Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness", Penguin Books, 2009. Just over a decade ago, a book by the title Nudge took the world by storm. Today, there are numerous "nudge units" sponsored by governments (the most famous of which is the Behavioural Insights Team ), and one of the co-authors, Richard H. Thaler, won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Nudge is also listed on the Hufflepuff rationality bookshelf . Given the status of the book, it's odd that I haven't read it earlier. But now I have, and below are my notes. Nudge begins by asking how the director of food services for a city's school system should tell the cafeterias to arrange and display the food choices, knowing that (a) people, including kids, are influenced by small changes in context, such as the order of items, and (b) there's no way to avoid organizing the food. The authors, Richard Thaler and ...

Book Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder", Penguin Books, 2013. In his book Adapt , Tim Harford argues that we should be experimenting with multiple projects in parallel since not all of them will pay off, but when an experiment is successful, it can transform our lives for the better "in a way that a failed experiment will not transform them for the worse". This asymmetry lies at the heart of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile , which promotes the idea of antifragile tinkering or bricolage -- a kind of trial-and-error in which small mistakes are good and one wishes to "fail fast", because this gives one the option to keep a hugely favorable result while limiting the bad, as long as one has the rationality to identify and exploit large gains. (Incidentally, Taleb wrote a review for Harford's Adapt with rare praise: " Adapt is a highly readable, even entertaining, argument against top-down de...

This is the final part of a three-part series on The Bed of Procrustes (2nd Penguin ed., 2016). In case you need a reminder or you started here, the goal of this exercise was to pick at random (with the help of technology ) an aphorism from N.N. Taleb's book for each of the 31 days of January, and write a brief reflection on it. Here are the first two parts: Part 1 and Part 2 . Now, let us continue. *** 21. "Contra the prevailing belief, "success" isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies." (p. 133) Humans naturally respond to status, and the fact that status is relative means that hierarchies, whether formal or informal, are nearly inevitable. So, I'm not sure if it's possible to be truly outside all hierarchies without being a hermit... Yet you can choose not to deliberately climb higher on any particularly visible hierarchy. Rather than judging your success by what others have accomplished, you can strive ...