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Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for reading and commenting with good faith and a, as far as I can tell, correct historical frame in mind. As opposed to with some literalist naive and/or hostile, contemporary-navel-gazing nonsense that is completely missing the point of the essay.

For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect (https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...), where he elaborates on the connection between risk and survival of ideas.

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"If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works at ninety percent. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are it works at less than ten percent"

Some of my favorite books of all time were Taleb's, but I have to say, his writing is the perfect demonstration of power law. 10℅ of his content is remarkably insightful and the remaining 90℅ is unadulterated bullshit.

I agree 90% of his insights are worthless, and yet the real insights that remain make reading his books very worthwhile. If I could produce 1 page of genius for every 9 pages of trash I would be ecstatic! Most authors never produce any real lasting insights at all.

The value of contrarians is not in the things they're wrong about, it's in the things they're right about. I'm pretty sure that was also the point of pg's mini essay.

Why are you using ℅ ("care of") instead of % ("percent")?

It's a Google Keyboard (GBoard) thing I think.

Right, it's easier to find ℅ than % and easy to mistake one for the other.

Holy s*, you guys are right. I've been using this phone for three years and never realized that ℅ is not percent. I always just assumed it was a display glitch that caused the "break in the circle".

I didn't notice until some of my texts only allowed half as many characters per message due to switching to Unicode.

I have been following his work (and social media discussions) since Black Swan, and it seems to me that the ideas are becoming stronger (to me) with time. The later ideas reinforcing and expanding on earlier themes. For example, Black Swan was about unpredictable and catastrophic risk, later Anti-fragility was about how to deal with risks including Black Swans, his work in progress (Skin in the game) is how to make systems more anti-fragile.

I encountered his ideas (10 years back!) at a time when my default way of thinking was very intuitive instead of systematic and analytical thinking (which many of my high-performing peers had developed over the course of engineering education). Perhaps because of this, I took to his ideas like duck (swan) takes to water. I never acquired a systematic(analytical) thinking approach despite being in academia till mid twenties though I could hack decent academic performances. It was in an engineering profession that I realized the advantage and importance of systematic thinking and tried to consciously develop it.

Strangely, the use of systematic thinking has also actually increased my appreciation of his ideas after a period of wavering doubt. The systematic (analytical) way of thinking is too seductive and it's successes too apparent that it appears far superior to my earlier intuitive way of thinking. However, I am gradually coming to realize that the intuitive way of thinking has a deep logic of it's own which is not visible or may not even be decipherable. It's logic can only be inferred by its effect which ofcourse a critic can also be ascribe to luck!

I tell people to "read enough Taleb that you understand why you shouldn't always listen to Taleb"

It is a filtering, nonsense expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for professional researchers. I for my part spent the first twenty three years of activity in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research.

I wonder if that explains why his first 3 books where so much better than what he has written since....

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