Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Wednesday, August 12, 2015 12:27:23 AM UTC

A lot of Greek texts such as Galen, even Aristotle, might be there, simply because nobody can decipher.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Sunday, July 13, 2014 2:02:37 PM UTC

David Zuccaro mentioning Descartes philosophy of mind here in this context is highly... out of place in an intelligent discussion. People like you are usually invited to leave this forum. And how about his mathematics? I am saying this because of the zillions of morons who put down Aristotle on some "mistake" he made.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:43:53 PM UTC

What we call virtue is Nietzsche's slave morality to make them obedient and preserve the status quo. Honor is his master's morality. Sorry but I had to be blunt.for the ancients see Aristotle (including Arabs) humility is only a virtue for losers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Thursday, May 3, 2012 6:43:49 PM UTC

And the golden mean is Aristotle...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:51:44 PM UTC

For the precursor name for antifragility was “long volatility” used in the jargon to describe an exposure, even anything that gains from volatility, turmoil and increase in randomness (“long” in the lingo simply meant “benefits from increases”). The lingo also included the expressions “convex” (a special case of nonlinear response) or other more obscure words (such as “long gamma”, “long second derivative”) completely meaningless to the outside world —and there were about a dozen varieties of such “long volatility”. So Dynamic Hedging went deeper and deeper, and uncovered more nonlinearities . I also characterized every possible form of nonlinear response —remarkable all of them portable to this book, and applicable, to, say the human body’s reaction to radiation therapy. But, without going into the next step, I had also been casually generalizing to real life, applying these words to every object around me that gained more from turmoil than was harmed from it. Activities like tinkering and trial and error were “long volatility” or “long randomness”, while those of central planning were “short volatility” or “short randomness” (“long” means benefits from a rise in what one is expose to, “short” means the opposite). Something harmed by potential war was “short volatility”. An employee with potential reputational damage was “short volatility” and had to play it safe.
One day, my friend Anthony Glickman the rabbi and Talmudic scholar, turned option trader, then turned again Rabbi and Talmudic scholar (so far), after one of these conversations about how this applies to everything around us, perhaps after one of my tirades on stoicism, calmly announced: “life is long gamma” (in the jargon, a variety of long volatility, that is, benefiting from volatility increase. Anthony even had his mail address “@longgamma.com”). But nobody else outside this narrow pursuit of option traders understood what I and my friends meant, cared about these concepts or connected to them. Even academics and the rocket scientists around me missed the point as they seemed to want to have more complicated and less relevant things on their minds —and from the comments of the professors who refereed the draft of Dynamic Hedging, I can safely saw that they weren’t even close.
So, clearly, I had a word for antifragility and a precise mapping of the concept but did not take it to its natural conclusion. For instance, one day, in the early 2000s, after watching the James Bond movie in which a Hamburg based media magnate fomented wars so he could sell more newspapers, I quietly described the film to a friend, another option trader as follows: “some fellow is long volatility” and the trader did not have to make any effort to understand why. Quiet days without turmoil would not have been good for the Hamburg magnate’s newspaper business. Today I would say: “some fellow is antifragile to wars”.
As I wrote in Chapter x, I also felt frustrated because while the true message of The Black Swan was about fragility to extreme events (I had by then adopted the notion of fragility) but in the first edition, I only focused on the event itself and everyone was talking about Black Swans not fragility.
I had lost more than a decade, but I felt the serenity of having closed the loop and completed unfinished business.
First, the central feature of an option contract, (again, more in the next section), is that it is a contingent claim between two parties who have a mirror image of outcomes; one person, the holder, makes all the gains, the other, the seller eats all the losses. It is hence asymmetric (in fact, as we will see, nonlinearity arises from asymmetry). One person can afford to be wrong, the other cannot and needs to be extremely careful. It turned out at the center of The Black Swan is a very, very similar epistemological asymmetry (hence nonlinearity): mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence –a elementary mistake made by very smart people, or people called “smart”. It was the same mistake typical “smart” people made with the misunderstanding of the symmetry of option contracts. One’s exposure to the error from absence of evidence is completely different from that to the error from evidence of absence. So I realized that the epistemological asymmetry is similar to the asymmetry within the option contract, if not exactly the same on some map that started forming in my head. I had closed the loop from nonlinearity to epistemology, the only business I felt worth being in. (Somehow this makes Fat Tony and Thales of Miletus much smarter in some things than Socrates and Aristotle. I know it is not clear for now as I have skipped many, many intermediary steps; but it will all be explained to the reader in later chapters).
The second, a bigger aha, came as follows. I decided to write a follow up to The Black Swan on the notion of fragility, which I eventually did as a postscript to the book. In my mind it was very vaguely linked to “short volatility” (negative exposure to volatility, in the lingo I used at the time), until trying to map it the way I had done in Dynamic Hedging, I realized that fragility was exactly that, short volatility, nothing else. I looked at a porcelain cup full of coffee, almost spilled it on my shirt, and saw that fragility was necessarily in the nonlinearity of things. If I drop if once from 10 centimeters, it would break. But if I dropped it twice from 5 centimeters, it would not. The increase in harm was nonlinear. Excitement: all fragilities (hence antifragilities) reside in the nonlinear, and I had already mapped which ones.
Now everything became one piece. Nobody had managed to provide a definition of risk so far, because risk the way they viewed it is subjective (the latest paper was by Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz, in 1971, and another one by Marc Machina and the same Rothschild announced the tautology: ”risk is what risk averse people don’t like”). Further, even if risk was objective, it would not be measurable because of Black Swan effects. My excitement is that fragility had a straightforward definition! And it was measurable!
So I hit my aha when I figured out that fragility in any domain, from a coffee cup to an organism, to a political system, to the size of a firm, to the health of a grandmother, is exactly what does not like randomness. I can even measure it. I called my friend Bruno Dupire with whom I have had a continuous conversation during the episode of the attic —the most intuitive mathematician, and non selfpromoter (he writes no papers), he can grasp things in seconds. He confirmed that I could express everything nonlinear with the same tools (combination of contingent claims) that I used before when he pored over my manuscript. I could express antifragility in medicine, sociology, life, economics, and coffee cups in graphs, variations around a single theme, close to {x forty} of them in this book, everything using the same series of options. And the epistemological issue can also fit on the same graphical representation —the exposure to the unknown.
Here was the definition of fragility and one that can lead to antifragility. as we will see with some depth in the next section.
The only bad news is that I no longer have that attic.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Wednesday, December 21, 2011 8:20:44 PM UTC

Courage is essential. But Aristotle's definition of courage is something in the middle between recklessness and cowardice. I think he takes it from Plato (Latches).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Sunday, December 19, 2010 9:17:14 PM UTC

You guys are not getting it at all: what you are talking about is "warm glow", a form of internal reward. I am shifting the problem to the very act doing something because it is part of you to do so, because of who you are, totally non-consequentialist.
To understand it better: for Aristotle the ARETE of a knife is to cut. If it is a good knife then it cuts well [NOT TH REVERSE]. Virtue is ARETE, you do things BECAUSE it is part of you.
Please think for a bit before responding.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Sunday, December 19, 2010 9:49:23 PM UTC

I am isolating the following point: whether the very notion of action for NO gain exists in ethics and WHERE it started showing. The kind of stuff I got, that actions have some motive, etc. is another (lesser) discussion.
Also Fabricio, you should learn to avoid slippery slope arguments: Aristotle's point on slavery (or any other topic) have nothing to do with his definition of ARETE and his example of the knife.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Saturday, November 13, 2010 4:25:55 PM UTC

Thanks Lucio -note that wiki page was (characteristically) updated by an idiot. Averroes did not know Greek and was not the translator of Aristotle.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Saturday, November 13, 2010 4:41:07 PM UTC

The other page, Christophe.
He most certainly knew no Greek.Incidentally, Aristotle was not translated from Greek into Arabic, but from SYRIAC (the Aramaic of the post-Antiquity Levant) in Bayt el HIkma in Bagdad.