business

[I]N NOOKS ALL OVER THE EARTH SIT MEN WHO ARE WAITING, SCARCELY KNOWING IN WHAT WAY THEY ARE WAITING, MUCH LESS THAT THEY ARE WAITING IN VAIN. OCCASIONALLY THE CALL THAT AWAKENS—THAT ACCIDENT WHICH GIVES THE “PERMISSION TO ACT—COMES TOO LATE, WHEN THE BEST YOUTH AND STRENGTH FOR ACTION HAS ALREADY BEEN USED UP BY … Read more

Rational about Rationality You don’t need science to survive, but you need to survive to do science. The best definition of rationality: actions that increase the chances of survival. Herbert Simon formulated the idea of bounded rationality; we can’t deal with the world as if we were a computer – we need shortcuts and distortions … Read more

My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words. Words have ambiguous meanings – this is bad for decision making. Philosophy was born out of the need for rigor in discourse – Socrates asked … Read more

Taleb’s point in Skin in the Game can be summed up with this observation. Anyone who needs to appease his colleagues to make progress, or his superiors, or deal with commentators, will have to take on the role of an actor, and by doing so, they trade results in the real world for their position … Read more

Jesus was a risk taker In Christianity, it would have been easier to separate Jesus from God, but there was an insistence on the Trinity. The duality of Jesus (being both man and God) is central, and has caused monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity and Christians to be beheaded by the Islamic … Read more

The Skin of Employees Employees exist because they have a lot of skin in the game, they share risk with their employers – enough for it prevent them from being undependable. With employees, you are buying dependability. And dependability is a driver behind many transactions. People of some means have a country house—which is inefficient … Read more

An intolerant minority will set the rules for everyone else. People in the U.S eat Kosher food not because most of the U.S is Jewish, but because non-Jews tolerate Kosher while Jews don’t tolerate non-Kosher. This asymmetry informs us about what will happen with GMO’s.  Companies can promote genetically modified food, but it only takes … Read more

Be careful of taking advice from people with misaligned incentives. If someone advises you to do something that is mutually beneficial, realize they may not care if you end up being harmed.   Traders understood this, they did not sell to other professional traders when they had excess inventory to unload – doing so would … Read more

In Book 1, Taleb introduces an outline of his arguments. Hierarchies aren’t so bad Hierarchies are not inherently bad, they are only harmful when they result in bureaucracies that help people separate themselves from the consequences of their decisions. Hierarchies should exist, and if they are localized and decentralized then they would not result in … Read more

Rhonda Patrick has worked alongside Bruce Ames, the 23rd most cited scientist across all fields between 1973 and 1984. She conducts antiaging research and published papers on a mechanism by which vitamin D regulates the production of serotonin. Teeth can save your life Baby teeth or wisdom teeth should be preserved. Mesenchymal stem cells can … Read more