Antifragile – a review or two, sort of

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Antifragile – Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb ISBN 9780141038223

While I was reading this book – during the days around Christmas 2013 – a major storm ravaged northern and western Europe. At one point my wife asked “What is that book about, anyway” and the perfect illustration of my answer presented itself in all newspapers the next morning: hundreds of thousands of households in Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, France and The United Kingdom were without electricity. How much easier could you want for an example to explain the concept of a fragile system? Some systems are so much optimalised that they work smoothly in the normal situation in Taleb’s vocabulary ‘mediocristan’, but as soon as an event of certain impact unexpectedly, or dismissed as not probable manifests itself, the vulnerable system collapses as a house of cards. The system is fragile and breaks, often with catastrophic consequences.

via HEACH: Antifragile – a review or two, sort of.
HatTip to Dave Lull

People are natural skeptics…

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People are natural skeptics, but speak in shortcuts that seem categorical but are not; when they say “bureaucrats don’t have courage” they mean “a high percentage of bureaucrats don’t have courage”, which is why proverbs and aphorisms are heuristic and economical, held to be imperfect approximations.
On the other hand, when an academic writes the overly hedged statement “it appears that under some conditions, there have been historically a high percentage of bureaucrats who did not prove have courage”, he generally truly believes that “all bureaucrats don’t have courage”.
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I am writing this because Aaron Haspel and I noticed that when I write the aphorism “most bureaucrats don’t have courage” it is transmitted and repeated in its shorter version: “bureaucrats don’t have courage”. Many of the nitpickers on the web are after the straw man of “generalization” when a heuristic is not categorical.

via Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

SALT LAS VEGAS MAY 13 – 16, 2014 | BELLAGIO

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Nassim Taleb

New York Times Bestselling Author, “The Black Swan” & Distinguished Scientific Advisor, Universa Investments

Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a philosophical essayist, and researcher in probability in 2006. Although he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University, he self-funds his research and operates in the manner of independent scholars. He is also Distinguished Scientific Advisor at Universa Investments L.P., an investment manager that specializes in tail hedging as a means to enhance long-term equity returns.

Mr. Taleb is the author of The Incerto: A Philosophical Essay on Uncertainty, in Four Volumes, which includes The Black Swan (2007) and Antifragile (2012). He is also author of a series of mathematical monographs on Probability and Risk in the Real World. His work focuses on decision-making under opacity and how systems can handle errors and disorder.

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via Nassim Taleb.