Myth & Errors in the Reporting on Antifragile by the Members of the 1%, The InternationalFraternityofEmptySuitsNotExposedtoHarm (IFESNEH)
THE GLORIFICATION OF
THE 99%
- Golden rule: one is not ethically allowed to tells others
what to do unless he is doing it himself, and can suffer harm in case it turns
out to be a bad advice. Predictors should be harmed by their prediction
errors if these stand to hurt others. As such I cannot give advice, I can only
tell readers what I do. Likewise,
I cannot tell people what I predict, I can just describe my portfolio. This rule
prevents people from being harmful phonies.
-Antifragile is critical the 1% of
professions in violation of the golden rule, hat is, phony and harmful to
others (there is nothing wrong phony on its own) —namely members of the InternationalFraternityofEmptySuitsNotExposedtoHarm
(IFESNEH) that is, media noise-journalists,
predictors, economists, academizing academics outside scientific disciplines, politicians
lobbyists, and such frauds who are not harmed by their mistakes that harm
others, in other words not ethically calibrated. The style is irreverent and
idiosyncratic, but only irreverent against harmful phonies. Remember they are
the ones reporting on the books by the very reason that they are not doers.
- Antifragile is a glorification of the doer and ethically
calibrated victim of IFESNEH, the 99% : entrepreneur, taxpayer, bus driver,
artisan, real people, etc.
- The book was written in exactly the same style as the other
books in the Incerto trilogy (The
Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness).
It has the same characters (Fat Tony, Nero Tulip). It was written for readers,
not reviewers (and middlemen), and does not allow summarizing by scanning. The organization
is fractal, with a general and comprehensive introduction, followed by
chapters, subsections and depth leaving no stone unturned. Critically, after
the introduction, the bulk of the book can be read out of sequence. No "narrative
nonfiction" is allowed, only ideas, parables, logical discussions, and
pure fiction.
- The advance as reported in the press does not correspond to a single publisher, but to an estimate from the ~ 32 publishers of The Black Swan who committed to the follow-up. But it did certainly generate a bit of envious responses. (Note that the bulk of comments on the books were made before the book was sold, by some IFESNEH members who had not read it and are stupid enough to leave a record of such ethical violation.)
MORE TECHNICAL
- The equivalence:
Fragile (to both shocks & model
error) Concave (functional space) left tail (probability space)
AntiFragile (to both shocks & model error) Convex (functional space) not fragile in the left tail
(probability space), positive in right tail.
is a mathematical necessity (by theorem). No positive statement is made with confidence, only via negativa ones.
All decision-making rules (such as barbells, heuristics, etc.) follow from the equivalence.
STYLISTIC MATTERS:THE PROPERTY OF BOOKS THAT SURVIVE
Longer Discussion: Fractal is good for the soul