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Matt Ridley reviews Antifragile in The Wall Street Journal

On By In General

You don’t need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead traders discover “heuristics,” or rules of thumb, by trial and error. These are then formalized by academics into theorems and taught to new generations of traders, who become slaves to theory, ignore their own common sense and end by blowing up the system. In a neat echo of its own thesis, Mr. Taleb’s paper making this point sat unpublished for seven years while academic reviewers tried to alter it to fit their prejudices.

Economic Bricolage: We should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.
http:// online. wsj. com/ article/ … 51100906 . html

Nassim Taleb on ForeignPolicy.com

On By In General, Writing

Foreign Policy has an article on their website with reflections from Nassim touching on Fragility/Antifragility, the stability of countries, city-states and decentralizing government, Lebanon, the European Union, and US deficits, titled Epiphanies from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Excerpt:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made a career of going against the grain, and he has been successful enough that the title of his book The Black Swan is a catchphrase for global unpredictability far beyond its Wall Street origins. Born in Lebanon, he weathered the first few years of the civil war in the late 1970s reading philosophy and mathematics — from Plato to Poincaré — in his family’s basement. War taught him how quickly fortunes can change, an insight he soon applied to derivatives markets. For Taleb, investing is about “hyper conservatism,” which includes making lots of tiny bets on wildly unlikely events — like a currency crisis or the banking collapse, on which he made tens of millions of dollars. His newest project is helping governments get smarter about risks, and his fervent anti-euro message has helped win him the ear of British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Link: http: // www. foreign policy. com/ articles/ 2012/ 10/ 08/ epiphanies_ from_ nassim_ nicholas_ taleb