Strategy.

Homer, Eight Bells, 1886

Strategy will compensate the talent. The talent will never compensate the strategy.

Marco Pierre White

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Peter F. Drucker

It may be odd that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Precisely.

You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Worth.

An excellent book ...

The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children's natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning.  Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Worth.

The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children's natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning.  Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO (or curriculum "director" -Ed.) with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Antilibrary.

Spitweg, The Bookworm, 1851

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Contact.

Hansen, The Wanderer in the Forest, 1973

Nobody in the Pleistocene jogged for 42 minutes three days a week; lifted weights every Tuesday and Friday with a bullying (but otherwise nice) personal trainer, and played tennis at 11 A.M. Saturday mornings. Not hunters. We swung between extremes: sprinted when chased or when chasing (once in a while in an extremely exerting way), and walked about aimlessly the rest of the time. Marathon running is a modern abomination (particularly when done without emotional stimuli). This is another application of the barbell strategy: plenty of idleness, some high intensity. The data shows that long, very long walks combined with high intensity exercise outperforms just running. I am not talking about "brisk walks" of the type you read about in the Science section of the New York Times. I mean walking without making any effort, except of course to kill boredom. What's more, consider the negative correlation between caloric expenditures and intake: we hunted in response of hunger; we did not eat breakfast to hunt, which had to accentuate the energy deficits. If you deprive an organism of stressors, you affect its epigenetics and gene expression-- some genes are up-regulated (or down-regulated) by contact with the environment. A person who does not face stressors will not survive should he encounters them. Just consider what happens to someone's strength after he spends a year in bed, or someone growing up in a sterilized environment who, one day, takes the Tokyo subway where riders are squeezed like sardines. Why am I using evolutionary arguments? Not because of the optimality of evolution --but entirely for epistemological reasons, how we should deal with a complex system with opaque causal links and complicated interactions. Mother Nature is not perfect, but has been so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from "Why I Walk"

CONNECT

Antimodels.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This week one of my sixth-grade students told me that heroes don't exist anymore.

Grandeur.

Wyeth, Apples on a Bough, Study Before Picking, 1942

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Outside.

Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

With great appreciation to my friend, Kurt, who introduced me to this great thinker.

Do.

Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Pictured: Taleb's study.

Risks.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Precisely.

You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Antilibrary.

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan

I have many experiences that are, I think, common to all who possess very many books (I now have around forty thousand volumes, between Milan and my other houses) and to all who consider a library not just a place to keep books one has already read but primarily a deposit for books to be read at some future date, when one feels the need to read them. It often happens that our eyes fall on some book we have not yet read, and we are filled with remorse.

But then the day eventually comes when, in order to learn something about a certain topic, you decide finally to open one of the many unread books, only to realize that you already know it. What has happened? There is the mystical-biological explanation, whereby with the passing of time, and by dint of moving books, dusting them, then putting them back, by contact with our fingertips the essence of the book has gradually penetrated our mind. There is also the casual but continual scanning explanation: as time goes by, and you take up and then reorder various volumes, it is not the case that the book has never been glanced at; even by merely moving it you glanced at a few pages, one today, another the next month, and so on until you end up by reading most of it, if not in the usual linear way. But the true explanation is that between the moment when the book first came to us and the moment when we opened it, we have read other books in which there was something that was said by that first book, and so, at the end of this long intertextual journey, you realize that even that book you had not read was still part of your mental heritage and perhaps had influenced you profoundly.

Umberto Eco, from On Literature

Fatuousness.

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;

at the state level, Republican;

at the local level, Democrat;

and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Violation.

When one deals with deep uncertainty, both governance and precaution require us to hedge for the worst. While risk-taking is a business that is left to individuals, collective safety and systemic risk are the business of the state. Failing that mandate of prudence by gambling with the lives of citizens is a professional wrongdoing that extends beyond academic mistake; it is a violation of the ethics of governing.

Thank you, Kurt.

Simple.

I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to de-narrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore social media.

Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being.

You can define a free and highly-actualized person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Many.

Thank you, Kurt.

Antifragility.

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: "innocent until proven guilty" as opposed to "guilty until proven innocent", let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Tolerate.

Finer men tolerate others' small inconsistencies though not the large ones; the weak tolerate others' large inconsistencies though not small ones.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Antifragile.

Cultural Offering adds to the Antifragile discussion ... HERE.

Keep on tinkering.