Omne ignotum pro magnifico

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...

Book Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets", Penguin Books, 2007. First published in 2001 (with an updated edition in 2004), Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness marks the first book in the "Incerto" series. It was selected by Fortune magazine as "one of the smartest books of all time" -- that's setting some high expectations! In my own opinion, this book is somewhat underwhelming after reading The Black Swan  (and I recently finished Antifragile , which is also more original and expansive). But that being said, Fooled by Randomness  is not a bad book; it is still a showcase of the author's wit, and marks a transition point between his life as a trader and as a literary essayist and professor. One can even witness the author's thinking shift from the "randomness foolishness" of Wall Street (this book), to examining the rare event  more broadly ( The ...

Book Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", Penguin Books, 2010. The MIRI and LessWrong founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, once wrote : "There is a meme which says that a certain ritual of cognition is the paragon of reasonableness and so defines what the reasonable  people do. But alas, the reasonable people often get their butts handed to them by the unreasonable  ones, because the universe isn't always reasonable . [...] If you keep on losing, perhaps you are doing something wrong . Do not console yourself about how you were so wonderfully rational in the course of losing. That is not  how things are supposed to go. It is not the Art that fails, but you who fails to grasp the Art." At the very least, a rationalist should avoid shooting their own foot off. As a corollary, they should avoid being a sucker -- which is certainly what the philosopher/statistician/trader/essayist Prof. Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say...