The best people

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed

Ernest Hemingway

Statistics

Statistics isn’t about discovering correlations, it’s about eliminating coincidence. Removing BS, like the correlation is not causation mantra.

Correlation is not correlation.

Risk

All risks are not equal. Risk is subjective.

Risk is a human thing and probability is its logic.

Risk is about asymmetries. There are more than 20 types of financial risks.

Risk manage: use what you don’t see to make decisions. In order to be dealt with, risk needs to be at least partially quantified.

You can get the timing and direction right but miss the severity. Risk happens fast.

Against the Gods: The remarkable story of risk

Risk transferers:
– Executives getting bonused then bailed out by the public.
– Middle management hiding their incompetence by firing their managers.
– Doctors profiting off iatrogenics.
– Architects impressing other architects.

It’s all about skin in the game.

Youth lacks exposure to time

You cannot really reason with youth.

They look through the lens of emotion.

Youth lacks exposure to time.

Lack of time means lack of perspective.

Honor

You are honorable in proportion to the number of people to whom you can say “fuck you” with impunity but don’t.

Nassim Taleb

Entrepreneurship

Capitalism is in essence chaotic. Entrepreneurs are convex, their pursuits are fragile. They are risk-takers with skin in the game.

Beware the fake entrepreneur only interested in packaging and selling companies.

Volatility is an Instrument of Truth

Manners is asymmetric

You maintain manners because you contain your inner selfish desires to yourself. You empathize with another person. You empower them to feel free in your presence.

By Ase Deliri

Antifragile vs Resilient

Recovering and recovery rate is resilience, antifragile what gets stronger. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better

Robust and anti-fragile are distinct, though not orthogonal, concepts. A robust system is resistant to stress. An anti-fragile system constructively adapts to stress.

Bottom-up coherence is ANTIFRAGILE

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

That you feel something to be right may have its cause in your never having thought much about yourself and having blindly accepted what has been labelled right since your childhood.

Friedrisch Nietzsche

The process of acceptance

I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:(i) this is worthless nonsense;
(ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;
(iii) this is true, but quite unimportant;
(iv) I always said so.
– J. B. S. Haldane