"Whether you prefer the term antilibrary, tsundoku, or something else entirely, the value of an unread book is its power to get you to read it."
Here
O poder de conseguir que o leia e a, por vezes, terrível decisão de qual ler a seguir, e, não poucas vezes, o resultado de estar a ler vários em simultâneo, por não aguentar mais a espera.
Showing posts with label Nassim Taleb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nassim Taleb. Show all posts
Antilibrary or Tsundoku,
The Green Lumber Fallacy / ou, de mal-entendidos
“All that glitters is not gold,” the saying goes. We're often fooled by aesthetics of things into thinking they are the thing. The gist of the Green Lumber Fallacy is this: What works in the real world is not necessarily match our stories of why it works. Unimportant details can often seduce us into thinking we know the reasons for something when we really don't. Only time filters reality from narrative."
"In one of the rare noncharlatanic books in finance, descriptively called What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, the protagonist makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow named Joe Siegel, one of the most successful traders in a commodity called “green lumber,” actually thought it was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because it had not been dried). And he made it his profession to trade the stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into grand intellectual theories and narratives of what caused the price of commodities to move and went bust.
It is not just that the successful expert on lumber was ignorant of central matters like the designation “green.” He also knew things about lumber that nonexperts think are unimportant. People we call ignorant might not be ignorant.
The fact that predicting the order flow in lumber and the usual narrative had little to do with the details one would assume from the outside are important. People who do things in the field are not subjected to a set exam; they are selected in the most non-narrative manager — nice arguments don't make much difference. Evolution does not rely on narratives, humans do. Evolution does not need a word for the color blue."
Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
Relying on predictions
"You can't predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust. Why? Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors. And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
On Takatoshi Kato's predictions / suit-and-tie-wearing hotshots
"These were days before I decided to climb up the mountain, speak slowly and in a priestly tone, and try shaming people rather than insulting them. Listening to Kato's presentation, I could not control myself and flew into a rage in front of two thousand Koreans – I was so angry that I almost started shouting in French, forgetting that I was in Korea. I ran to the podium and told the audience that the next time someone in a suit and tie gave them projections for some dates in the future, they should ask him to show what he had projected in the past – in this case, what he had been forecasting for 2008 and 2009 (the crisis years) two to five years earlier, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. They would then verify that highly Venerable Kato-san and his colleagues are, to put it mildly, not very good at this predictionizing business. And it is not just Mr. Kato: our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not so close to zero; it is zero."
"What was getting me in that state of anger was my realization that forecasting was not neutral. It is all in the iatrogenics. Forecasting can be downright injurious to risk-takers – no different from giving people snake oil medicine in place of cancer treatment, or bleeding, as in the story of Geaorge Washington. And there was evidence. Danny Kahneman – rightfully – kept admonishing me for my fits of anger and outbursts at respectable members of the establishment (respectable for now), deeming such behavior to be unbecoming of the wise member of the intelligentsia I was supposed to be. Yet he stoked my frustration and sense of outrage the most by showing me the evidence of iatrogenics. There are ample empirical findings to the effect that providing someone with a random numerical forecast increases his risk taking, even if the person knows the projections are random.
All I hear is complaints about forecasters, when the next step is obvious yet rarely taken: avoidance of iatrogenics from forecasting. We understand childproofing, but not forecaster-hubris-proofing."
The financier Warren Buffett states that he tries to invest in businesses that are "so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Quando a incompetência ajuda
"The famine in China that killed 30 million people between 1959 and 1961 can enlighten us about the effect of the state "trying hard." Xin Meng, Nancy Qian, and Pierre Yared examined its variations between areas, looking into how the famine was distributed. They discovered that famine was more severe in areas with higher food production in the period before the famine began, meaning that it was government policy of food distribution that was behind much of the problem, owing to the inflexibility in the procurement system. And indeed, a larger than expected share of famine over the past century has occured in economies with central planning.
But often it is the state's incompetence that can help save us from the grip of statism and modernity – inverse iatrogenics. The insightful author Dmitri Orlov showed how calamities were avoided after the breakdown of the Soviet state because food production was inefficient and full of unintentional redundancies, which ended up working in favor of stability. Stalin played with agriculture, causing his share of famine. But he and his successors never managed to get agriculture to become "efficient," that is, centralized and optimized as it is today in America, so every town had the staples growing around it. This was costlier, as they did not get benefits of specialization, but this local lack of specialization allowed people to have access to all varieties of food in spite of the severe breakdown of institutions. In the United States, we burn twelve calories in transportation for every calorie of nutrition; in Soviet Russia, it was one to one. One can imagine what could happen to the United States (or Europe) in the event of food disruptions. Further, because of the inefficiency of housing in the Soviet state, people had been living in close quarters for three generations, and had tight bonds that ensured – as in the Lebanese war – that they stayed close to each other and lent to each other. People had real links, unlike in social networks, and fed their hungry friends, expecting that some friend (most likely another one) would help them should they get in dire circumstances.
And the top-down state is not necessarily the one that has the reputation of being so."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Avoiding black swans and becoming more antifragile
"Knowledge has not improved massively. We do not have advanced knowledge. read Seneca and you'll see that in world sciences and in a lot of fields we have not advanced that much. In the complex domain we have not advanced that much. So, being a generalist as people were 500 years ago, is still feasible." [NT]
"Why is it, that we humans denigrate the systems ability to correct themselves on their own? We act as if we were necessary for things to take place. And that's a big problem. We always tend to think that we're smarter than Nature. We have that bias. So this is the problem I'm working on. Is how to mitigate that. How to replace the instinct with something that's not as harmful." [NT]
In praise of procrastinantion
"The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition – or a bonus – for it. [...]
A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revolution. The society included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald, and even Bertrand Russell for a moment. In retrospect, it turned out to be a very effective strategy, not so much as a way to achieve their objectives, but rather to accommodate the fact that these objectives are moving targets. Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies. And of course members did change their minds after seeing the failures and horrors of Stalinism and similar regimes.
There is a latin expression festina lente, "make haste slowly." The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission. The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei, "passive achievement."
Nassim Taleb, in "Antifragile"
Political annealing e o Princípio de Peter
"It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty have their role in life — so you can imagine what it would be like to explain it to politicians. Yet this is where a certain amount of randomness is needed the most.
I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness — very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right.
I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing — and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients — again, those ancients! — were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parlementary system."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
da relevância da liberdade
A sentence that still shocks me when I think about it [civil war in Lebanon] was voiced by one of my grandfather's friends, a wealthy Aleppine merchant who fled the Baath regime. When my grandfather asked his friend during the Lebanese war why he did not go back to Aleppo, his answer was categorical: "We people of Aleppo prefer war to prison." I thought that he meant that they were going to put him in jail, but then I realized that by "prison" he meant the loss of political and economic freedoms.
Economic life, too, seems to prefer war to prison. Lebanon and Northern Syria had very similar wealth per individual (what economists call gross Domestic Product) about a century ago – and had identical cultures, language, ethnicities, food, and even jokes. Everything was the same except for the rule of the "modernizing" Baath Party in Syria compared to the totally benign state in Lebanon. In spite of a civil war that decimated the population, causing an acute brain drain and setting wealth back by several decades, in addition to every possible form of chaos that rocked the place, today Lebanon has considerably higher standard of living – between three and six times the wealth of Syria.
Nor did the point escape Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: "It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom.
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Antifragile
"Consider this in terms of economic and institutional life. If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever. Nor would it have permanent administrations and forecasting departments that try to outsmart the future – it would not let the scam artists of the United States Office of Management and Budget make such mistakes of epistemic arrogance.
If one looks at history as a complex system similar to nature, then, like nature, it won't let a single empire dominate the planet forever – even if every superpower from the Babylonians to the Egyptians to the Persians to the Romans to modern America has believed in permanence of its domination and managed to produce historians to theorize to that effect. Systems subjected to randomness – and unpredictability – build a mechanism beyond the robust to opportunistically reinvent themselves each generation, with continuous change of population and species.
[...] Let us look at how evolution benefits from randomness and volatility (in some dose, of course). The more noise and disturbances in the system, up to a point, barring those extreme shocks that lead to extinction of a species, the more effect of reproduction of the fittest and that of random mutations will play a role in defining the properties of the next generation. Say an organism produces ten offspring. If the environment is perfectly stable, all ten will be able to reproduce. But if there is instability, pushing aside five of these descendants (likely to be on average weaker than their surviving siblings), then those that evolution considers (on balance) tha better ones will reproduce, making the gene undergo some fitness. Likewise, if there is variability among the offspring, thanks to occasional random spontaneous mutation, a sort of copying mistake in the genetic code, then the best should reproduce, increasing the fitness of the species. So evolution benefits from randomness by two different routes: randomness in the mutations, and randomness in the environment – both act in a similar way to cause changes in the traits of the surviving next generations."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
to gain from disorder
"Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die or blow up. We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything... by suppressing randomness and volatility. Just as spending a month in bed (preferably with an unabridged version of War and Peace and access to The Sopranos' entire eighty-six episodes) leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions (dubbed "Soviet-Harvard delusions" in the book) which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems.
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
If about everything top-down fragilizes and blocks antifragility and growth, everything bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder. The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, agressive risk bearing rather than formal education."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile – Things That Gain From Disorder
da resiliência / antifragile
"Being antifragile is being alive. You should crave being kicked around.
The more you've been kicked around, the more you know that you're
turning into that diamond."
Da importância de estarmos abertos ao que se atravessa no nosso caminho / Getting away with it all messed up! / The importance of the 'reconfigurers' / mudando paradigmas / Flow: to lose ourselves in a sacred sort of way
"The sacred is, whatever it is in a culture at which you are not allowed to laugh."
Sean Dorrance Kelly, citando Nietzsche
"And that state where nothing seems any more important than anything else is the state that Nietzsche called, the state of nihilism. The state that W. H. Auden said in a poem, the state where all elsewheres are equal. The state where every choice is equally good. Nietzsche thought that was a great thing, but we [S.D.Kelly and Hubert Dreyfuss] think that's an unlivable state to find yourself in. So the threat of nihilism is a threat that's peculiar in the secular age."
Sean Dorrance Kelly
"It never occurred to me that I was suffering from nihilism."
Hubert Dreyfus
"We, maybe, can still get the kind of excitement and meaning and insight and intensity that they had in the center of their lives. We can find it in the margin of ours, thanks to these great works. And then, and that's a whole other story, develop the skills for bringing back these marginal practices and putting them in the center of their lives, so that they, again, have what earlier people thought of as their gods. They will find their own new gods, which won't be some gods that they invent and they won't be totally new. They will find the sacred and the gods that were there, in these other epochs, in an intense way, and bring them back in a new way. That's why we end up with Moby Dick. The only person who sees this is Melville, who says explicitly that he wants to bring back the Homeric gods and he is, in the course of Moby Dick, collecting the sacred wherever he finds it from all these other cultures. Instead of at the other epics in the history of the West, by the time you get to Melville, the whole West, the whole world is there available, so he sales all around the world, picking up the cultural sacred, the meaningful, the intense and so forth, and getting in sinc with it, wherever he finds it, and bringing it back.
Now that I say it, I don't see exactly how that fits with Homer... (We have to think about this). There seems to be two different stories, both of them right. Melville wants to go back to the Homeric gods, but he also wants to get in touch with all the other gods and sacred that he can find. And that's not incompatible. That just two wonderful sources of meaning and intensity and insight, and he's for both of them. And my course seems to be giving people access to them, and so they get all excited."
Hubert Dreyfus
"Monotheism is the enemy of the multiple local sacred."
Hubert Dreyfus
"You get the idea that the right relation to the divine is openness and receptivity and even if it's risky you do it, and that's what Helen did, and that's what we can learn to do. And that's another long story, how we would learn to do it." [+/– min 29]
Hubert Dreyfus
"Jesus [as a 'reconfigurer'] does it by putting down the Law (which was the big deal thing), and substituting this new thing, agape love, which is a receptive way of relating to others, and transforms things because what was the central thing, namely the law, is now still there but only on the margin."
Hubert Dreyfus
A partir do minuto 35:40, Sean Kelly fala sobre David Foster Wallace (muito interessante).
"That feeling of it just being obvious that this needs to be done, at this moment, is a feeling that people can have, if they have the right kind of background, the right kind of skills, and the right kind of openness to what's meaningful in the situation. But the idea that those are the things that you need to develop, set of background skills that allow you to be open to what's required in the situation is just exactly the opposite of Wallace's idea that you need to develop a sense of control over how you determine and decide all on your own what's going to be meaningful regardless of what the situation tells you. We're trying to pull out of these previous epics a different notion in each of them of a kind of receptivity to what's already meaningful in the situation, that we seem no longer to be sensitive to in virtue of the fact that we think that meanings in situations come from our own autonomous and subjective choices and from the force of our own individual will."
Sean Dorrance Kelly
da fragilidade / dealing with failure
"If you are not exposed to stressers you are going to be weakened. We have a society that is obsessed by eliminating small stressers, small risk, at the expense of large risk. [...] We are made for variability."
Nassim Taleb
Ou seja, errar muitas vezes faz bem! :)
"We are made to hate randomness. The environment gives us randomness and it prevented us from dying, prevented us from encountering the big large scale event. So we are made to hate randomness because we are not fine tuned for such subtlety that some randomness in small amounts is good for us."
Nassim Taleb
"The psychology of it is that we are actually relatively more sensitive to small losses than to big losses, to small harms than to big harms. We have a limited ability, actually, to feel pain, and we feel a lot of pain for very little harm and then it doesn't get worse proportionately. So in a very real sense we're designed against what you want. [...] When you have achieved anti-fragility, you really don't need to predict. You don't need to predict the detail."
Daniel Kahneman
"Trial and error isn't really trial and error. Trial and error is trial with small error. What is anti-fragile? It's small losses and big gains. To out perform trial and error intellectually, you need at least 1000 IQ points. What I mean is that you'd rather be anti-fragile than intelligent any time. You look at the data and you realize that all the big gains we have had, in any field, except the nuclear, and even in medicine except for AZT drugs, came from trial and error by people who didn't have much of a clue about the process. It's trying."
Nassim Taleb
Link: Fat Tony [+/– min 54]
"Fat Tony doesn't believe in knowledge. He believes in tricks and no theory. He believes in doing and you keep trying till something works. And then you get rich and then you go and have lunch and that is why he is called Fat Tony. So Fat Tony is arguing with Socrates and he was able to express that sentence that Nietzsche really understood, he said: 'The mistake people tend to make is to think that whenever you don't understand it's stupid. The unintelligible is not necessarily unintelligent. And anti-fragility is harvesting the unintelligible. It's harvesting what we don't understand. And this is what was done. Take the industrial revolution, take the Silicon Valley, take the discoveries in medicine... It's harvesting the unintelligible with small errors and big gains, and doing it in an industrial scale. So the industrial revolution happened with people who weren't really academics."
Nassim Taleb
"And that is why I don't like academia. If you had put Bill Gates through a whole college experience, you wouldn't have had Microsoft."
Nassim Taleb
"Many of the concepts we really admire are questioned in the book. And if you don't completely buy the argument (I think the argument is quite extreme). But you even don't completely buy it, it is bound to lead you to questions. To questions about the relative value of theory and practice. To questions about the value of planning, just as trial and error. We normally favor theory, we favor general understanding, we favor deductive reasoning or induction. That's the way our values are. These are questions in this book. [...] All of these issues that we normally consider, fairly obviously, the way to go in the modern world, all of these are really questioned in Anti-Fragile, so that makes it worth taking a look, even of sometimes the book is going to make you quite uncomfortable."
Daniel Kahneman
"Thinking probabilistically, in a proper way is extremely difficult for people. People do have a sense of propensity. That is, that a system has a tendency to do something or other, but that's quite different from thinking about probability, where you do have to think about two possibilities and weigh their relative chances of happening."
Daniel Kahneman
"I'm a firm believer in intuition. I have done a lot of research in explaining where intuition leads us astray, but intuition works most of the time extremely well for us. Basically it's system one that keeps us moving and it's intuitive and mostly it's fine. Occasionally it leads us into amusing errors and I spent my life time studying those amusing errors."
Daniel Kahneman
"Try to avoid a non narrative form of life by, opportunistically, taking advantage of things in a structured way. So you need a huge amount of reason but at the same time you don't need a narrative. It's much harder to live that way but it's much more rewarding and much safer. [...] You have to allow the people to fail. Encourage the risk takers. You should bail out the individuals, not the corporations, by giving them a backup to take more risks in life."
Nassim Taleb
