Epiphanies from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are three categories of things: Fragile things that break, like the financial system; robust things that don't break easily but don't improve, like the Brooklyn Bridge; and my new category, "antifragile" things that gain strength from stressors and get stronger from failure, like evolution. The fundamental problem in foreign policy is that people shoot for stability rather than antifragility.

The most stable country in the history of mankind, and probably the most boring, by the way, is Switzerland. It's not even a city-state environment; it's a municipal state. Most decisions are made at the local level, which allows for distributed errors that don't adversely affect the wider system. Meanwhile, people want a united Europe, more alignment, and look at the problems. The solution is right in the middle of Europe -- Switzerland. It's not united! It doesn't have a Brussels! It doesn't need one.

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Taleb's new book Antifragile:Things That Gain from Disorder is coming out of November 27th 2012

Quote of the Day

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

- H.P. Lovecraft, via  Andrew

Finding Bliss In Boredom

“Bliss — a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."

- Excerpted from David Foster Wallace's last book The Pale King

Quote of the Day

"Marriages should be celebrated quietly and humbly, because they are the beginning of something. Loud celebrations should be saved for successful conclusions"

- W.H. Auden

Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are - Amy Cuddle

"So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, what we find is that when you're in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a pretty whopping significant difference. Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.

The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, oh, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am."

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Wisdom Of The Week

What industries do you look to for inspiration, if not the tech world?
I take my inspiration from small mom-and-pop businesses that have been around for a long time. There are restaurants all over the place that I like to go to that have been around a long time, 30 years or more, and thinking about that, that’s an incredible run. I don’t know what percentage of tech companies have been around 30 years. The other interesting thing about restaurants is you could have a dozen Italian restaurants in the city and they can all be successful. It’s not like in the tech world, where everyone wants to beat each other up, and there’s one winner. Those are the businesses I find interesting--it could be a dry cleaner, a restaurant, a clothing store. Actually, my cleaning lady, for example, she’s great.

Your business icon is your cleaning lady? 
She’s on her own, she cleans people’s homes, she’s incredibly nice. She brings flowers every time she cleans, and she’s just respectful and nice and awesome. Why can’t more people be like that? She’s been doing it some twenty-odd years, and that’s just an incredible success story. To me that’s far more interesting than a tech company that’s hiring a bunch of people, just got their fourth round of financing for 12 million dollars, and they’re still losing money. That’s what everyone talks about as being exciting, but I think that’s an absolutely disgusting scenario when it comes to business.

- Interview with Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals

Quote of the Day

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

- Mark Twain

The Joy of X - A guided Tour Of Math, From One To Infinity

Excerpts from the new book The Joy of X: A guided tour of math, from one to infinity by Steven Strogatz:

Please don’t mistake this mathematical remark for financial advice. Anyone facing these decisions in real life needs to be aware of many complications that muddy the waters: Do you expect to be in a higher or lower tax bracket when you retire? Will you max out your contribution limits? Do you think the government will change its policies about the tax-exempt status of withdrawals by the time you’re ready to take the money out? Leaving all this aside (and don’t get me wrong, it’s all important; I’m just trying to focus here on a simpler mathematical issue), my basic point is that the commutative law is relevant to the analysis of such decisions.

You can find heated debates about this on personal finance sites on the Internet. Even after the relevance of the commutative law has been pointed out, some bloggers don’t accept it. It’s that counterintuitive.

Maybe we’re wired to doubt the commutative law because in daily life, it usually matters what you do first. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. And when taking off your shoes and socks, you’ve got to get the sequencing right.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann came to a similar realization one day when he was worrying about his future. As an undergraduate at Yale, he desperately wanted to stay in the Ivy League for graduate school. Unfortunately Princeton rejected his application. Harvard said yes but seemed to be dragging its feet about providing the financial support he needed. His best option, though he found it depressing, was MIT. In Gell-Mann’s eyes, MIT was a grubby technological institute, beneath his rarefied taste. Nevertheless, he accepted the offer. Years later he would explain that he had contemplated suicide at the time but decided against it once he realized that attending MIT and killing himself didn’t commute. He could always go to MIT and commit suicide later if he had to, but not the other way around.

Gell-Mann had probably been sensitized to the importance of non-commutativity. As a quantum physicist he would have been acutely aware that at the deepest level, nature disobeys the commutative law. And it’s a good thing, too. For the failure of commutativity is what makes the world the way it is. It’s why matter is solid, and why atoms don’t implode.

Specifically, early in the development of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac had discovered that nature follows a curious kind of logic in which p × q ≠ q × p, where p and q represent the momentum and position of a quantum particle. Without that breakdown of the commutative law, there would be no Heisenberg uncertainty principle, atoms would collapse, and nothing would exist.

That’s why you’d better mind your p’s and q’s. And tell your kids to do the same.

Quote of the Day

"Intellectuals in their self-flattering wish-fulfillment say that knowledge is power, but the truth is that knowledge further empowers only those who have or can acquire the power to use it."

- Knowledge Is Power

Bright.com - Algorithm Might Help You Find A Job

The trick—and it is quite a trick—is taking a host of ingredients, from the highly tangible (location, education, salary level) to the highly intangible (right level of experience, right background) and cooking up a single value that matches people with the jobs they not only want but can get.

The point of the algorithm is to have information that the individual user or human-resources executive can’t possibly access. Bright.com mines social- media contacts, and suggests jobs that come through people you already know. It pushes users toward companies that are more likely to hire from their college or grad school. It crunches numbers to determine a person’s preferred career path, even if she hasn’t thought it through herself, and suggests jobs she could be right for but may not have picked out of a search lineup. Salary is taken into account—applicants won’t be put up for jobs that are not in their desired range. (Users don’t have to share how much they make—the algorithm will guess.)

To make the whole system work, Goodman hired dozens of human-resources professionals to evaluate piles of résumés and train the Bright score algorithm in how to think like the world’s fastest HR exec. He also hired a neuroscientist, Jacob Bollinger, as well as a former nuclear physicist, a geophysicist, and other data crunchers to build and test it.

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