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Antifragile book 6

Dec 21, 20249 min read

202205170603

Antifragile book 6

  • We don’t usually take into account what we missed doing. We recount only an action but not an inaction. ^f1a743
    • According to Taleb, it’s more important.
    • Evolution and professionals use in their framework only negative effects.
      • Chess grand masters win by not losing.
      • Entrepreneurs get rich by not getting bust.
      • The learning of life is about what to avoid.
      • Listen to Peter Watts about pessimists, who survived.
    • The greatest contribution to knowledge lies in a field of subtraction. ^1323f4

Follow up on Karl Popper's work

The Poverty of Historicism - Karl Popper

Steve Jobs or LESS is MORE principle in action

«People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.»

Less is more principle described in Essentialism The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

  • Wrong things are quite robust.

    • They were wrong a hundred years ago and still wrong today.
    • Is it the real state of affairs, or we are missing something? How to disprove this statement?

  • Again, less is more in decision-making.

    • Fast and frugal (resource efficient), reach good decision despite limited time, knowledge and computing powers.
    • Don’t overcomplicate things you are dealing with. Abandon any sophistication for speed and efficiency.

  • Pareto’s distribution is not exactly 20-80.

    • Now we are moving this already imbalances numbers to even more imbalanced numbers of 99-1.
      • 99 percent of Internet traffic is generated to less than 1 percent sites.
      • 99 percent of book sales come from 1 percent of authors.

  • At some point, abundant information can turn itself into a problem.

    • To reach a right decision, we need the exactly needed amount of information, no more. [Occam’s razor] principle.
      • If during the process of solving the problem, you’ve reached to more than one possibility, then the problem isn’t solved.
      • If you have more than one reason to do something, don’t do it. Think better.
      • Obvious decisions, which are robust to error, don’t require more than a single reason.
        • A true philosopher should be known for one single idea, not more. Wittgenstein?
    • When we cross the street, we remove everything inessential.
      • We look at the traffic and lights.
      • The question is this: how many things a person must disregard in order to act?

  • Time is an ultimate straw that breaks everything fragile.

    • No matter how something looks from an intellectual perspective, if it hasn’t passed the test of time, it stays fragile.

  • When talking about the future, or making prognoses, we tend to add certain things, but they are nothing more than wishes.

    • Wishes that don’t have support under themselves and might not come to fruition.
    • In order to save yourself the headache of being wrong, don’t add the properties to the future inventions or circumstances. Simplify.
      • Reduce properties, take away edges, talk about things that don’t belong to times.
    • We use the present as a baseline for making a prediction, which is wrong.
      • Present hasn’t proven itself even robust, yet.
      • To make a good prediction, you need to follow four points:
        • Respect for the past.
        • Curiosity about historical records.
        • A hunger for wisdom of the elders.
        • A grasp of the notion of heuristics. Unwritten rules of thumb. That are resilient to external conditions.
      • To put it simpler, give credit to what have survived and been around some time.
        • But what to weave the idea that Black Swans do not come from the past? Or it is not about Black Swan, but about a search of robust and antifragile?
        • Taleb says, that future lies in the past.

Was he wrong about that?

«So, thank God, I will not be dressed in a shiny synthetic space-style suit, consuming nutritionally optimized pills while communicating with my dinner peers by means of screens.»

  • If we have to look at AF properties, AF objects have nonperishability among the most needed qualities. ^60d2f3
    • But physical objects are always perishable.
      • Every additional day brings it closer to an inevitable demise. In essence, making its life shorter.
    • Information, though, is not. Especially contextualized and understood.
      • Every additional day may be adding to a property. In short, it makes longer life expectancy not something unreachable, but actually doable.
      • Books are a good example. Those that survived the test of times.
      • If a book has been around for 40 years, expect it be popular or in print for another 40.
      • If some publisher has been printing a book for 10 years, then we can conclude that the book is with us another 50 years.
      • The real work of invention starts when the process of invention has been completed.
        Transclude of А-что-после#5bd61a
    • What can we say about information explosion? That it will be with us forever, and every piece of new information makes the whole information flow more robust or even AF.

Sage advice

Don’t condemn children who are watching prepacked 18 minutes hyped-up lectures on youtube, instead of that talk to them. See what they are watching. Prod their thinking.

  • Children are the key to our future, they aren’t afraid of anything, can take risks.

    • They have many unseasoned ideas, that are fragile, we need to help them grow valuable ones and trim the others.

  • Getting back to information at its properties.

    • It’s not enough that it is resilient and robust in places where it shouldn’t be.
    • Dangers are hiding in another layer, hidden from the eyes of an observer. Information failure insensitive. It doesn’t show failures, that are encoded into the fabric and in order to find, a person dealing with it must carefully unweave and decompose.
      Transclude of Декомпозиция-идеи#1c0005
    • We usually pay attention to what is changing. At this place our desire of new iPhone is born. Because we see changes and not the constant.
      • The modern generation, including me, is technological aggressive. We change one platform for another, we switch from one messenger to another, we update gadgets every year.
        • In this spinning world, what has failed is completely missed.
      • I see differenced but stay absolutely blind to commonalities.

Interesting fact about imperial system

«A mile, from the Latin milia passum, is a thousand paces. Likewise a stone (14 pounds) corresponds to … well, a stone. An inch (or pouce) corresponds to a thumb. A furlong is the distance one can sprint before running out of breath»

  • Lindy effect is a mathematical equation that calculates the robustness of an invention, idea, book or piece of information. ^f518dc
    • On order to reach a decision if an innovation or scientific result is a breakthrough, we have let the time work on the fog of incomprehension. Look at the definition of a breakthrough.
    • We have to allow time and effort of others to clear the opacity.
    • We have to see all the aspects of the idea outside the noise and initial fogginess of happiness.
    • Best inventors are amateurs in any discipline. Those who like toying with ideas and look for unusual solutions.
      • They rely not on scientific method or technology, but instead use age-tested heuristics.

Reading choice, rule of thumb

«As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years»

  • Any decision we find ourselves invested in, has more unknown factors than known.

    • So what could be done if it is the case?

  • Mean is dangerous zone for gauging the possible success or failure of any venture.

  • Take a look at the theory of knowledge, written by Claude Shannon From data to knowledge via fake news

    • You can say that the last stage provides the actual sensual feeling that we can call experience.
    • This is what stays after the theory has been tested.
    • After a new theory has arrived, you are left with only experience of the previous one.

  • Random variability must never be considered as information.

    • If blood pressure has one result on with one doctor and another with different, it’s random variability.

Correlation between data and interpretation is tricky

The Myth of Experience - Emre Soyer Robin M Hogarth Taleb says they give plentiful explanation to the phenomenon.

  • Taleb as Junger stick to the idea that the less we have the better we off in the world. We should be using absolutely needed minimum of things and this could lead to more potent life experience. ^c2b447
    • True wealth, Категории благосостояния again this thing. It consists of next categories: ^0e8afd
      • Worriless sleep.
      • Clear conscience.
      • Reciprocal gratitude.
      • Absence of envy.
      • Good appetite.
      • No meals alone.
      • Muscle strength.
      • Physical energy.
      • Frequent laughs.
      • Some physical labor (hobby will do).
      • No meeting rooms.
      • Periodic surprises.
    • It is mostly subtraction We get rid of inessential in life.

Истинное благосостояние

Immortality is a fools’ errand. Данила Медведев might not agree.

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Related: Книжный клуб Антихрупкость книга 6

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