Anti-Fragile Book: Why We Should Eat Like Cavemen, Embrace Religion, and Hate Bankers - Mic: "The concept of anti-fragility urges readers to think counter-intuitively in order to realistically understand our world. Taleb believes it is human nature to assume there is order where there is chaos, and insist on creating narratives out of obvious randomness.
This idea that we can smooth everything out, and eliminate risk, or what Taleb refers to as “the soccer mom problem” and “touristification” is not only hubris, it’s stupidity. The book is an evisceration of our own self-deceptions using statistical interpretations, mathematics, historical, and even biological examples.
In his worldview, great success is only achieved by heuristic trial-and-error, not stability. At the Brooklyn launch of his book on Wednesday, Taleb declared that, “The only anti-fragile systems now are Silicon Valley and the New York restaurant industry.” Both entities are extremely innovative, and prone to high levels of failure and reward. The ability for individual disasters to benefit the overall quality of the collective qualifies them as anti-fragile...
His perfect workout is, “Go to the gym and get into a fight on the way. Win. Go into the basement and lift something very heavy.” Randomness and convexity teach the body to be strong and adaptable. Taleb scorns the idea of running on a treadmill. “If a Martian saw people on treadmill machines, they would think they were in a Russian labor camp.”
...The author is quite skeptical of education as a cure-all for economic development and career building. He points to the idea that rich countries have high levels of education and literacy. Therefore, there’s the belief that education leads to wealth, when actually the opposite occurs—countries get rich, and then they get educated. Since studies show that education does not equal GDP, to be anti-fragile, first have skills, and then obtain formal education. An example given is, “The merchant profession has lots of variance. A dentist has very little.” Although parents want a life of stability for their children, Taleb’s theory would put the odds of success on the merchant in an unpredictable world. “College insulates students from downsides,” he says, “but also prevents brilliance.”"
Nassim Taleb: my rules for life | Books | The Guardian: "His justification for all this is that "experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies". More than anything else, he believes in having "skin in the game". When, for example, he warned about the fragility of the banking system in The Black Swan, "I was betting on its collapse". His point is that he's always put his money where his mouth is, and it's this principle – and the lack of it – that is still, he believes, the fundamental problem with the entire banking system. In the book he calls this "Hammurabi's Code", a 3,800-year-old Babylonian law that stipulated that if a building collapses and kills someone, the builder should be put to death. Whereas, for bankers, "there is no downside". The bonus system means that "they're paid billions in compensation". And if their bets lose, it's the taxpayers who pay. He cites, not unadmiringly, the tradition in Catalonia where they would "behead bankers in front of their banks". So, what's changed, I asked, since he wrote the book, and the system collapsed? "Nothing. Nothing has changed. Zero. Now I switch to writing technical papers. There is some hope, the Bank of England wants to implement antifragility. Mervyn King [the governor of the Bank of England] spoke about it at the LSE. And I've done work for the IMF… And he especially despises journalists who made the case for war on Iraq, like the New York Times's Thomas Friedman, "a serial criminal" who he says makes him feel physically sick. It's back to his "skin in the game" beliefs. If you're going to make the case for war, you need to have at least one direct descendant who stands to lose his life from the decision. And while some may wonder why they need a lecture on ethics from an ex-city trader, it's hard to argue with. Though it's easy enough to argue about more or less anything else."
The 5 Worst Moments From Last Night’s State of the Union | TIME: "1. “Today, fewer than 15,000 [troops] remain” in Afghanistan and Iraq, said Obama. That’s down from nearly 200,000 just six years ago. Well, what took so long, really? Obama’s administration did everything it could to extend our presence in both countries (even tripling troop strength in Afghanistan for a “surge” that was a resolute failure by all accounts). Now we’re droning the hell out of Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere (where innocent targets are hit 28 times for every intended target, according to the British group Reprieve). And we’re back in Iraq, fighting ISIS without a declaration of war or a clear plan. Maybe we’ve “turned the page,” as Obama asserted in the speech’s controlling metaphor, but we’re just in a new chapter in the same tired old playbook when it comes to what Candidate Obama called “dumb wars” and pledged to avoid..."
"God Bless."
'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize | Rolling Stone: "The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried. No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups. But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – that was a hard one to see coming...
There's the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq. Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the "human story."
...The problem of course is that there's no such thing as "winning" the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues to this day to spread beyond Iraq's borders. Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that killing Mustafa was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It's a scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from Seattle to Savannah...
The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children. They're the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has mostly been over just how much of a "hero" Chris Kyle really was...
The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too. They did this after Vietnam, when America spent decades watching movies like Deer Hunter and First Blood and Coming Home about vets struggling to reassimilate after the madness of the jungles. So we came to think of the "tragedy" of Vietnam as something primarily experienced by our guys, and not by the millions of Indochinese we killed. That doesn't mean Vietnam Veterans didn't suffer: they did, often terribly. But making entertainment out of their dilemmas helped Americans turn their eyes from their political choices. The movies used the struggles of soldiers as a kind of human shield protecting us from thinking too much about what we'd done in places like Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.
This is going to start happening now with the War-on-Terror movies. As CNN's Griggs writes, "We're finally ready for a movie about the Iraq War." Meaning: we're ready to be entertained by stories about how hard it was for our guys. And it might have been. But that's not the whole story and never will be. We'll make movies about the Chris Kyles of the world and argue about whether they were heroes or not. Some were, some weren't. But in public relations as in war, it'll be the soldiers taking the bullets, not the suits in the Beltway who blithely sent them into lethal missions they were never supposed to understand."
Eddie Huang on Seeing His Memoir Become a Sitcom -- Vulture: "But for all the bullshit I heard at studios about universal stories and the cultural pus it perpetuates, I felt some truth in it for those three minutes. It takes a lot of chutzpah to launch a network comedy with a pilot addressing the word chink, yet it works because it’s the safest bet the studio could have made. The feeling of being different is universal because difference makes us universally human in our individual relationships with society. We’re all fucking weirdos. The social contract is here because we have a collective desire to be individuals and preserve our rights to pursue singular happiness with or without cilantro. But we’ve been fixated way too long on universality and the matrix’s pursuit of monoculture. It’s time to embrace difference and speak about it with singularity, idiosyncracy, and infinite density. No more drone strikes, no more Nielsen boxes, no more "we are the world" … if it’s walkin' dead with a red dot, take the shot. Chinkstronauts, ride out ..."
"Most mammals mark their territories with excretions. Domesticated primates humans mark their territories with ink excretions on paper." - Robert Anton Wilson.
"Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil." - Robert Anton Wilson
Pope Francis Says He Never Meant to Endorse Punishment of Religious Insults - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "In his comments last week, Francis never explicitly said violence was OK, merely that it was to be expected. I accept that he did not mean to defend violence, although I still question both the accuracy and the wisdom of declaring that it's only human to punch someone in the nose when he insults your mother or your religion. Francis even went so far as to say that he himself would respond violently if someone insulted his mother. Expectations matter, and if we expect violence in situations like these, we will get more of it. Even though Francis says a violent response is "unjust," he is offering an appealing excuse for it."
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