The Nassim Taleb thread
01-15-2018, 03:46 AM
Well, I managed to get a copy of Antifragile and started reading it properly, and right away I realised my previous post was inaccurate. I got it horribly wrong, confusing robustness and resilience with antifragility ... in my defence, a common error since there literally is no word in the English language (or any other) for antifragility. But he does have a very simple way of describing it, by reference to Greek myth.
Fragile = Damocles.
Robust = The Phoenix.
Antifragile = The Hydra.
Damocles is subject to massive harm if one small event changes in his life, i.e. the descent of the sword. The Phoenix is robust because if it burns down its own inherent qualities allow it to be restored to the same position it had previously. The Hydra is antifragile because harm makes it even more effective (cut off one head, two more appear to replace it). Antifragility welcomes harm because it always benefits from it on balance.
Also some important insights about human physiology already: constant low level stress hurts human beings because there is no opportunity to recover. This was precisely how Heracles defeated the hydra, overcame an antifragile organism: he cauterised the wound where the head had been cut off immediately, thus preventing the chance to recover.
Intermittent stress, on the other hand, followed by a recovery, allows the body to overcompensate, allows antifragility in. You have that all-important recovery time. This is probably a good argument for HIIT over long exercise periods and endurance. Also worth wondering whether you should allow for longer recovery times, maybe 2 hardcore workouts per week actually is better for overall growth than 3-4? (It's certainly the case for older people).
One interesting thought, coming out of the Aziz false rape accusation thing: we are now seeing that income from left-leaning celebrity, fame, below a certain point is fragile as Taleb might define it. I think I'm going to see a discussion of fuck-you money later on in the book, but it'd be hilarious to conduct a study of those celebrities or male stars who have been accused of sexual harassment or outright rape, false or otherwise, in particular looking at the source of their income and how large that income is.
Hypothesis:
If your income is incredibly low and you're a comedian, then you are either robust or antifragile generally: you're already screwed or your resources are low enough that even if you're sued into oblivion the bank is going to spend more money chasing you than they would just calling it quits. And as you drag yourself through the civil law hell, you pick up more material and can attack your enemies nonetheless, since comedy is generally a defence to defamation or libel. This is particularly so under the US system of justice where each person bears their own costs in civil courts as I understand it.
On the other hand, if your income is incredibly high as a comedian, you might be able to hold yourself robust by diversifying your investments (pick up hedge funds, index funds, a trustable wife or family below whom to hide your assets) but you will not really be antifragile. You won't be able to make the small mistakes so necessary to build competence or better comedy; I think it was Patrice O'Neal who said bad jokes are how a comedian learns, but the comedian has much less freedom to make bad, distasteful jokes the more fame he gets and the bigger his audience gets: he's like Seinfeld, he goes dry because he can't afford to piss anyone off. The odds are on you're going to be fragile: let alone making a bad paedophile joke in front of a packed house, all it takes is one rape accusation (of the many, let's say) to get through the net and you're dead in the water.
And for my proof I draw off George Carlin's quote:
"Because of my abuse of drugs, I neglected my business affairs and had large arrears with the IRS, and that took me eighteen to twenty years to dig out of. I did it honorably, and I don't begrudge them. I don't hate paying taxes, and I'm not angry at anyone, because I was complicit in it. But I'll tell you what it did for me: it made me a way better comedian. Because I had to stay out on the road and I couldn't pursue that movie career, which would have gone nowhere, and I became a really good comic and a really good writer."
That is antifragility. The harm made him better at what he did.
What launched Carlin's real career, in 1978? When he gave his "Seven Words You Can't Say On Television" show and the stupid bastards arrested him for it, guaranteeing like dozens of French authors across history that he would become a household name. Again: antifragility is when the harm benefits you on balance.
Further hypothesis:
As a comedian, holding open leftist political positions makes you even more fragile, regardless of your income as a comedian. The crowd that actually pays to go and see comedians is mostly leftie. It's coastal and has more disposable money. That is, it makes it harder to achieve antifragile status as a comedian because if you openly profess leftist positions and are found to be violating them, the backlash will be much greater than if you were a comedian who openly holds and then is found to be violating right-wing positions. Suppose Aziz had been a white man who made woman/Asian/black jokes from the beginning of his career and had constantly made jokes about the Yosemite Sam shooting accuracy of your average Federal agent. Then one day he makes incompetent moves on an Asian chick.
Yes, he'd lose some of the Daily Stormer crowd who are in the front row of his concerts, but any of his leftie audience aren't really worried about it since they openly profess to tolerance -- if they ridicule him they give him more attention and therefore make him stronger -- and the more moderate right-wingers couldn't really care less. It's fair to say White Aziz probably wouldn't be making anywhere as near as much money from the beginning as IRT Aziz, but he'd be much less vulnerable to A Scandal than his leftie counterpart would be. (This same phenomenon is why radical Islam eventually conquers moderate Islam in any reasonably tolerant Islamic population - something else Taleb has written about, but I digress).
George Carlin again: stayed rude and offensive right to the end, in terms of his politics he appeared more apolitical ... or apathetic ... than leftie as such. He was antifragile because he thought elections were illusions of choice, and therefore neither side could touch him, and you could believe him to be any political affiliation you wanted.
By contrast, if you hold openly leftist political positions and are found to be contradicting them, you have a crisis. You can't pick up any audience from the right wing because you've been against them anyway, but your prime audience is nowhere near as tolerant and therefore more likely to desert you in large numbers. As Aziz's crowd is likely to do, and pretty much why the photographer girl calculated her complaint for this moment.
That is: if you're a comedian and you want to try and have sex using bad game, you're better off making Marx jokes: because a leftist with public profile is fragile.
Indeed I wonder (not with much seriousness) whether there's actually a mathematical "maximum returns" point for sucking leftie cock. Past a certain point it doesn't help you in terms of income to be a leftist, because beyond that point you are hopelessly fragile that a single dissatisfied girl can bring you down. Or it might be some kind of bell curve, because if you get to the dizzying heights of income the sex accusations either don't hurt you or, paradoxically, help your reputation (as they do with an alpha like Donald Trump).
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm
![[Image: 1*XZZ0IxbyE5fjhPms1aY7Ew.gif]](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*XZZ0IxbyE5fjhPms1aY7Ew.gif)
