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

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maCDzPonMay 19, 2021

I got the opposite feeling from The Black Swan.
Taleb finished the book by pointing out that life on earth is a black swan and very precious. That was meaningful to me.

_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

pacman2onMay 19, 2021

I have not read it. The black swan was interesting. But in the end I may have liked books from Mandelbrot more. I have met professional traders that did not know (and became very angry) when told that far out of the money options are underpriced because it is not a random walk but a fat tail distribution.

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

Most impressive book: Thus spoke Zarathustra.

shannifinonMay 19, 2021

Similar for me. I first learned of Taleb through another short book called "The Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile" which examines ideas from "Fooled by Randomness" as they relate to fiction publishing. (Taleb in turn briefly references this book somewhere in "The Black Swan".) This was actually encouraging for me, because it meant my stories being rejected by publishers did not necessarily mean my writing wasn't good enough; quality is an important variable up to a point, but "luck" also plays a major role. Recognizing that means you can more effectively leverage it.

cpp_frogonJune 20, 2021

As usual, the replies are attacking an oversimplication of the concept of the Lindy effect, and that reaction in part may be because Skallas indulges in oversimplification himself. The condition of something being Lindy is something to be determined after a long time has passed (tried-and-tested, stading the test of time, centuries or even thousands of years), it does not necessarily imply that all technology is inherently bad, but that dropping timeless heuristics that helped humans get by, acquire knowledge, solve problems, etc. is.

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).

colonelanguzonJune 29, 2021

In my opinion, no, not really. Hard work could be necessary but not sufficient, or contingently necessary. Or the success criterion could be defined in a way that obscures the link to hard work. This is from a review of Taleb's The Black Swan:

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...

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.

mmmrkonMar 21, 2021

Having recently finished N. N. Taleb's "The Black Swan", I am now wary when I see Gaussian distribution concepts applied to the stock market. The numerical study code seems to use `std`, as in standard deviation, unless I'm misunderstanding something? That assumption would make the code (and entire idea?) useless, because markets do not appear to be Gaussian?