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The Bed of Procrustes

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable. Random House, 2007.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle

We know a lot less about hundred-year floods than five-year floods—model error swells when it comes to small probabilities. The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence—yet the rarer the event, the more confident these “scientists” involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferenc... See more

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle

Incerto 4-Book Bundle

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • 1 highlight

amazon.com

Nassim Taleb in a book curiously titled Antifragile. Here is the core of the idea. We can think about three categories of objects: Ones that are harmed by volatility and unpredictability, ones that are neutral to volatility and unpredictability, and finally, ones that benefit from it.

Rhiannon Beaubien • The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts

people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instincts and to listen to their grandmothers (or to Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge), who have a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

I worry less about advertised and sensational risks, more about the more vicious hidden ones. I worry less about terrorism than about diabetes, less about matters people usually worry about because they are obvious worries, and more about matters that lie outside our consciousness and common discourse (I also have to confess that I do not worry a l

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)

Black Swan Glossary

Academic libertarian: someone (like myself) who considers that knowledge is subjected to strict rules but not institutional authority, as the interest of organized knowledge is self-perpetuation, not necessarily truth (as with governments). Academia can suffer from an acute expert problem (q.v.), producing cosmetic