If words are scaffolds for society, then this book is a time machine that takes the reader back to ancient Mediterranean thinkers and action makers, humbling us by answering the question "What is not true"?
Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a collection of his literature, which to this day he is still building.
I read the 2016 edition with the newest edition (The Deluxe Edition), including Taleb's latest book, Skin in the Game.
I came away from this reading realizing modernity sucks. Many of the systems put in place after the Second World War are falling apart. The US housing market, the European Union, and Liberal Democracy, to name a few.
At the center of it is the advancements of information technology, or the microprocessor to be specific, as these were inventions only after peacetime in America started. Any and everybody connected to the internet is fighting against this information overlord - this fog of war.
The irony of this is that as I'm writing this blog, I intend to connect with another user whom I will probably never get to know. Talib's literature helps brush all this noise away by pointing not forward but backward through the rise and fall of past civilizations and to the philosophers that were not platonic in essence.
Rather than efficiency, attempt to answer effectiveness. Instead of the next big thing, look at what's always the little somethings, and rather than race to be number one, learn to be yourself.
I read this book to learn to be a better trader, but by the end, my takeaway was that money has little meaning aside from the necessity of trading. And this tech, all the efficiency and connectedness, and data - it's not true. With that said here is a quote providing insight into Taleb's trading style:
"I have a trick to know if something real in the world is taking place. I have set up my Bloomberg monitor to display the price and percentage change of all relevant prices in the world: currencies, stocks, interest rates, and commodities by dint of looking at the same setup for years as I keep the currencies in the upper left corner and the various stock markets on the right, I manage to build an instinctive way of knowing if something serious is going on. The trick is to look only at a large percentage of changes. Unless something moves by more than its usual daily percentage change, the event is deemed to be noise. Percentage moves are the size of headlines. In addition, the interpretation is not linear, a 2% move is not twice as significant as events as 1%. It is rather like 4 to 10 times. A 7% move can be several billion times more relevant than a 1% move! The headline of the Dow moving by 1.3 points on my screen today has less than 1 billionth of the significance of the series 7% drop of October 1997. People may ask me: why did I want everybody to learn some statistics? The answer is that too many people read explanations. We cannot instinctively understand the nonlinear aspect of probability."
The AI boom shows intelligence in itself means little. I went for a long walk, as Taleb suggests, and I arrived at my current aim, which is to find and create passion and run with it.
THIS IS A REPRINT FROM MY PARAGRAPH
