Imagining the unimaginable is much more important than most people give it credit for.

It's essentially the culmination of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan.

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Introvert Advantage - Marti Olsen Laney

The Mindful Way Through Depression - Mark Williams et al.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Sorry about the justification; I'll check to see if I did that or if Posterous did that.

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

One of the most obnoxious writers I know of.

I recently read "The Black Swan" which I thought was an important read in spite of how unlikeable I find the author, how long the book is, and how tangled up the ideas are. It felt like a bit of a crazy rant, but worthwhile.

Thanks!

If you've not read The Black Swan already, I would highly recommend it, it's a fascinating book.

brown9-2-2 is right the latter part of the headline is pure speculation.

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Pretty much any book by Nassim Taleb, but the Black Swan was my first read of his, and then Antifragile

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/2/why-most-things-fai...

Probably not. But it does suggest people should read The Black Swan, especially the parts on prediction.

He strikes me as someone who is so desperate to be important and recognized that an assertion like this doesn't really surprise me.

1a) A Guide to the Good Life is an easier introduction to Stoic philosophy if you don't want to dive straight into Epictetus

2) The Black Swan by Taleb to change the way you think about risk

Absolutely not. Ideas that are diffuse and unoriginal, on the other hand, are often repeated because they are uncompelling.

I've read The Black Swan, and although it was entertaining, I didn't feel like I learned anything of value.

I always manage a chuckle when I hear "black swan" used to describe a rare event. Where I am, a black swan is the norm.

    - Antifragile (already started)
    - The Black Swan
    - Skin In The Game
    - (there are 2 more books which I've already read)

- Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

- Reread: E-Myth, Michael E. Gerber

The Black Swan by Taleb

Thinking Fast & Slow by Kahneman

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Diamond

The World According To Monsanto by Robin

The Organized Mind by Levitin

The Vital Question by Lane

Life Ascending by Lane

Chasing the Scream by Hari

Anything By Gladwell.

Don't confuse the fact that we've been lucky not to go extinct yet with evidence that we won't, especially when you being around to make that inference is conditional on said luck.

According to him, it was MBA courses that recommended adding chess to the CV, as it showed strategic thinking and would never be verified.

also http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm

http://www.hashlike.com/movies

Instead of under books, "The Black Swan" was listed under movies.

The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

I'm looking forward to getting to The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

I'd also recommend reading Nassim Taleb's books Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan (info at his website http://fooledbyrandomness.com/) along with one he recommends:

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

http://infraredpress.com/

Those will all teach you what not to do, which is just as, if not more important in investing and trading than what to do.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...

Take time to walk slowly and think deeply. Walk slow enough to forget that you're actually walking.

I have not read Thinking Fast and Slow ether but really disliked "The tipping point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Most impressive book: Thus spoke Zarathustra.

More crucially, the virus is affecting the real economy, and people's lives. Fixes for the financial economy that don't address that directly are band-aids to make balance sheets look good.

Only because I happen to just starting reading this 4 books [0-3] motohagiography (word-depipction-of-saints?), and until 2-3 weeks ago I am ashamed to say I didn't even know who that was:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

[0-3]: Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness, The Bed of Procrustes

I agree 100%. One of the most interesting books I've read lately has been The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, which deals with this at length (ostensibly it is about unpredictability in financial markets, but the implications are far broader than that).

Read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled By Randomness is also good) if you want to peer into the mind of an investor.

Read Hesse's Siddhartha if you're thinking along the lines of culture/religion/philosophy.

Read a few Ayn Rand books if you like libertarianism and don't really care to relate to the characters.

Read We by Yevgheny Zamyatin if you want an interesting allegory that metaphorically compares heaven to a dystopian dictatorship.

Read Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins if you're very interested in the sciences.

I remember Sebastian Marshall recommending Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa -- I'd recommend it too. It's pretty good, and I was especially interested since I've been doing marshal arts for over 10 years now.

And read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! no matter how you think. It's fantastic.

EDIT: More Books!

I read these when I was in elementary school, but they still hold their value:

The Giver by Lois Lowry if you want more dystopias.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery if you're feeling especially playful.

You hear all the time about how unlikely it is for someone to succeed as a startup. Or how the Democrats have a 65% chance of winning. Or even how statistically speaking, it's safer to fly than to drive.

After going through that book, my perception on randomness was changed forever.

Taleb's book The Black Swan talks about this phenomenon, but I can't recommend the book--it's basically one chapter's worth of material stretched over 400 pages.

His writing style in general is meandering and lacks focus. The book I read had a handful of insights amid pointless narration. I read books like The Black Swan to learn new ideas, not to learn how great the author is.

I would like to point out research in low-probability events, response to too-big-to-fail, fat tails and black swans in defense of emerging Financial Engineering and Risk Management. The best defense of it that I have ever seen was in the book "The Black Swan".

> All of them continue to do great object-level work in their respective fields, but it seems like the “moment” for books about rationality came and passed around 2010. Maybe it’s because the relevant science has slowed down – who is doing Kahneman-level work anymore? Maybe it’s because people spent about eight years seeing if knowing about cognitive biases made them more successful at anything, noticed it didn’t, and stopped caring.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/19/book-review-the-black-s...

Sounds more like playing the lottery to me. It could work reasonably well provided:1) the small losses don't add up to more than the payoffs, and 2) the payoffs aren't so far a part you go broke waiting for them. By Taleb's own arguments (in Fooled by Randomness, I haven't read The Black Swan), the unexpected events are too unpredictable to count on even that much. Most likely he's just been lucky with the timing.

Certain types of mental models are covered in the book, but not in a concentrated way. The book was also highly recommend in one of Nassim Taleb's books (I think it was "The Black Swan").

The Re-enchantment of Art, by Suzi Gablik. I hated it when I first read it but then after reading it a second time realized she was right about a lot of things.

The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassim Taleb

They don't properly, and that is the problem. A lot of it had to do with creating models that do not reflect reality. They worked fine until extraordinary circumstances occur under which they break down. A well known mistake is assuming a normal distribution for financial returns. In reality this greatly underestimates the likelihood and magnitude of extreme moves that can cause catastrophic losses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan" discusses this in great detail. The bottom line is essentially that a move more extreme than what you anticipated is going to happen eventually.

LTCM made the mistake of neglecting the impact of changing correlations. The thought they had outsmarted the market by eliminating risk from their portfolio. But in times of financial turmoil, correlations of risky assets tend to increase. If your carefully constructed and hedged portfolio does not take this into account, you may be exposed to much more risk than you intended. This is precisely what happend to them. The fund was bailed out by a group of large banks, and their bets did eventually pay off, but the temporary losses were far beyond what their models had anticipated.

I'm not sure such a thing alone can determine our philosophy. Based on his Twitter feed I feel like DHH is more libertarian than the average Dane you're likely to meet.

"From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations experience [potentially high] variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans--we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance.

... So where on earth does this idea of "steady" exercise come from? Nobody in the Pleistocene jogged for forty-two minutes three days a week, lifted weights every Teusday and Friday, etc... Not hunters. We swung between extremes: we sprinted when chased or when chasing (once in a while in an extremely exerting way), and walked about aimlessly the rest of the time."

That's what he thinks anyway. We are complex, yo.

The Black Swan was mostly fantastic, but Antifragile was mostly regurgitation.

The biggest problem with him is he thinks he's much, much smarter than he is, like a kind of inverse-Dunning-Kruger effect. It's odd because he is quite a smart man in the first place; there's no need for him to be such a pretentious asshole.

The Black Swan is longer, and has a bit more technical coverage. I liked that, but I've heard from others that it gets in the way of the main point about how to deal with randomness.

Regardless, both books are insanely good. Worth the time and money for sure.

Yeah, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan were both pretty good. I haven't necessarily thought of them as significantly overlapping with the HTMA stuff up until this point, but now that you mention it I can see a connection. I should probably go back and re-read both, and read Antifragile.

maybe those Stafford Beer papers about the Viable Systems Model?

Hmm... never heard of "Viable Systems Model" before, so I'll have to go read up on that. Thanks for the pointer.

Exercise books for Fermi estimates like Guesstimation, etc

I'll take a look at Guesstimation. Thanks for the pointer on that as well.

But you'll always be safer if you keep rich qualitative models and treat quantification as gravy on top of that.

I can buy that. I'm a fan of using approaches like Hubbard's to quantify things to a point. I do think his approach can supply a bit of extra rigor and some useful bounds to things that otherwise seem impossible to quantify at all. But it's not a perfect system by any means. The two biggest risks, so far as I can tell, would be leaving a variable (or more than one) out of your model completely, or using the wrong probability distributions for the various variables when doing the simulation part.

It has probably more to do with genetic drift. You cannot stumble upon a tribe, take some random property they all share, and then make causal inferences from all the other properties they all share. This holds especially when this property correlates with survival of the tribe; it is actually more informative to investigate a group of people with properties that reduce survival, e.g. bad heart conditions.

> I am surprised at the blind spot I had when first reading it – Kahneman’s overconfidence didn’t register with me.

Wow, this hits me pretty hard too. My impression of the book was of Kahneman being a subtle and humble thinker, in stark contrast to the bombast of Nassim Taleb of "The Black Swan".

A great post, if only for this and drawing my attention to the fact that the "hot hand" effect may actually exist... I've definitely used it as an example of when people are liable to see patterns in the noise :-(

For those interested in reading more about the role of luck (amongst other very interesting discussions about how we make decisions), I'd heartily recommend reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman (and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb too as a nice complement).

[1]http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm

Say my bonus is, I dunno, 2% of profits.

I go put 100 billion dollars on a single hand of blackjack. If I win, I make 2 billion. If I lose, I'm out 400k. Easy choice. Do it!

The Black Swan is an interesting book. You might disagree with Taleb's claims, but he's not making elementary mistakes.

The reason I say buy not as an investment is because the real estate market hasn't nearly hit bottom yet and won't for another two years. Until then investing significantly in real estate would be a mistake. So buy something modest that you like in an area that you like.

Cash is king right now. Being in Canadian currency is good. Read Nassim Taleb, who presciently suggested years ago that we avoid investing heavily in the stock markets; they're too risky. Instead put ~90% into absolutely safe investments and then bet the remaining 5-10% in long-shot positive "black swans" (e.g, high technology and biotech ventures with long odds but incredible payoffs). Most often you'll lose but, when you win you'll win huge, more than enough to cover your losses. To understand his suggestions, you'd best read his excellent book, "The Black Swan".

And I assume you've split your money into various accounts so that you are insured against any losses should your bank go out of business.

May I add, one of the best sources for the Lindy effect is Nassim Taleb's works (the final part of The Black Swan and Antifragile).

But he's also definitely over the hill as a thinker. About the only notable thing he's done in the last few years has been sustaining a long-running and personal feud with Nate Silver (of 538) about who among them better understands probability.

Yes it did. But remember Mutual Funds? "Past investment returns are no guarantee of....". You should either read "The Black Swan" or read it again.

Also: "The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct global warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, in as little as perhaps twenty years and as the leverage of technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination -- with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win."

It never amazes me what you can experience, if you are living in a large City or get involved with a large group of people. When I was doing National Service, I once drove to the Hospital, about twenty, 18yr olds suffering from "nocturnal enuresis" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_enuresis). It is a very uncommon event in adults <0.5%.

If you'd prefer to just read the actual chapters, it starts on page 33:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.695...

For those interested in expanding their (anti-)library:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Frag...

For the last 12 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen to me that we are taking huge risks and massive exposure to rare events. I isolated some areas in which people make bogus claims --epistemologically unsound. The Black Swan is a philosophy book (epistemology, philosophy of history & philosophy of science), but I used banks as a particularly worrisome case of epistemic arrogance --and the use of "science" to measure the risk of rare events, making society dependent on very spurious measurements. To me a banking crisis --worse than what we have ever seen -- was unavoidable and NOT A BLACK SWAN, just as a drunk and incompetent pilot would eventually crash the plane. And I kept receiving insults for 12 years!

(http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm)

In other places I've seen Taleb acknowledge that he was not the only one who predicted the problems.

Completely with you about Spivak, as far as calculus goes.

Physics: recently picked up Walter Lewin's "For the Love of Physics" and it's a masterpiece. Didn't get the chance to finish it because of the pandemic and it got locked in the office but it appears he's managed to cram in an entire university course in one book.

Biology and anatomy - "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins is brilliant entry point for people with limited knowledge on the subject.

Chemistry - no idea, that's the one subject which I hated with a passion since I was a child. Very paradoxical, given that physics was arguably my favorite subject ¯\_(ツ)_/¯...

History - Yuval Noah Harari's books, though somewhat anecdotal as far as history is concerned. I'd say there are way too many to list here and there is way too much to read about all major events in history to fit in just a few books.

However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he's been engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in this at an intellectual level (personally, I'm more on his side than not), the tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and unacceptable.

[1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.

-"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman
-"The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis
-"Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
-"Pre-suasion" by Cialdini
-"The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright
-"The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks
-"Everybody Lies" by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz
-"How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" by Scott Adams
-The "Freakonomics" Trilogy

Looks like this has already been extensively discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=811864

N.N. Taleb writes about some of this in "The Black Swan", which I'm sure most readers here already know about. I would also recommend Benoit Mandelbrot's (yes, that Mandelbrot's) "The Misbehavior of Markets". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/665134.The_Mis_Behavior_...

- Elon Musk: Inventing the Future - Ashlee Vance
Totally worth to get insight into the Elon. Kinda changes the superhero/good guy image everyone has but you end up with more respect for him whatsoever.

- Thinking fast and slow - Daniel Kahneman
Awesome book presenting modern psychology. You'll get insight into how humans work.

- Rework - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
Nice, albeit small book regarding how the creators of rails manage their company. So very nice insight.

- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers - Ben Horowitz
I started reading this but it was too business centric for me so I stopped, however if you're a business owner it might be worth it.

- Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel - Rolf Potts
This is a nice/into book if you're interested into digital nomading, long term travel in general.

- The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This in my opinion is a superb book if you are interested in statistics/philosophy. He presents the chaotic structure of our world and why extreme events are more common than we think.Definitely suggested.

- The art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin
This is a book that presents the Author's (Chess and Tai Chi Chuan World champion) way of learning. Has some pretty useful insight.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415621
[1]: https://github.com/kostistsaprailis/non-tech-books-for-devel...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_at_risk

The "1 in 3 billion years" quote sounds like exactly the kind of line of thinking that was in the Big Short.

It's up to smart people to understand what statistical model they should probably use.

It's not just that their model is wrong -- and VaR is certainly wrong. It's that NO model is right.

That is, the fundamental problem is that they are trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Black swans aren't quantifiable by definition.

If you think there is an "appropriate statistical model", then definitely read the Black Swan. I'm glad it came up many times in this thread, because that means the point has been driven home. If you don't get it, you need the 300 pages of beratement it gives you :)

For example those with the largest adjusted incomes probably live in the safest areas where one can get comfortably wealthy over a long period of time. However, they probably forgo the option at huge wins by shirking the cost/risk of getting a tech startup lottery ticket.

Same thing occurs with those who go into med/law/normal engineering. They essentially shoot themselves in the head to take themselves off the lottery list and put themselves on the steady, safe and slow wealth generation list.

Those in extremistan pay a greater entry fee in terms of risk vs. reward to play the finance/startup lottery and have a small shot at winning really big. In turn, risk adjusted their salaries are pitiful when adjusted for risk/cost of living - but somewhat decent if you factor in the value of the lottery ticket.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

I agree with the premise of your first two paragraphs, that often people will try to explain situations without being a participant of those events while decisions were being made. However, you have not shown that this premise applies to this article, which is a "logical hole" in your own statement. In fact, the stories mentioned by the blogger happen to be well known to be accurate, straight from the mouths of the founders of those companies.

I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed to succeed.

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the article. The author says a friend wants to start a business but is waiting for a perfect idea (and logically believes the audience of the blog may as well.) So he suggests that he go for it anyway, and adjust his idea as he goes. He then gives examples of companies that kept changing their ideas as they went along.

Malcolm Gladwell - Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers
Tim Harford - The Undercover Economist
Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan

I enjoyed the Steve Jobs book too, I liked the fact that he believed in what he was working on (no matter how crazy or disruptive) and saw so much beauty in perfection. There's a lot we can learn from his persistence and attitude towards persevering in the face of failure.

And for entertainment, I like profound books: The Alchemist, The Little Prince

I like Taleb.

For anyone who has read The Black Swan, you will see how this DARPA project may have to do with his Las Vegas casino visit. http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/math/appliedcompmath/rum/in...

It has a profile of Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan." A Black Swan is an unpredictable event, because the day to day probability is so low, say a world wide liquidity crisis. Taleb argues against probability based models, because in the long run an outlier is going to kill you. I got "The Black Swan" for Christmas. I have read only 3 or 4 chapters so far, but I highly recommend it. Very interesting and very entertaining.

But maybe there are some tail risks we should really worry about.

and indeed that's what much of Taleb's body of work is about. I am partway through Antifragile and do not find it as compelling as The Black Swan, however.

- Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart. Plenty of gotchas with real world examples from academia. Well written and easy to read.

- The Circle by Dave Eggers. This one was scary. About imaginary corporation (a blend of Facebook and Google and Amazon) and probably not too distant future. If you liked Black Mirrors, you will love this.

- Brave New World by Huxley, Aldous. Classic novel with interesting thoughts about engineered society, where every human is assigned class, purpose in the society and feature at birth.

- Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Bilton, Nick. Read this book in a weekend, really well written and well researched about the inception of Twitter.

- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Tetlock, Philip E. A study on people with above average ability to forecast feature events (mostly geo-political). Talks about measuring predictions and improving them.

- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Brilliant book about overlooking rare events which have dramatic consequences because 'it's unlikely to happen'.

Finance/statistics :
The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Math/science history :
Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Physics:
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar

Lit:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Philosophy:
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Any of the upanishads but probably Kena Upanishad, Isha Upanishad, or Prashna Upanishad at first (selected for (relative) ease in readership by yours truly)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (for a gentle introduction into Eastern thought)

I'm missing countless others but this is what I have right now. Thanks for the prompt and happy reading! :)

"... your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative. Instead of putting your money in 'medium risk' investments, you need to put a portion, say 85 to 90 percent, in extremely safe instruments, like Treasury bills—as safe a class of instruments as you can manage to find on this planet. The remaining 10 to 15 percent you put in extremely speculative bets, as leveraged as possible (like options), preferably venture capital-style portfolios."

It seems that going to work for a startup is the exact opposite of this.

I.e., it would be better to be an investor in many startups rather than working solely on/for one startup.

Coders at Work by Peter Siebel and Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston - I loved reading about the founder's stories and first-hand perspectives of notable programmers.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton - really interesting perspective on "work" and various types of careers and people that find happiness in them/work itself.

Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - even if you don't agree with their arguments or think that the authors are all fluff, I think that their writing style is exceptionally clear and easy to understand.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - some really interesting ideas and analysis, although the book could have been 1/2 as short

Fiction:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson - starts out slow but after the first 200 pages it became a really great story that I couldn't put down.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel - loved the main story of the book, the controversial ending didn't bother me too much because I don't feel like it takes away from the story at all.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson - cheap fun and suspenseful

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I don't think much needs to be said about this book

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga - extremely interesting and gripping novel about a side of the world most of us Westerners never see

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - finally read this classic. I read the "Ultimate Edition" which contains all 5 of Adams' novel, loved the first one but the story felt like it started to putter out by the third.

I think the situation we're in right now is pretty much a "legal coup" by a motivated minority. It'll be a slog to get back to representative democracy.

I read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb recently, and he mentioned how his home country of Lebanon went from diverse paradise to all-out civil war in six weeks, or 1.5 months. About the same time as "just a flu" to today.

For all our sakes, I hope to God I'm wrong and I hope to God you're right.

In it, Taleb describes how a process or event can be misperceived as strengthening those who go through it, when actually it weakens all of them, killing some.

His example is submitting a cohort of rats to radiation. As they are subjected to higher and higher levels of radiation, more will die, the ones who are naturally stronger will survive. Our cohort will appear stronger and stronger as the radiation increases and the dead drop out of the group. But crucially, all will have been weaker after the radiation than before it.

But since we observed a stronger group the more we increased the radiation, we may say that it "hardened" them, in the sense of "that which doesn't kill one makes one stronger".

The problem of relying too much on "data-driven decisions" is that it leads to absurd optimizations that make the overall system more fragile.

We had only one pandemic in our lifetime, yet. But don't forget about Avian Flu and Swine Flu also happened and caused concern less than 10 years ago. The world is way more connected and we never had so many people being able to go across the world spreading a virus in less than 24h. The likelihood of another pandemic threat is increasing with time, not decreasing.

If anything, one of the lessons that I hope we take from this year is that we need to think our environments (on all scales, from the bedrooms in our homes to our cities and schools for our kids and the city altogether) for robustness and longevity, not for cost, practicality or marketability.

Yes. Black Swans are certainly a problem. It's insane to think that investment returns are anything resembling a Gaussian distribution. In the financial crisis of 2008-2009, people were using phrases such as "a 9 sigma event" to describe the markets.

Wrong! Basically THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS a 9 SIGMA EVENT. Wikipedia gives the probability of a 6 sigma event as 1 in 500 million. So it the epitome of arrogance to think that we're so "special" that we just happened to be alive during a 9 sigma market move.

What it all really means is that the markets do not behave the way lazy eggheads want them to. Everyone understands Gaussian distributions and standard deviation. So they are eager to use that math where they shouldn't.

I'm sure you know all this. But for those people who aren't familiar with Taleb and want to read more, he wrote three pop books about it:

2001 Fooled by Randomness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

2007 The Black Swan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_%28Taleb_book%29

2012 Antifragile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

I'm in the middle of reading Antifragile, and I am thoroughly enjoying it so far.

I don't believe this is a way of validating the security of a blockchain. Consider the turkey problem as stated in "THE BLACK SWAN" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "A Turkey is fed for 1000 days by a butcher. Every day confirms to the turkey (and the turkey's economics department, and its risk management department and its analytics department ...) that in fact the butcher loves turkeys. Every day brings more confidence to the statement. Until one day the Turkey is ripe for Thanks Giving".

You may very well be correct but I don't think length of time without a fatal error is a valid metric.

For me personally, I am in the Bitcoin proof-of-stake camp however I would be lying if I didn't say I also have a position in Ethereum.

What this does is create an opportunity for some industries to have 'winner takes almost all' scenarios. Book publishing and POP music are two examples where the very top people take almost all the rewards. Brain surgeon is not one of these industries - being the very best brain surgeon would still require a (in comparison) a lot more time than the author of the Harry Potter books takes to sell another book.

Most wealth is created by massively scalable business models such as licensing, show biz and mass media. And interestingly not that many fortunes come from Wall Street.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb also addresses this topic in some depth in his book "The black Swan" (http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...).

Options are riskier than stock, so they tend to pay out much higher. With such an unexpected drop in march, you could have bought a LOT of very very cheap (let's say $1/contract to make the numbers simple) put options for like AAPL $250 let's say. Those options are cheap because they generally never hit, and even in early the market had not priced in the possibility of coronavirus being a global problem of this scale. If that contract is worth $10 later (which is still a very cheap option), you've made 1,000% return.

> A tail-risk hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” returned 3,612% in March, paying off massively for clients who invested in it as protection against a plunge in stock prices.

All institutions hedge, it's just a matter of how much they hedge -- there are also some institutions that are intentionally "long volatility" (which means they expect volatility to increase). One way you could do this is to buy shares of a speculative instrument like $TVIX which is 2x fund of a thing called $VIX (the "Volatility Index"), you're going to lose money/maintain holdings (there's a thing called roll risk and other risks to consider just holding these instruments), but in a month like march when $VIX goes from ~$10 to ~$80, you're going to have a ~800% return.

A "sell the company" business model is like becoming an actor with a mind of becoming rich like Tom Cruise. No doubt some people who do it will find some success, but by definition this is something that (a) works only for a small number of people (the world needs a limited number of movie stars, Google & Co acquire a limited number of companies) and (b) contains a large element of luck - many actors have comparable talent & looks, many companies can (and a few already have) build a Twitter-like product.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a great book about the randomness in our lives: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...

^A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. A non-scalable job is something like dentistry, where the amount of money you make always stays pretty closely tied to the hours you work.

Let me second this suggestion. "Fooled by Randomness" is great and I enjoyed it a lot. I've read it multiple times. I read the "The Black Swan" once and thought it was good. I did not finish "Antifragile".

I am curious; what is your opinion of his works and the man himself? I had read (a long time ago) "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" and the thing i remember most is his definitions of Extremistan/Mediocristan (from the latter book) and our inability to understand "random chance" leading to a tendency to see patterns and devise explanations where there are none (eg. Causation vs. Correlation vs. Randomness) I find his writings thought-provoking but difficult to understand (eg. Differences between Randomness, Uncertainty, Probability and Risk) and sometimes quite nihilistic.

When you say "They have the data." I assume you are speaking of statistics. But

- These are rare events and statistical analysis is at it's limits,

- The past is no predictor of the future. Example: the introduction and continued enhancement of IEDs in Iraq.

Although he doesn't elaborate on my first point above, I recommend that you also read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, "The Black Swan".

Book: Accelerate

I picked up this book after hearing high praises from Martin Fowler and Dan North during conference talks. Forsgren and her colleagues have been doing research into DevOps and its effects on organizational performance. This is a much more rigorous account than is usual in this space, so I believe it is a must read for everyone in software.

---

Author: Gerald Weinberg

Books:

* Are Your Lights On?

* Becoming a Technical Leader'

* Introduction to General Systems Thinking

Jerry's books have had a tremendous amount of impact on my thinking in the past couple years. I highly recommend reading everything you can get your hands on.

---

Author: Nassim Taleb

Books:

* The Black Swan

* Fooled by Randomness

Taleb has changed my way of looking at the world. His books are enjoyable to read, and his ideas thought provoking. I will continue to read the rest of his books over the next year.

---

Author: Robert Pirsig

Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A classic. I reread this for a bookclub. It's a bit esoteric, but I coupled it with Weinbergs General Systems Thinking and extracted some vague but interesting insights.

---

Author: Timmothy Snyder

Book: On Tyranny

This is a short and captivating book. I read it in about an hour and a half on Remembrance Day.

* Oxygen (Lane)

* The Vital Question (Lane)

* Mitochondria and the meaning of life (Lane)

* Life Ascending (Lane)

* Shoe Dog (Knight)

* Heat (Buford)

* Thinking Fast And Slow (Daniel K, 3rd time reading it)

* Fluent Forever (Wyner)

* Dark Money (Mayer)

* Elon Musk (Vance)

* The Black Swan (Taleb, 5th time reading it)

read more :

NewYorker:"The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System" ( April 21, 2020 )

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is...

I'm reading Anti-Fragile now. Can't off the top of my head give you advice on experiment design or statistics. [EDIT] It's more about designing systems that benefit from the unpredictability of the world, instead of building systems that are harmed by unpredictability. [EDIT] It's an important companion to his previous book, because it gives positive advice on how to make decisions in a world that isn't amenable to understanding because of complexity. It effectively gives positive advice, instead of just negative.

There's also SITG that I'd like to read. And there's a "Technical Incerto" which looks like a work-in-progress, but involves concrete statistics.

[edit] He's also tweeting the contents of a new Data Science course he's teaching at NYU. Be warned that Taleb is a bit of an arsehole on Twitter.

Nope. To fully demonstrate how uncertain predictors’ forecasts are, you need to animate a few meteorites crashing into the Plinko board, one said meteorite with Hillary's emails on them. And then go read The Black Swan, especially the chapter where one of the reference figures is a Plinko board.

Fooled By Randomness - Taleb

The Black Swan - Taleb

Antifragile - Taleb

When Genius Failed - Lowenstein

Liars Poker - Lewis

The Big Short - Lewis

Flash Boys - Lewis

Too Big To Fail - Sorkin

Against the Gods - Bernstein

One Up On Wallstreet - Lynch

The Intelligent Investor - Graham

Discounted cashflow = bullshit used to rationalize the sale price ( it can have some use in super long term predictable business like real estate with 10 year lease and well diversified tenants)

Hope this was helpfull

Nothing they state in the 5 points has the facts to back it up.

> Ireland’s population was decimated by the effect of monoculture during the potato famine. Just consider that the same can happen at a planetary scale.

We have famine at a planetary scale, just the writers are not in that famine.

"Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. " https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

[edit] "The Black Swan" is just plan wrong, I really don't get why people buy into that book. It's a cute idea. But wrong.

In reality this narrative we create is not a product of facts, but a story we use to make the world seem more understandable than it really is. This concept is discussed in The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb.

I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed to succeed.

A more accurate summary would read "a 7900 word article on the little-known economics and vulnerabilities of modern chip fabs, with ~100 words explaining how the author came to be interested in the topic". You could replace the WBE bits with "I am an investor in Intel and was reading Taleb's _The Black Swan_ and began to wonder what black swans might affect my stock holdings", and the essay wouldn't be that different.

Have you read The Black Swan? It's not a pep talk. It's all about how much of what affects us is out of our control. I suppose one could mope about this, but what Taleb says is to do things that will reward you if the unpredictable happens.

Persistence and effort, on the other hand, scales linearly - if you can iterate over 10 ideas instead of 1, you're 10 times as likely to succeed, no matter what your intelligence.

Incorrect. If you can generate one more idea than anyone else, you may be worth many times what they're worth--because to someone who desperately needs an idea, they're going to pay a huge premium to get the best person for the job. If you're buying market data in order to make high-frequency trades, the company that gets you information 1% faster isn't worth 1% more. It's worth almost infinitely more, since being the second person in the trade doesn't get you any profit.

Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's had so much success that this is probably my fault.

If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of his pieces are written in easily digestible formats.

https://medium.com/@nntaleb

I've re-started trying to read the Black Swan about 10 times and IMHO if you just read the first 3 chapters then you'll get about 95% of what you would if you had read the entire book.

I think the problem with his books that I have is that he considers himself not just an author but a modern day philosopher, and with that comes a level of rigor in his writing that brings me back to my measure theory and real analysis courses.

If you really want to read his books, then start backwards.

Antifragile is awesome, but still very wordy, and builds on top of all his other works. It almost seems to be the culmination of the idea's he's been writing about since the black Swan.

As a side note, for anyone who wants to learn about options trading with a focus on how a trader would view them, ie from a mathematical perspective, then check out one of his first books...... Dynamic Hedging of Options.

http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803...

As a second side note........

His latest concept of “Skin in the game” is the best form of risk control that we've found for reigning in traders. Once traders are required to

1) keep the vast majority of their bonus in the fund for a few years

2) take part of their bonus in the form of non liquid securities if they want to hold more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in non liquid assets

we have found they pay alot more attention to the liquidity of their portfolio and the long term profitability of their portfolio, both of which are good for the long term success of the fund.

The Selfish Gene - Dawkins

A New Kind of Science - Wolfram

The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter

Atlas Shrugged - Rand

The Fountainhead - Rand

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi

Artificial Life - Steven Levy

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html

Glasshouse - Charles Stross

Permutation City - Greg Egan

Neuromancer - William Gibson

The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - Eric Beinhocker

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Taleb in "The Black Swan" on the value of unread books.

IIRC Nassim Nicholas Taleb speaks of VC startups as good "Black Swans" {in contrast to the bad Black Swans visiting the mortgage market, stock exchanges, and financial investing in general today). He also compares bankers (who wear suits and ties) with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and concludes that investment in the entrepreneur is safer. Aside: Taleb says not to trust any expert who wears a suit and tie. It sounds funny but he wasn't joking.

It's a good time to read "The Black Swan": it will help people re-align their investments and make better future judgements in their work and play.

I think, that mottos in Western culture are just pathetic ones. Western culture knows nothing about how to raise steady emotions in people. I was born in USSR, and I saw how it should be done. But there is one consequence: with experience comes tolerance to external attempts to raise my emotions by some lovely motto. Now it is really hard to. "All people deserve to live healthy lives" -- what is it? I was grown on ideas of Worldwide Communist Revolution and bringing freedom from damned capitalists to all people? I read books, I watched films, discussed this in a classes, I learnt world history in terms of societies struggling to make one more step toward communism. And after that I hear motto for preschool kids. The topic for boring school essay about role of Communism in bringing healthy life to everyone. I had eaten tons of this shit before I came to a school. I have eaten even more in school. Why I should have any emotions now?

Really, I can hardly believe that any adult can be touched by such a motto. I'm unable to understand it, even when I try to imagine how it could be, if I was not born under ideologic pressure.

The Black Swan can be a good motto, because it is a symbol of some non-trivial idea, because it reminds me something that I can forget to think through one more time. It reminds me about ideas which I want to think through again and again. But "healty lives for everyone" is something like communism, it will not be like that in the overseeable future. It is just one more ideologic lie, which is must be spoken due to some social protocol. Pointless tradition.

Everything else had me scratching my head wondering why he is usually so highly regarded on here. I am enjoying the Black Swan right now, it's the first book I've read of his, but he really goes off the deep end on twitter.

As Cicero pointed out, we all suffer from 'survivorship bias': that is, we confine our evidence to that adduced from those few who succeed or survive, and ignore the silent evidence of all those who didn't make it. The graveyard is silent, the awards ceremony is noisy.

[1] https://sunwords.com/2009/08/24/to-understand-success-and-fa...

The ideas in Antifragile are to me an good application of the bets to make in life and love. Skin in the game is to evaluate the bets (actions) of others. Doctor prescribing statins...hmmm...what are his incentives around the upsides/downsides of it?

Fooled by Randomness is a prescription of how to evaluate systemic performance (or failure). Black swans is eh...just about black swans or how outlier events in power law distributions can fool us by not showing up for a long time and then ...watch out.

Nassim can appear to be overly verbose but his books defy summarization. I recommend reading them but given my own experience can empathize by the contra opinions.

The properties of the bell curve are well known, and therefore easier to perform statistical tests with, whereas the many stable power law distributions are harder to deal with and more difficult to simply assume.

Also Teddy Roosevelt's biography has been very influential.

I replied to nirvana about how the word inventing does not mean anything. And yet he and you kept on debating on minutiae. Many techie people from India look up to MS and Google as opposed to say Apple or Amazon, partly because their influence is more apparent, so I understand your affinity for them. But attributing invention or success to something which can be attributed to random events and network effects, is a bit off by standards here.

I did not down vote anyone, just making a general comment. Things are never so black and white, grab a good book, read some scientific (non-CS) papers, you will probably have a broader perspective. I would recommend starting with the massive bibliography at the back of The Black Swan (Taleb).

You can focus on creating sustainable small software business. I don't know if you have read "Start small, Stay small" by Rob Wallings. It talks about creating a sustainable small business on the side.

David Lawee: Launch quickly! Google buys technology and people.

Sam Altman: How and when to get funding for your startup. Easy and detailed explanations.

Jack Sheridan: There are four important legal areas to consider for your startup: Who owns the company? Who owns the tech? Who controls the company? Who gets what in case of liquidity? Analysis of each of these.

Paul Graham: like the "Be Good" essay, but much more fun in-person

Greg McAdoo: What Sequoia looks for: big total market, company that defines a new category, rapid iteration, accumulated advantage.

DHH: "Step 2: Price!" In the context of the prior two talks, this one was explosive. Aggressively stated position that differs from the implicit philosophy of the rest of startup school, and a certain Web 2.0 scene in general.

Paul Buchheit: Inspirational. Leave your job if you feel drained. Left Intel for Google. Then left Google. What if Woz had stayed at HP?

Jeff Bezos: AWS is great! It's scales up and down elastically!

Arrington: "I genuinely look up to entrepeneurs." Roosevelt "man in the arena" quote. Engage in dialog with people who criticize you.

Marc Andreessen: Read "The Black Swan". High-level philosophy. Experiences in the first bubble. How to avoid mediocrity in growing your company.

Peter Norvig: Nerdy math/algorithms fun. "It's more agile to work with data than code."

I received the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb for Christmas, and there is a lot of "disruption leads to winner take all" talk in the book. I don't necessarily disagree with Taleb, but it's amazing that our lives are dominated by only a handful of companies (I'm willing to bet 90% of our daily time will be attributed to using a product made by either Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook). Now, the aforementioned companies generally do require scale, so my assertion is a bit hyperbolic, but in Uber's case... does freight really NEED scale? I've never needed to order freight, so I can't speak from experience here, but it seems like the social cost to having Uber win all may be far greater than the benefits in efficiency. I can imagine a future where we arrive at a new Era of Barons and legislation is passed to break them up (ala Rockefeller, Vanderbilt...etc.).

Last but not least, we seem to be push for "Universal Income" as a means to assuage the pain caused by the Winner Take All economy, but I don't think that's fair to a lot of America. I think we should solve the problem in it's root before we talk about Universal Income- I don't mean to sound negative, but it just seems like a convenient cop out to the problems at hand.

The more interesting question is how do you expose yourself to the positive uncertainties involved (e.g. a carbon negative power technology)? This requires investment in research in parallel with your infrastructure investments.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

Personally, that's a motivator to build a product without being concerned about what all the other products are doing / how they look. It's also a great reminder of the importance of empiricism in some parts of life, which is great to keep in mind with something as simple as debugging your code or doing customer support...coming at a problem like an experiment, from the position of knowing nothing, means you can get to the answer faster (usually) and with more accuracy and precision.

I personally like to read books from people who predicted things before they happened and try to understand their mindset.

Understanding finance...

One may not like its writing style but Nicolas Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" helped me understand how finance was indeed the crumbs of capitalism that Buffet hates.

Understanding economy...

Another one I love --but it's in french-- is Charles Gave. That economist (definitely not mainstream) did write, in 1999, that the introduction of the common currency in Europe (the Euro) would lead to: "Too many houses in Spain, too many industries in Germany and too many public servants in France. That Spain was going to state default, followed by Greece".

So he got the order wrong about Greece (which already default a first time and which is going to default again) and Spain, but besides that he was spot on.

And you cannot say: "If you take enough economists, one of them is going to predict the future". Because here the prediction was way too precise to be sheer luck. He did explain the precise mechanisms that would lead to that situation (and he did bet his money accordingly and made millions).

Basically after reading that you understand how wrong the Keynes school is and how Krugman totally lost it (yeah, let's mill a $1 trillion coin... Why not mill 26 of them and be done with the public debt right!?).

There are going to be more state defaults in Europe (it's not even opened up for debate), starting with Greece which is going to default again. There's going to either severe inflation or partial state default in the U.S. too unless public spendings are dramatically brought down. No way out.

I'd suggest not to read from people explaining the past or the present. It's not interesting. It's more interesting to take out older writings explaining what's going to happen in the future and why. People able to do that are the most critical thinkers ever.

These writers often use an aggressive tone but you have to bear with it: these people are right and they know it and hardly anyone is listening to them.

Examples of the books I am talking about are: The Black Swan, Brief History of Time, God Delusion, Selfish Gene, Predictibly Irrational, etc. etc.

At the moment I am reading The Black Swan by Nasim Nicholas Taleb. In the fiction category I last read Haruka Murakami's (hope I spelled it right) After Dark.

The Black Swan was also by Taleb and probably the most influential finance book of the last 20 years, plus a great read for anybody thinking in 'systems'. It'd give the idea the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes words have no meaning, sometimes it takes some work.

I played this game myself with a friend. I sent him ten samples of a (for him) unknown distribution and asked him to estimate the mean. Then 100, then 1000. His estimate of the mean kept changing to higher and higher values, because the samples were drawn from a Pareto (power-law) distribution with a mean of 1000. Such a distribution is almost indistinguishable from one with a mean of infinity, because all the signal is in the very rare, large outliers. If you try to analyze samples from such a process assuming it's Gaussian, nothing will make sense, and the standard deviation will give you an estimated uncertainty of the mean that is far, far below the actual uncertainty.

No, but I've read the wikipedia article, and absolutely despised the tone of this article. That said, calling it "pep talk bullshit" was an emotional response - it's been a long day. What I mean to say is that Taleb is giving bad advice with a lot of confidence and bad "proofs" based on idiotically simple models. For example:

Taleb says is to do things that will reward you if the unpredictable happens

That sentence seems to either (a) have a huge gap of basic probability, or (b) contradict itself.

First, if "unpredictable" is to mean "low probability of happening", there are several orders of magnitude more "unpredictable" things than "predictable" ones (and that's why they have such a low probability of happening).

A better model of "events" and "probability" would consider the key variable correlating to probability of events is specificity - it's highly probable that some planes will crash in the next 10 years. That relatively general event can be partitioned into less probable (but more specific) events. There are more specific events than general events, and each is less probable in proportion to its specificity. If you could know which unpredictable thing were going to happen, they wouldn't be unpredictable anymore.

Of course, reality is stranger yet - events aren't all neat subsets and partitions of each other like they are in that model, and predictable varies with probable based on some measure of the accuracy of the world model of the predictor (which, I would argue, is usually pretty bad). Hence, I would argue that predictability doesn't matter much at all (after some point) - evolution and the ability to let go of one seemingly great ideas matters more.

But there are a few clear standouts.
6. The patently obvious design flaws in a vehicle or weapon system go uncorrected during the entire life cycle of the system in question.

The original humvee had issues with passenger armor back in 2004 - they could have been purchased with the armor but weren't.

13, Computers, when shot, explode as if they had been stuffed full of Roman candles.

The videos of laptop batteries catching fire are pretty sparkly. Not sure how that would actually interact with a gunshot.

25, On-board computers always know exactly how long it will take for the malfunction to blow up the ship.

The Tesla roadster battery stories seem to give warning and force drivers to stop and get out.

31. A robot that can't climb stairs is deployed in an area where stairs are common.

Roomba?

At the very least, we can make an existential argument about sci-fi cliches actually being accurate. I couldn't think of a good way to get historical science fiction cliches. But the thing about the future is it's unknown. some of Jules Verne's stuff worked out, like submarines and travel to the moon, and other stuff didn't, like time travel.

I guess the rational response to "the singularity" is to stick a number on the likelihood of that actually happening - and then getting on with your life.

I think you're thinking about the future in a funny way, you should give Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan a read.

– The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

I purposefully don't listen to music when I walk places. I enjoy thinking and taking in my surroundings. However, I probably still don't think enough. Thanks for this article!

Side note: Please don't justify the text if you don't have to, it makes it harder to read. Thanks!

First, have you read Steven Gary Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany?" If not, put that at #1 on your list, IMO.

Outside of that, Patricia Seybold's "Outside Innovation" was interesting. "Rework" by the 37 Signals guys is worth a read. If you want something that's not strictly business, but could be important to entrepreneurs, or just anybody who is fascinated by understanding more about how the world works, then "The Black Swan" and/or "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb are very interesting.

The main problem however is that it would be much better (for the reader) condensed down as a long essay. Although many books in the genre are essentially essays flanneled out into books, the problem is particularly acute in The Black Swan.

Sun Tzu, which edition/translation?

I don't know what right is, but I know the way we currently think about intelligence is wrong.

  - Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society"
  - N.N.Taleb "The Black Swan"
  - Danny Kahneman "Thinking Fast & Slow" (also his papers with Amos Tversky)
  - Thomas Ligotti "The Conspiracy against the Human Race"
  - Peter Wessel Zapffe "On the Tragic" & "The Last Messiah"
  - Sokal, Alan D "Intellectual Impostures"
  - Simon Herbert "A The Sciences of the Artificial"
  - Herbert Marcuse "One-Dimensional Man"
  - Schopenhauer "Parerga and Paralipomena"
  - Lewis Mumford "The Story of Utopias"
  - Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish"
  - Edward S. Herman "Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media"
  - Franklin Foer "World Without Mind The Existential Threat of Big Tech"
  - Ben Goldacre "Bad science"
  - Emil Cioran "The Book of Delusions"
  - Gracian "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"
  - Heidegger Martin "The Question Concerning Technology"
  - Jacques Ellul "Propaganda The Formation of Mens Attitudes"
  - Mumford Lewis "The Culture of Cities"
  - Orwell "1984", "Down and Out in Paris and London", "Animal Farm"
  - Huxley "Brave New World", "The Doors Of Perception"
  - Michael Pollan "How to change your mind"
  - Jeff Hawkins "On Intelligence"
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", "Notes from the Underground", "The Brothers Kasamarov", "The Gambler", "The Idiot", "Crime & Punishment"
  - Peter Smith "Teach Yourself Logic"
  - Thomas More "Utopia"
  - Emil Cioran "The Trouble With Being Born"
  - Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago"
  - Nietzsche "Complete works"
  - Bulgakov "Master and Margarita"
  - Gerald M. Weinberg "The Secrets of Consulting"

Here are some books I've given as gifts recently:

* The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, Lewis Dartnell[1]

* The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb[2]

* Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse[3]

* The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris and Steven Hayes[4]

* Code, Charles Petzold[5]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Afterm...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Frag...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Siddhartha-Hermann-Hesse/dp/161382378...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Start-Livin...

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...

> A story in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan illustrates this automatic search for causality. He reports that bond prices initially rose on the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture in his hiding place in Iraq. Investors were apparently seeking safer assets that morning, and the Bloomberg News service flashed this headline: U.S. TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM. Half an hour later, bond prices fell back and the revised headline read: U.S. TREASURIES FALL; HUSSEIN CAPTURE BOOSTS ALLURE OF RISKY ASSETS. Obviously, Hussein’s capture was the major event of the day, and because of the way the automatic search for causes shapes our thinking, that event was destined to be the explanation of whatever happened in the market on that day. The two headlines look superficially like explanations of what happened in the market, but a statement that can explain two contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all. In fact, all the headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence: a large event is supposed to have consequences, and consequences need causes to explain them.

"Likewise we think that Galileo was a victim in the name of science; in fact, the church didn't take him too seriously. It seems, rather, that Galileo caused the uproar himself by ruffling a few feathers. At the end of the year in which Darwin and Wallace presented their papers on evolution by natural selection that changed the way we view the world, the president of the Linnean society, where the papers were presented, announced that the society saw "no striking discovery," nothing in particular that could revolutionize science. "

So Taleb makes the opposite claim that their ideas in their time weren't regarded as heresy as we now tend to believe.

> The ludic fallacy, identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, is "the misuse of games to model real-life situations."

...

> The alleged fallacy is a central argument in the book and a rebuttal of the predictive mathematical models used to predict the future – as well as an attack on the idea of applying naïve and simplified statistical models in complex domains. According to Taleb, statistics is applicable only in some domains, for instance casinos in which the odds are visible and defined.

Both Taleb's books, "The Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness" are an interesting take for such models. Meanwhile, most economists know about "Knightian Uncertainty" [1] which talks about differentiation of risk and uncertainty.

> "Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated.... The essential fact is that 'risk' means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating.... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or 'risk' proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty

Long story short, the less you know, the more "random" events appear to be. As Taleb wrote, "a surprise for the turkey is not a surprise for the butcher." Buffett's strategy is to know/understand as much as possible. Of course you will still be victim of the unexpected, but probably not as frequently.

Of course, a big part of the latter two books was also structuring my life so I don't have situations where I need to deal with office politics as part of my livelihood. But I can confirm that the techniques do work for very real stresses I've had that can't be avoided.

> Things got a lot worse in 1997. The Swedish academy gave another round of Gaussian-based Nobel Prizes to Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who had improved on an old mathematical formula and made it compatible with the existing grand Gaussian general financial equilibrium theories—hence acceptable to the economics establishment. The formula was now “useable.” It had a list of long forgotten “precursors,” among whom was the mathematician and gambler Ed Thorp, who had authored the bestselling Beat the Dealer, about how to get ahead in blackjack, but somehow people believe that Scholes and Merton invented it, when in fact they just made it acceptable. The formula was my bread and butter. Traders, bottom-up people, know its wrinkles better than academics by dint of spending their nights worrying about their risks, except that few of them could express their ideas in technical terms, so I felt I was representing them. Scholes and Merton made the formula dependent on the Gaussian, but their “precursors” subjected it to no such restriction. /.../

> And the option formula went on bearing the name Black-Scholes-Merton, instead of reverting to its true owners, Louis Bachelier, Ed Thorp, and others.

Taleb's "The Black Swan" has a nice discussion of scorn of the abstract, though not in the context of procrastination.

A "Black Swan" is an improbable event that has a major impact, and happens when people least expect it (e.g.: 9/11, WWI, 2008 economy crisis).

Black swans can have a negative or positive impact. The negative ones can wipe out things build over decades in a matter of seconds, while the positive ones can take longer (e.g.: the advancement of technology in the past 30 years). The positive ones need to be put on scale with longer intervals of time. They’re harder to notice if you look at a specific time in history.

"“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

Just to point to you, you seem to mis-characterize him as saying "Everything is random!" Here is a complete quote.

"The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress.

The beneficial properties have to reside in the type of exposure, that is, the payoff function and not in the "luck" part: there needs to be a significant asymmetry between the gains (as they need to be large) and the errors (small or harmless), and it is from such asymmetry that luck and trial and error can produce results. The general mathematical property of this asymmetry is convexity (which is explained in Figure 1); functions with larger gains than losses are nonlinear-convex and resemble financial options. Critically, convex payoffs benefit from uncertainty and disorder. The nonlinear properties of the payoff function, that is, convexity, allow us to formulate rational and rigorous research policies, and ones that allow the harvesting of randomness."

http://edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substit...

Also, stop feeling scared and terrified (your words). These emotions are not helping you in any way.

Ha, I did the same thing.

> I am partway through Antifragile and do not find it as compelling as The Black Swan, however.

Personally I think Antifragile is much better, in that it it's a more complete work that contains his previous books and irons out what the consequences are. It's possible you need to have a similar view on history, culture and modernity in place before you appreciate it - I was into stoicism, empiricism and classics in general before I read Taleb - as he's largely using that as "the other side of the barbell" in his explanations, with the first side being mathematical (see his technical online textbook). I've read The Black Swan once or maybe twice, whereas I am already on my third reading of the Antifragile (I can't help myself, it's too relevant).

I'll choose Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebo...).

The way it changed my life was to make me actually think more about the way my mind operates, the decisions I make and the way these decisions affect my life. As a consequence, there were a few books I read later that were loosely related to this one in the way that they all refer to the way people think.

Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice

Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works

Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan; and Fooled by Randomness

Leonard Mlodinov - The Drunkard's Walk (quite similar to Fooled by Randomness)

Carol Dweck - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Neil Postman / Andrew Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death

Rolf Dobelli - The Art of Thinking Clearly (just started)

On my reading list now:

Quiet by Susan Cain - mentioned already

The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday

Also, did not quite change my life, but very recommended:

Neal Stephenson - Anathem.

You may have to struggle through the beginning, but as soon as I understood the way the world he devised operates, I was thrilled completely.

I did find that Taleb is quick critical of poor-quality reviewers, but did not find something which matches your description. I presume it's described in his third book?

Two which had wide acclaim for more-or-less predicting the financial crisis of 2008-2009 were Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. But I happen to like his later Antifragile the best.[2]

My biggest criticism of Taleb's books is that, while he tells us what can happen and why, he only has generalities on how to prepare and respond. I'd prefer more specifics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

step 2) read The Black Swan by Taleb

step 3) make an account at caps.fool.com

step 4) get your score above 80

step 5) never invest more than 2% of your capital in any investment

step 6) figure out how to profit from your capital given rule #5

step 7) if you've figured out rule #6 you're set for life

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com) in his book “The Black Swan” talks about one of his friends, a stock trader, with a very specific strategy. This strategy involves losing lots of small amounts over time, and once every 6 years or so, one enormous win. He explained that his trader friend needed to check his track record continuously to remind him of the actual benefit of this strategy, because even the small losses were eating away at him. Up to a point where he wanted to give up.

"During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. Researchers from the Center for Naval Analyses had conducted a study of the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions, and had recommended that armor be added to the areas that showed the most damage. Wald noted that the study only considered the aircraft that had survived their missions — the bombers that had been shot down were not present for the damage assessment. The holes in the returning aircraft, then, represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still return home safely. Wald proposed that the Navy instead reinforce the areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, since those were the areas that, if hit, would cause the plane to be lost."

Some of them lend themselves very well to being compressed, like 'crossing the chasm'. Others, like 'founders at work' are really impossible to summarize.

I find it sort of interesting that he lists both 'The Black Swan', as well as the stories/autobiographies. One of the points of the former is that a lot of the big successes are just luck - being in the right place at the right time and having enough skills to capitalize on the opportunity. But beyond that, there is often nothing in particular that can be copied to 'achieve success'. It's an interesting book, and I'm still wrestling with it.

The fellow's predictions in the past have missed the big events: don't bother trusting his newest predictions.

What do either of these books teach you about trading, other than "never forget that shit happens, because your mind will do everything it can to convince that it won't?"

I can only guess why it works, or why simply reading HN or articles isn't enough. Reading a book is usually harder, more immersive and, if the author is good, usually feels like a dialog.

What books exactly probably depends on yourself. I started with The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and it really opened my taste to good books. Richard Dawkins's older books, Marvin Minsky, Hernando de Soto, Jared Diamond, they all deserve to be read in full.

I also caught up with some professional books I somehow missed, like The Mythical Man-month or Peopleware, and I found a fascination for cognitive psychology with The Wisdom of Crowds and Predictably Irrational.

Yup. Thinking back I no longer wonder why. Each book was a very long conversation with a person smarter then myself. Exactly what I needed.

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

The Emperors New Mind - Roger Penrose

Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglass Hoffstadter

Brocas Brain - Carl Sagan

The (mis)Behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot

The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassem Taleb

Fiction

Gates Of Fire - Stephen Pressfield

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

Hardwired - Walter Jon Williams

Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan

Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

Space - Stephen Baxter

Enders Game - Orson Scott Card

Skeleton Crew - Stephen King

I've given away a lot of books. I'm old.

"What an assertion! It also proved to be very useful for hordes of scientists... what about some examples of confused scientists?"

How about every single economist and financial analyst who failed to predict the financial crashes of the last 50 years? Did you realize how much money was lost over the last 50 years by the financial industry's reliance on models that improperly use the standard Gaussian bell curve? Taleb pointed out why the Gaussian is not usually an appropriate model for financial analysis and suggested a return to more conservative models. Yet today Modern Portfolio Theory and the Black-Scholes models (which use the Gaussian) dominate in financial schools and institutions despite the fact that they absolutely utterly failed, not badly, but catastrophically in every financial crisis when they were most needed.

You state that "Standard deviation tells you how volatile measurements are". But Taleb shows how financial markets are non-Gaussian and have "fat tails" and gives the data and the supporting arguments.

bluecalm says:

"As someone who uses it daily I am eagerly awaiting his argument."

You're late! Taleb began publishing his arguments years ago and continues to publish. You're way behind. Read his papers and read his books in the following order:

Fooled by Randomness http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Market...

The Black Swan http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness/d...

Antifragile, http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/...

BTW simply because someone's writing style is different does not mean that he is wrong. To me, complaining about a writing style is a form of ad hominem argument. People are different and Taleb is one-of-a-kind. Initially I didn't see where he was going, but once I realized that he was presenting ideas that were absolutely, utterly novel and had real explanatory power I sat up and paid attention. If you read for the facts and the valid arguments you will see that Taleb delivers the goods.

(Of course, 99% of the businesses where there's no possible way it can succeed don't actually succeed, and you get back to Taleb's argument again.)

I agree that commercial debt can be used for investment and is therefore useful. I think he is commenting on national debt. The problem is that the UK and US hold a magnitude of debt that will not be re-paid for several generations. Most of us would agree this is not healthy.

Further to this, his point about debt is that it is used to prevent the old institutions from failing and the resulting tax increases are hindering the next wave entrepreneurs. The financial crisis should have sped up the next wave of creative/destructive innovation in the financial sector but instead we are pretty much back to the status quo in The City and on Wall Street.

One would therefore be well advised to take his notes about the work of a French economist with a pinch of salt.

"The optimal strategy is to go become an academic or a French-style civil servant, the anti-wealth generators."

To pick but one example among many others, Louis Pasteur was French, an academic and (therefore) a civil servant, and arguably contributed to save many lives. Or does that not qualify as wealth generation?

An older version of his web page (cached on Google) says that he's done with his sabbatical and book writing (new book out next month) and back to work:

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:1nVmMgBra40J:www.fooledbyrandomness.com/%3Fref%3DSevSevil.Com+taleb+sabbatical&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=15&gl=us

"I took a one year sabbatical to finish The Black Swan (which lasted 2 1/2 years). Now I am back but will not discuss my business activities -- only my literary and technical ideas on the philosophy of chance uncertainty, & probability. In a way I am back in business taking a rest sabbatical from thinking."