HackerNews Readings: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

All Time Past 6 Months

How to Lie with Statistics

Darrell Huff and Irving Geis

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Game Programming Patterns

Robert Nystrom

4.8 on Amazon

8 HN comments

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

Will Larson

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Federalist Papers

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Calculus Made Easy

Silvanus P. Thompson and Martin Gardner

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer - translator, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)

Nassim Nicholas Nicholas Taleb

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt and Gildan Media, LLC

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Unicorn Project

Gene Kim

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

4.3 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))

Martin Fowler

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman, George Wilson, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Joe Ochman, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

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terioonJune 25, 2021

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. Good stuff about randomness and how to benefit from it.

VMGonJune 21, 2021

I could be more specific, but I would risk getting sued by Craig Wright and his friends

I want to leave you with this quote though

> “First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”

> ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

_MicroftonMay 19, 2021

You might know one of his books: "The Black Swan", "Antifragile" and "Skin in the Game".

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

cweillonJune 27, 2021

I'm also a huge Taleb fan. However for a first book, I'd recommend his Antifragile book instead since it was written 10 years later in his career and further explores the ideas addressed in Fooled by Randomness with the benefit of more hindsight and discussion with peers in the field.

For anyone interested, I discuss the key takeaways from Antifragile, specifically for software engineers in https://youtu.be/jP6UQPSAk58.

oh_sighonApr 9, 2021

Nassim Taleb wrote a book on this concept called
"Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder"

kpwagneronMay 19, 2021

Haha! I had a similar reaction when I started reading Taleb. You might checkout Antifragile, which offers a more positive view of randomness. It's easy to get a dire impression from Taleb, but to use his words, "don't read it *too* well." If you really dig into Taleb, specifically Skin in the Game, he is a proponent of risk-taking: his closing statements in Skin in the Game include "Start a business."

haltingproblemonMay 19, 2021

I thought the same for a long time about Antifragile and the oft overlooked Skin in the Game. Both books are now on my yearly reading list. Reading those two along with Fooled by Randomness and to an extent the Black Swan has made me infinitely less foolish and perhaps wiser.

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.