<story><title>Nicholas Taleb&apos;s Amazon Reviews</title><url>https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AHMHNR4MRTDLMBOOT6Q7LX2WP5YA/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_gw_tr?ie=UTF8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnarbarian</author><text>I love Taleb. he&amp;#x27;s full of piss and vinegar. His books are pretty interesting but really most of them could be one sentence long. Two examples:&lt;p&gt;Antifragile: what doesn&amp;#x27;t kill you makes you stronger.&lt;p&gt;Black Swan: Forecasting is really hard, perfect forecasting is impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anthony_r</author><text>&amp;gt; Antifragile: what doesn&amp;#x27;t kill you makes you stronger&lt;p&gt;No, you&amp;#x27;ve missed the point of the book (or haven&amp;#x27;t read it). It&amp;#x27;s about that &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; things become better in the presence of error&amp;#x2F;noise&amp;#x2F;damage&amp;#x2F;volatility. But not all things, some other, fragile things, become worse and worse as damage accumulates. And that there&amp;#x27;s no word for such a property, so he calls it &amp;quot;Antifragile&amp;quot;. And then the book goes in great detail about lots and lots of examples (with the usual rambling).</text></comment>
<story><title>Nicholas Taleb&apos;s Amazon Reviews</title><url>https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AHMHNR4MRTDLMBOOT6Q7LX2WP5YA/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_gw_tr?ie=UTF8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnarbarian</author><text>I love Taleb. he&amp;#x27;s full of piss and vinegar. His books are pretty interesting but really most of them could be one sentence long. Two examples:&lt;p&gt;Antifragile: what doesn&amp;#x27;t kill you makes you stronger.&lt;p&gt;Black Swan: Forecasting is really hard, perfect forecasting is impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chubot</author><text>His books are definitely repetitive (and somewhat unorganized), but I find that saying the same thing a hundred times in slightly different ways helps drive home the message.&lt;p&gt;People may &amp;quot;nod their head yes&amp;quot; when you give the one sentence descriptions, and think they understand it.  But then they ACT in a different way, especially when they have &amp;quot;skin in the game&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Taleb actually has a name for that: &amp;quot;domain dependence&amp;quot;.  That is, you can nod your head in agreement while reading a book, but then when confronted with the exact same situation in real life, you act as if you don&amp;#x27;t have that knowledge, or you act contrary to it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve noticed this in programming vs. computer science.  In a test or interview situation, someone might say they&amp;#x27;ll do things one way.  But then their production code they do it a different way, just because that&amp;#x27;s the common way they&amp;#x27;ve seen it done, in that particular situation.&lt;p&gt;This can be good or bad -- sometimes the textbook way is actually better; sometimes not.  You can also flip it around -- it also applies to the person asking the question.  They might expect a certain answer of the interviewee, but when they have skin in the game, they do something else.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;I also don&amp;#x27;t agree with the one sentence description of the Black Swan.  I&amp;#x27;d say the most important idea is that outliers are often ignored, but they&amp;#x27;re precisely what drives history.  [1] And also that they&amp;#x27;re more likely than naive mathematics would suggest, i.e. &amp;quot;fat tails&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;To use an example that&amp;#x27;s HN friendly, every successful company is an outlier.  And we always seem to be talking about the biggest outliers of them all (e.g. FAANG, none of which existed when I started using computers.)  Making statements about the average new company isn&amp;#x27;t informative, because the average one fails and doesn&amp;#x27;t matter.&lt;p&gt;[1] Thiel has a similar sentiment, something like &amp;quot;every big moment in business happens exactly once.  The next Google isn&amp;#x27;t making a search engine, etc.&amp;quot;</text></comment>