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What Nassim Taleb can teach us

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Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#11

Post by emtel »

Taleb holds that essentially all journalists are fools, and the articles they publish are "noise". He says "to cure yourself of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers". There's wisdom in this: the importance of the news of the day can't be immediately apprehended. What seems important at the time can quickly fade into irrelevance. Larger stories are often completely missed or gotten totally wrong.

Buuuuuut apparently what Taleb means is that no one but him can figure out the importance of things immediately. The guy tweets, apparently believing that he understands the lasting importance of what he's tweeting about. And hey, maybe he does... except, among other things, he's in (or was in) a twitter war with JK Rowling!

The guy is a loon who has figured a lot of things out, and now believes he knows everything.

Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#13

Post by cmac2992 »

emtel wrote: post #11

Taleb holds that essentially all journalists are fools, and the articles they publish are "noise". He says "to cure yourself of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers". There's wisdom in this: the importance of the news of the day can't be immediately apprehended. What seems important at the time can quickly fade into irrelevance. Larger stories are often completely missed or gotten totally w…

He totally lost me when he started talking about Michael Flynn being one of the great military minds or praising The Mooch's rant and "being direct, natural, and nononsense".

Seems like a smart guy but...

Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#14

Post by hoodwink »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

I love Nassim Taleb as an academic and philosopher. I think he has a Peter Thiel like quality of being able to thinking differently, but in a very applicable way. Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's had so much success that this is probably my fault. If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of his pieces are written in easily digestible format…

I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I couldn't help reply to your comment about starting backwards: I completely disagree. Fooled by Randomness, in my opinion, is Taleb's seminal work. Reading it changed the course of career (I work in finance), much more so than Antifragile or Black Swan (even though both books are excellent).

Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#16

Post by justin66 »

zenogais wrote: post #8
qubex wrote: post #3

I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable. However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one poi…

To be fair, many many authors have posted books of their own aphorisms while still alive. For exmaple Nietzsche, Cioran, de La Rochefoucauld, et al. See this wikipedia page for a list of all such authors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphorism

Nietzsche's aphoristic style was actually pretty effective. Taleb has this tendency to throw aphorisms out there and wait for his followers to get confused by them, at which point he revises them (or just explains them). It's hard to imagine most authors operating that way.

Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#17

Post by ambivalence »

qubex wrote: post #3

I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable. However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one poi…

> At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive.

He did, it's called "The Bed of Procrustes". I quite enjoyed it, there's quite a few brilliant thoughts there, even though they're sprinkled between countless cheap shots against his enemies.

Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#18

Post by stretchwithme »

mseebach wrote: post #9
stretchwithme wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or bonuses should be based on what happens during a long period of time. Say you lead a company from 2015 to 2020, but your bonus is based on how well the company does from 2020 through 2025. And if the company fails before you get your bonus, too bad for you. I haven't read his books but find his ideas as presented in videos and podcasts to be valuable.

That's exactly the idea. Your bonuses 2015-2020 are invested in the company every year, and you can only cash them out after five years, in 2020-2025. If the company tanks in 2020 your bonuses for 2015-2020 are retroactively zero.

I think companies should be rated by how much skin in the game its leaders have.

Companies run by founders that still have a substantial percentage of their wealth in the company would get the highest rating. And professional managers getting stock-based short term incentives would be on the low end.

Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#19

Post by RachelF »

qubex wrote: post #3

I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable. However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one poi…

He has gone a bit off the deep end recently. I guess too much arguing with opponents radicalised him, similar to Dawkins.

IMHO his best book is his first mass market one: "Fooled by Randomness". It contains all the big ideas of his subsequent books and is an easy, entertaining read.

Re: What Nassim Taleb can teach us

#20

Post by gxs »

ambivalence wrote: post #17
qubex wrote: post #3

I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable. However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one poi…

> At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He did, it's called "The Bed of Procrustes". I quite enjoyed it, there's quite a few brilliant thoughts there, even though they're sprinkled between countless cheap shots against his enemies.

I found this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/21/bed-of-procrus...

Does he go into detail about these in his book? Some of these are clever but did he write some substance behind these quips? Asking, not accusing.

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