Which Nassim Nicholas Taleb Book Do I Read First?

[Alphaville]

just finished the first edition of the black swan. what a great book. about to embark in the 3 postcript essays he wrote for the 2nd edition (i think, this is what happened).

but just wanted to take a breather and say WOW! what a book.

and i’m glad i read “fooled by randomness” first—it’s a much more circumscribed book and it does prime you for the big enchilada of “black swan.”

[Alphaville]

hah, i can see how the postcript is already moving towards antifragile.

also i think he went earlier than @jacob with this?

I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.

why did i take so long to read this book!!

[CS]

So, I'm working my way through Fooled by Randomness and wondering, does anyone know if he still keeps ALL his money in US Treasuries still?

I mean, one asset.

One.

[Alphaville]

i don’t know about him— but he’s got more money than he needs in multiple lifetimes, and he needs to secure not grow it. in black swan he mentions treasuries—and so why not?

as for his investment strategy, it’s 90-95% securities and the rest in highly speculative instruments with chance of oversize payoff? [eta: in black swan he talks about potential huge payoffs from biotech]

take it easy and soak in the views... incerto is a long ride and no need to rush it.

i just started “antifragile” where he goes into detail about barbell strategy. thing is i decided to read this one fully out of order so im jumping around as a kind of foreplay.

think of fooled by randomness also as foreplay, ha ha ha.

in fact i’d go back to kahneman first. good prelude to all.

[CS]

I'm just talking about the part where he talks about how he keeps his own personal savings in medium term treasuries and that's it. It's in the beginning when dealing with the feelings about the flashy neighbor. It just seems so... fragile. Yes, if treasuries bite the dust, we are sitting on bigger problems than a stock crash, but still.

[Alphaville]

yeah if treasuries bite the dust then money will likely cease to matter, but then again i’m not sure he’ll put it all out for the world to see. in the postcript on robustness in black swan he talks about having money in the bank AND cash under the mattress so i’m sure he’s got other piggybanks he’s not telling everyone about.

but the bulk of his capital... why not? treasuries back up the stock market... and everything else including the current world order. then again, i plead ignorance of deeper matters.

[CS]

Ah, yes, not advertising would make sense. And under the mattress is about right if the system falls...

[Alphaville]

thought about mandelbrot and taleb when i read about today’s amazon outages. reference to the one 2 years ago was very funny:

A massive AWS outage two years ago disabled large chunks of the internet, including sites including Slack, Medium and Quora. That outage, which also hit the northern Virginia region, was caused by human error, when an employee mistyped a command, taking down huge chunks of the system that knocked out AWS’s core storage service.

one employee mistypes one command, a huge part of the world goes down? who needs butterflies causing hurricanes?

[CS]

Shocking amount of name-calling (like the kind elementary school kids do) in Skin in the Game. It really distracts from his message, as well detracts from his personal reputation, at least in my eyes. Not liking someone is one thing, allowing it to degrade one's own behavior is another entirely.

My thinking is that not all social beneficial behaviors are to remain 'employable', nor are all anti-social offenses the sign of a 'free man'. A good re-read of Marcus Aurelius would help illuminate that.

[Alphaville]

Shocking amount of name-calling (like the kind elementary school kids do) in Skin in the Game. It really distracts from his message, as well detracts from his personal reputation, at least in my eyes. Not liking someone is one thing, allowing it to degrade one's own behavior is another entirely.

Not all social beneficial behaviors are to remain 'employable', nor are all anti-social offenses the sign of a 'free man'. A good re-read of Marcus Aurelius would help illuminate that.

oh ha ha ha! i haven’t read that one yet. is he getting cranky with age?

please keep us posted with more discoveries. i started antifragile but got sidetracked.

[CS]

Perhaps cranky - the sense I got was just really, really, angry to the point of losing self-composure. But "cranky" is more generous.

[7Wannabe5]

I think there is sometimes a fine line between being able to yell “Yo, Emperor. I can see your butt.” Vs “Yo, Emperor. I can see your wrinkly old ass.”

Marcus Aurelius is likely an ENTJ and Taleb is likely an XNTP, and according to that model, the difference between the J and the P in that configuration amounts to an entirely different world view. ENTJs really have to battle with anger. xNTPs are just bratty.

[CS]

Haha! @7WB5, thanks for the laugh!