“The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said.”
BY OTHERS◎Tuesday, November 30, 2010
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
543 aphorisms from the Incerto. The probabilist who treats the page like a trader treats the market - short, asymmetric, and unwilling to apologise. Risk, academia, people, modernity, wisdom, ethics.
tags: taleb, incerto, aphorism, risk, antifragile, skin-in-the-game, probability, lebanon
- THE INCERTO · ΑΣΚΗΣΙΣ -
TALEBNassim Nicholas
نسيم نقولا طالب
b. 1960 · Amioun, Mount Lebanon
FIG. 1 · A FAT-TAILED DISTRIBUTION (solid) v. A GAUSSIAN (dotted)
The thin tail to the left is the world the textbooks describe. The fat tail to the right is the world that pays your salary, kills your father, and writes your inheritance.
- SKIN IN THE GAME
- 1985 - 2004 · Derivatives trader. UBS · Credit Suisse · BNP Paribas. Profit and loss carried personally. The career was a long bet that fat tails are real.
- VIA NEGATIVA
- Subtraction over addition. The wisdom of saying no. What you remove improves the system more reliably than what you add.
- ANTIFRAGILE
- The thing that gains from disorder. Not robustness - robustness is what survives the shock unchanged. Antifragility is what gets stronger.
- BARBELL
- Two extremes, no middle. 90% in cash. 10% in the most asymmetric possible bets. Never a moderate position. The middle is where you go bankrupt slowly.
- WEIGHT CAGE
- Olympic squat · deadlift · the iron over yet another opinion. The body knows fat tails better than the mind. (To be sceptical, lift heavy.)
- CLASSICAL
- Greek · Aramaic · Latin · Arabic. Reads Plutarch on the trading floor. Cites Solon, the Phoenicians, and Mandelbrot in the same paragraph.
- METHOD
- Aphorism · essay · short technical paper · Twitter altercation. Five books in the Incerto: Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007), The Bed of Procrustes (2010), Antifragile (2012), Skin in the Game (2018).
Ce qui ne me tue pas me rend antifragile. - adapted from Nietzsche, against Nietzsche
INCERTO · APHORISMS & FRAGMENTS
Marginalia
525 entries · arrow-keys to turn pages
SEARCH /
Nassim Nicholas Taleb was born in Amioun, Lebanon, in 1960. Greek-Orthodox Levantine family, doctors and judges going back generations, civil war made the place uninhabitable. Wharton; Paris; twenty years a derivatives trader (Credit Suisse, UBS, BNP Paribas, his own fund); retired in 2004 to do mathematics and write.
The five-volume Incerto makes a single argument across 2,500 pages: that the world is dominated by the rare, the unseen, and the convex; that human beings are blind to all three; that the only honest response is to organise your life so that surprises help you.
- STRATEGY № 2 · THE TRIAD -
Fragile · Robust · Antifragile
Drag the stress lever. The fragile thing crumbles; the robust thing endures unchanged; the antifragile thing improves.
FRAGILE51.2cracks visible
ROBUST50.0indifferent
ANTIFRAGILE54.1strengthening
- DOCTRINE № 1 · ETHICAL -
SKIN / IN / THE / GAME
The asymmetry that disciplines every prediction. If a man recommends a course of action that, if wrong, will hurt only you and not him - ignore him.
- I. What you predict, you must risk.
- II. If you cannot lose by being wrong, your opinion is worthless.
- III. Asymmetry is the ground of ethics.
- IV. The artisan is more honest than the consultant.
- V. Hammurabi predates Locke. He still applies.
- VI. A bureaucrat who never bled is more dangerous than one who has.
- VII. Soul in the Game > Skin in the Game > nothing.
- DOCTRINE № 2 · METHODOLOGICAL -
VIA · NEGATIVA
Strength is what remains when you have removed everything that weakens you. The list of removals is more honest than the list of additions; it costs nothing, and it cannot be sold.
NUTRITION
- sugar- because the body does not require it.
- breakfast- because the ancestors rarely had it.
- industrial seed oils- because they did not exist before 1908.
- snacking- because hunger is not an emergency.
- orange juice- because no creature ever ate eight oranges in one minute.
PROFESSION
- salaried employment- because the salary disciplines the cowardice.
- forecasting meetings- because nobody who matters attends them.
- PowerPoint- because it makes thinking look like presenting.
- "deep dives"- because the depth is in the trade, not the slide.
- LinkedIn- because being seen is not being worth seeing.
INTELLECT
- cable news- because the rolling deadline produces panic, not insight.
- centrist op-eds- because the centrist always sides with the bigger fool.
- business books- because they are written by losers about winners.
- Twitter (until 2022)- because the rate-limiter on stupidity broke.
- forecasts > 2 years- because they are storytelling.
PEOPLE
- IYI consultants- because the smart sound dumb, the dumb sound smart.
- fragilistas- because they break what works to fix what isn't broken.
- permanent advisors- because their incentive is the next retainer.
- thought leaders- because the leadership is in the absence of thinking.
- university PRs- because the cap-and-gown doesn't cover the lying.
Cross out enough, and what remains is yours. The opposite method - adding, optimising, "growth-hacking" - gives you somebody else’s life.
- DOCTRINE № 3 · CORPOREAL -
THE DEADLIFT
Strength is information. The bar tells the truth.
N. N. T.
amioun · brooklyn · the iron
- DEADLIFT, 1RM
- 330 lb · conventional, mixed grip
- SQUAT, 1RM
- 275 lb
- BODYWEIGHT
- ≈ 220 lb
- CARDIO
- walking the hills above Amioun · sprinting from buses
- FORBIDDEN
- treadmills · jogging · "wellness" · cycling for fitness
- RULE
- The lift produces convexity. You gain disproportionately from a heavy day; you lose nothing on a light one.
“A book left unread is not the work undone. The bar left unmoved is.”- self-translation, 2018
On the aphorism
The aphorism is the only honest form of philosophy because it cannot hide behind length. The Bed of Procrustes is 384 sentences each meant to stand alone, organised loosely by theme but not by argument. Read it out of order. The Later Aphorisms (2022, compiled with Smiljana Skiba) are a continuation: same rhythm, same enmities (academics without skin in the game, journalists who confuse coverage with knowledge), aged targets (surveillance, identity politics, the medication of children).
What is striking on a re-read is how often the lines work at two levels. If you must explain it, don't. - surface, an instruction to the reader. Underneath: a self-instruction from a man who has been explained, in venues that did not understand him, for two decades.
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