What I've Been Reading

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. One the best books I read in my life and probably I will ever read in my life time, period. I don't care if this book is not on any "top ten" list or if people I admire hate it.
Taleb wants to be remembered as a philosopher and he wants his name to be synonymous with uncertainty, randomness and yes, Black Swan - I think he already succeeded in that mission. 

• Fragility implies more to lose than to gain, equals more downside than upside, equals (unfavorable) asymmetry and Antifragility implies more to gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable) asymmetry. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
• The largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of “skin in the game.” At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.
• We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling— very compelling— evidence to show that this is an illusion, the illusion I call lecturing birds how to fly.
• Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.
• It is time to revive the not well-known philosophical notion of doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal risks. 
• First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
• Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when  …   he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.
• How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold— it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction— that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity.
• Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens— usually.
• The worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.
• If you drink a poisonous substance in small amounts, the mechanism by which your organism gets better is, according to Danchin, evolutionary within your system, with bad (and weak) proteins in the cells replaced by stronger— and younger— ones and the stronger ones being spared (or some similar operation). When you starve yourself of food, it is the bad proteins that are broken down first and recycled by your own body— a process called autophagy.
• One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility.
• An agency problem, for instance, is present with the stockbroker and medical doctor, whose ultimate interest is their own checking account, not your financial and medical health, respectively, and who give you advice that is geared to benefit themselves. Or with politicians working on their career. What Montaigne and Seneca missed, in addition to the notion of skin in the game, was that one can draw the line with public affairs. They missed the agency problem— although the problem was known heuristically (Hammurabi, golden rules), it was not part of their consciousness.
• 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. In fact we humans are very bad at filtering information, particularly short-term information, and procrastination can be a way for us to filter better, to resist the consequences of jumping on information. 
• No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.
• To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher. Many of the “doers” turned “thinkers” like Montaigne have done a serial barbell: pure action, then pure reflection.
• Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
• Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions. It is not about turning humans into vegetables. My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
• I am personally completely paranoid about certain risks, then very aggressive with others. The rules are: no smoking, no sugar (particularly fructose), no motorcycles, no bicycles in town or more generally outside a traffic-free area such as the Sahara desert, no mixing with the Eastern European mafias, and no getting on a plane not flown by a professional pilot (unless there is a co-pilot). Outside of these I can take all manner of professional and personal risks, particularly those in which there is no risk of terminal injury.
• No one at present dares to state the obvious: growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.
• If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur. (The key is that your assessment doesn’t need to be made beforehand, only after the outcome.)
• We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow’s important things look like. We use randomness to spoon-feed us with discoveries— which is why antifragility is necessary.
• People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the real world can’t afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane. Unlike researchers, they were selected for survival, not complications.
• Governments should spend on nonteleological tinkering - Note that I do not believe that the argument set forth above should logically lead us to say that no money should be spent by government. This reasoning is more against teleology than research in general. There has to be a form of spending that works. 
• Our ingratitude toward many who have helped us get here — letting our ancestors survive - Our misunderstanding of convex tinkering, antifragility, and how to tame randomness is woven into our institutions— though not consciously and explicitly. There is a category of people in medicine called the empirics, or empirical skeptics, the doers, and that is about it— we do not have many names for them as they have not written a lot of books. Many of their works were destroyed or hidden from cultural consciousness, or have naturally dropped out of the archives, and their memory has been treated very badly by history. Formal thinkers and theorizing theorizers tend to write books; seat-of-the-pants people tend to be practitioners who are often content to get the excitement, make or lose the money, and discourse at the pub. Their experiences are often formalized by academics; indeed, history has been written by those who want you to believe that reasoning has a monopoly or near monopoly on the production of knowledge. Consider our ingratitude to those who got us here, got our disrespect, and do not even know that they were heroes.
• 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.
• I started, around the age of thirteen, to keep a log of my reading hours, shooting for between thirty and sixty a week, a practice I’ve kept up for a long time.
• We may be drawn to think that Friedrich Hayek would be in that antifragile, antirationalist category. He is the twentieth-century philosopher and economist who opposed social planning on the grounds that the pricing system reveals through transactions the knowledge embedded in society, knowledge not accessible to a social planner. But Hayek missed the notion of optionality as a substitute for the social planner. In a way, he believed in intelligence, but as a distributed or collective intelligence— not in optionality as a replacement for intelligence.
• I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them.
• I have often followed what I call Bergson’s razor: “A philosopher should be known for one single idea, not more” (I can’t source it to Bergson, but the rule is good enough). 
• To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.
• For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.
• Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life) because of the scalability of the errors, you are exposed to the wildest possible form of randomness.
• 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. Let us close on this business of b*** t “evidence.” If you want to talk about the “statistically significant,” nothing on the planet can be as close to “statistically significant” as nature. This is in deference to her track record and the sheer statistical significance of her massively large experience— the way she has managed to survive Black Swan events.
• It has been shown that many people benefit from the removal of products that did not exist in their ancestral habitat: sugars and other carbohydrates in unnatural format, wheat products (those with celiac disease, but almost all of us are somewhat ill-adapted to this new addition to the human diet), milk and other cow products (for those of non– Northern European origin who did not develop lactose tolerance), sodas (both diet and regular), wine (for those of Asian origin who do not have the history of exposure), vitamin pills, food supplements, the family doctor, headache medicine and other painkillers.
• So once again, religions with ritual fasts have more answers than assumed by those who look at them too literally. In fact what these ritual fasts do is try to bring nonlinearities in consumption to match biological properties.
• Finally, the cure to many ethical problems maps to the exact cure for the Stiglitz effect, which I state now. Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have— or don’t have— in their portfolio.

One of the important message from the book about which many don't talk about comes from the Thales, a pre-Socratic philosopher (later, Montaigne and Seneca seconded it):

Thales, as a philosopher, was characteristically impecunious. He got tired of his buddies with more transactional lives hinting at him that “those who can, do, and others philosophize.” He performed the following prowess: he put a down payment on the seasonal use of every olive press in the vicinity of Miletus and Chios, which he got at low rent. The harvest turned out to be extremely bountiful and there was demand for olive presses, so he released the owners of olive presses on his own terms, building a substantial fortune in the process. Then he went back to philosophizing. 

What he collected was large, perhaps not enough to make him massively wealthy, but enough to make the point— to others but also, I suspect, to himself— that he talked the talk and was truly above, not below, wealth. This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “fuck you money”— a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation.