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c15028e
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b) The more volatile the something--the more uncertainty--the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade if there is unevenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100,000 cars for both time periods; 80,000 then 120,000, would be even worse than 90,000 and 110,000.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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76680b7
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c) If the function is convex (antifragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3be7743
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mi heuristica me sugiere que cuanto mas pagano sea alguien, mas brillante es su mente, y mayor capacidad tiene para gestionar matices y ambiguedades.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f378b17
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Some people do not know their own interest--just consider addicts, workaholics, people trapped in a bad relationship, people who support large government, the press, book reviewers, or respectable bureaucrats, all of whom for some mysterious reason act against their own interest.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5a4aea7
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many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to either cash out by selling the company they helped create to someone else, or "go public" by issuing shares in the stock market. The true value of the company, what it makes, and its long-term survival are of small relevance to them. This is a pure financing scheme and we will exclude this class of people from our "entrepreneur" risk-..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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05a733e
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We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e42a4b9
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Ademas, en los paises donde la riqueza se obtiene a traves de la manipulacion o explotacion del entorno politico o economico, sea por la via del patrocinio o por la de la imposicion de regulaciones (recuerdo al lector que los poderosos y los que forman parte del sistema se sirven de las regulaciones para enganar a la gente, y del papeleo para ralentizar la competencia), la riqueza, deciamos, se plantea como una suma cero.* Lo que una person..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bceb787
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Los emprendedores son unos heroes en nuestra sociedad. Fracasan por el resto de nosotros
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f1b530d
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Puede que no sea algo exigible desde el punto de vista etico, pero la politica mas eficaz y mas libre de verguenza es la transparencia maxima, la cual incluye la transparencia de intenciones.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d1db038
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A escala federal, soy liberal; a escala estatal, republicano; a escala local, democrata; y con mi familia y mis amigos, socialista.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c607af1
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La Ley de Rodas establece que si se tira mercancia para aligerar la carga del barco, lo que se ha perdido para beneficio de todos debe recuperarse mediante la contribucion de todos.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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18e2c53
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By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view--and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8449ccc
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To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two Let me stop to issue rules based on the chapter so far. (i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs; (iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people, so look for someone capable of changing six or seven times over his career, or more (an idea that is part of the modus operandi of the venture capitalist Marc Andr..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ede904c
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Yet in practice it is the negative that's used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4fa8d3f
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the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life).2
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8726f9a
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Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute. That is the most common Procrustean bed.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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02131e4
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And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don't risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can't feel insulted by a dog.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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20c194d
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Consider a more extreme example than the casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars--this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money. If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis, he would have claimed that one has an 83.33 percent chance of gains, for an "expected" average return per shot of $833,333. But if you keep playing Russian..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a31c1cc
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a) The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. If traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situations: 90,000, then 110,000 cars on the one hand, or 100,000 cars on the other.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b8ff8f6
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Or take the health category. Adding is on the left, removing to the right. Removing medication, or some other unnatural stressor--say, gluten, fructose, tranquilizers, nail polish, or some such substance--by trial and error is more robust than adding medication, with unknown side effects, unknown in spite of the statements about "evidence" and shmevidence."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c20b51e
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Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. Less is more and usually more effective. Thus I will produce a small number of tricks, directives, and interdicts--how to live in a world we don't understand, or, rather, how to not be afraid to work with things we patently don't understand, and, more princi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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49ec1cc
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Hormesis was well known by the ancients (and like the color blue was known but not expressed). But it was only in 1888 that it was first "scientifically" described (though still not given a name) by a German toxicologist, Hugo Schulz, who observed that small doses of poison stimulate the growth of yeast while larger doses cause harm. Some researchers hold that the benefits of vegetables may not be so much in what we call the "vitamins" or s..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8828fe9
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Many claim that caloric restriction (permanent or episodic) activates healthy reactions and switches that, among other benefits, lengthen life expectancy in laboratory animals. We humans live too long for researchers to test if such restriction increases our life expectancy (if the hypothesis is true, then the subjects of the test would outlive the researchers). But it looks like such restriction makes humans healthier (and may also improve..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f505ae6
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is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility--hence fragile--than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans. But only practitioners (or people who do things) tend to spontaneously get the point.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a925ac5
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Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called "observational," ones in which the researcher finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data, can therefore fall into the trap of an invented narrative."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2e12e62
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Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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22544e3
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. So I will expose the transfer of fragility, or rather the theft of antifragility, by people "arbitraging" the system. These people will be named by name. Poets and painters are free, liberi poetae et pictores, and there are severe moral imperatives that come with such freedom. First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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00db0e4
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If you see a fraud and don't say fraud, you are a fraud.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9bedc60
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Think of the difficulty in forecasting in terms of branches growing out of a tree; at every fork we have a multiplication of new branches. To see how our intuitions about these nonlinear multiplicative effects are rather weak,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cc75b26
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Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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704af28
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We observe old people and see them age, so we associate aging with their loss of muscle mass, bone weakness, loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects. But these failures to self-repair come largely from maladjustment--either too few stressors or too little time for recovery between them--and maladjustment for this author is the mismatch between one's design and the structure of the randomness ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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66cd250
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Artificial, man-made mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not "complex," as they don't have interdependencies. You push a button, say, a light switch, and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences, even in Russia. But with complex systems, interdependencies are severe. You need to think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain: its..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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65deefc
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The tradition has been to think that aging causes bone weakness (bones lose density, become more brittle), as if there was a one-way relationship possibly brought about by hormones (females start experiencing osteoporosis after menopause). It turns out, as shown by Karsenty and others who have since embarked on the line of research, that the reverse is also largely true: loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also c..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a8b055b
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sobs" (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile? Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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017205d
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Now I am punished by privilege and comfort--and I can't resist comfort.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5e48e82
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But 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."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bbb1298
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Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock--in other words, if you are alive--something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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64a35b0
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In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder--while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cb6581b
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So from this we can see that there is a tension between nature and individual organisms. Everything alive or organic in nature has a finite life and dies eventually--even Methuselah lived less than a thousand years. But it usually dies after reproducing offspring with a genetic code in one way or another different from that of the parents, with their information modified. Methuselah's genetic information is still present in Damascus, Jerusa..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c6eadf4
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Remember that for an event to be a Black Swan, it does not just have to be rare, or just wild; it has to be unexpected, has to lie outside our tunnel of possibilities. You must be a sucker for it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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48d7ff5
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Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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76b70e1
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Further, the problem is not just that Mithridatization and hormesis can be known in (some) medical circles and missed in other applications such as socioeconomic life. Even within medicine, some get it here and miss it there. The same doctor might recommend exercise so you "get tougher," and a few minutes later write a prescription for antibiotics in response to a trivial infection so you "don't get sick."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8bb3151
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I had a vivid illustration of domain dependence in the driveway of a hotel in the pseudocity of Dubai. A fellow who looked like a banker had a uniformed porter carry his luggage (I can instantly tell if someone is a certain type of banker with minimal cues as I have physical allergies to them, even affecting my breathing). About fifteen minutes later I saw the banker lifting free weights at the gym, trying to replicate natural exercises usi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6d1a5ac
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It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping. This is why we don't see antifragility in places that are obvious, too obvious. It is not part of the accepted way of thinking about success, economic growth, or innovation that these may result only from overcompensation against stressors. Nor do we see this overcompensation at work elsewhere. (And domain dependence is also wh..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |