"Things that gain from disorder"
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility randomness, … and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Lets call it antifragile.
Sword of Damocles.
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.
Cato, Roman statesman, looked at comfort as a road to waste.
Overcompensation, just a form of redundancy. (?)
Better to be slightly inaudible, less clear. … One should have enough self-control to make the audience work hard to listen.
Lucretius problem the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed.
… you do not want to control your reputation, … focus on altering your exposure where you're impervious to reputational damage.
Machines, use it and lose it. Organisms, use it or lose it.
Mistaking the absence of evidence for evidence of absence.
Buridan's Donkey A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught equally between thirst and hunger will unavoidably die of either. He can be saved thanks to a random nudge either way.
You need a name for the colour blue when you build a narrative, but not in action — the thinker lacking for a word "blue" is handicapped; not the doer.
Iatrogenics
Agency problem/principal agent problem: The agent has personal interests that are divorced from those of the one using his service (big pharma).
Make haste slowly, Lao Tsu.
Procrastination is our natural defense, naturalistic filter, I only write if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about.
I use procrastination as a message from my inner self.
Naturalistic fallacy What is natural is not necessarily morally right.
Our track record in figuring out significant rate events in politics and economics is not close to zero; it is zero.
Not if but when, safeguarding from negative black swans, smaller nuclear reactors with enough layers of protection …
Four quadrant
Stoicism — transforms pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
The domestication of emotions.
Seneca, de denificiis (research and read) - bookkeeping.
Antifragility in purest form, upside-downside asymmetry.
Seneca's barbell - Prefer to put 90/10 boring cash (protected against inflation) / risky, maximally risky security cannot lose more than 10%.
A barbell can be any dual strategy composed of extremes; anything that removes risk of ruin.
Insure for black swans, not small probable ones.
Sinecure cum writing is quite a soothing model.
[I] find it preferable to work intensely for very short hours then do nothing for the rest of the time until I recover completely …
Maximum weights, effortless long walks.
The option is the agent of antifragility.
Freedom is the ultimate option.
Volatility of life helps us to provide information to us about others, but also about ourselves.
Party invitation - option.
Asymmetric in payoff.
The decision maker focuses on the payoff, the consequences of the actions, the Aristotelian focuses on right and wrong, raw logic.
Baconian linear model: academia -> applied science & technology -> application.
Lecturing birds on how to fly.
(Suggests the opposite holds for most things, hackers, empirical tinkering.)
Epiphenomena: Mental affects in the brain doesn't cause physical effects - theory to application.
People look for books that support their mental program, not people read books then develop their ideas…(?)
(Argues education does not lead to wealth)
Green lumber fallacy: Mistaking source of necessary knowledge for another, less tractable, less narratable.
Difference between narrative and practice — important things that cannot be easily narrated, lies in optionality.
Optionality is Promethean, narratives is Epimethean — optionality vs teleological table.
Tinkering does not rely on narrative being true (Deep learning just works ?)
The internet set up as military communication network - DARPA
Vicars and clergymen leaving recorded traces for prosperity than scientists, (formally trained, wealthier?) - Bill Bryson Home
Joseph Needham, Chinese science, top-down dictation, lack of European tinkering.
You bet on the jockey not the horse — innovations drift, one needs flaneur-like abilities to innovate.
The payoff can be so large that you can not afford not to be in everything.
The pin does not have a single maker but 25 persons involved.
Cannot centralize innovation.
Rigid plans lead to option-blindness.
Antifragile: good news tends to be absent from past data (positive asymmetry).
Romans were anti-theoretical pragmatic bunch, Arabs loved everything scientific and philosophical.
Lions in captivity live longer; technically richer and guaranteed job security for life, if these criteria you are focusing on…
Be bored with a specific book not the act of reading.
… reading hours between thirty to sixty a week.
When one could write essays with a rich, literary, but precise vocabulary and maintain coherence, what one writes becomes secondary and the examiners get a hint about ones style.
Nonnerdy applied maths:find a problem, figure out maths that solves that problem than studying in a vacuum.
Severe mistake in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent.
Fat tony, never lets the other person frame the question, an answer is planted in every question; never respond with a straight answer that makes no sense to you.
What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent.
The birth of tragedy, Apollonian vs Dionysian, yang without yin.
Traditions provide an aggregation of filtered collective knowledge.
Focus on the payoff instead of the structure of the world.
Listing decisions you made in the past week, you decided based on fragility not probability.
Instead of, we need better computation to predict black swans, modify your exposure and learn to get out of trouble, traditional heuristics and religion teaches us well.
Size hurts you at times of stress.
Adding uncertainty to projects causes them to take longer to complete.
How to lose a grandmother. (average temperature of 20 degrees)
More non linear, less important is the average, stability around average.
Statues are carved by subtraction.
Michelangelo was asked about the secret of his genius, … particularly how he carved the statue of David. … It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David.
You have to pick carefully, I am as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
Bergson's Razor: A philosopher should be known for one single idea, not more.
Lindy Effect: Things that have stood the test of time.
… make them read the classics. The future is in the past.
Another mental bias in overhyping technology comes from the fact we notice change, not statics.
… you lost 10,000 vs your portfolio was 785,000 and is now 775,000.
New things will lose their novelty, treadmill effect.
I also enjoy writing facing trees, and, if possible, wild untamed gardens with ferns.
How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
There was so much traffic in London because people wanted to be there, being there exceeds the cost.
Time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining into dustbins all these overhyped works.
… student (who was studying economics)… what to read? "As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years,"
The original role of the prophet, to warn not to predict. And predict calamities if people didn't listen.
If something has been around for a very, very long time then irrational or not, you can expect it to stick around much longer,
Extension of via negativa and Fat Tony's don't be a sucker rule, non-natural needs to prove its benefits, not the natural
The swelling Mother Nature gave me, not directly caused by the trauma but my body's response to the injury.
Of the drugs available today, I can hardly find a via positiva one that makes a healthy person unconditionally "better".
… lobbying for reclassifications of conditions, and fine-tuning sales tricks to get doctors to overprescribe.
If the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.
… if the person is very ill, there are no iatrogenics to worry about.
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.
What Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, …, good bowel movements, no meeting rooms and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive (elimination of iatrogenics).
I believe in heuristics of religion and blindly accommodate its rules.
Cretans, … they lived longer because of the types of food they consumed. It could be true, but the second-order effect (the variations in intake) could be dominant,
Walking effortlessly, … as I speculate, is necessary for humans, perhaps as necessary as sleep.
We live to improve on information, or improve on it.
Nietzsche had the Latin pun, aut liberi, aut libri, either children or books.
For heroism is the exact inverse of the agency problem: someone bears the disadvantage for the sake of others.
A half-person is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.
megalopsychon, a sense of grandeur that was superseded by the Christian value of "humility". … If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can't feel insulted by a dog.
Hammurabi's code: If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner, the builder shall be put to death.
People voting for war need to have at least one descendant (child or grandchild) exposed to combat.
Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place.
How poetry can kill you
[Humanity started] at the rank of an idle freeman, unpreoccupied with work. It never meant not working; it just meant not deriving your personal and emotional identity from your work, and viewing work as something optional, more like a hobby. In a way your profession does not identify you so much as other attributes.
… if for the Greeks, only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion, for our horizontal friend and advisor, only he who has courage is free with his opinion.
The best way of checking if you are alive is by checking if you live variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger.