Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Doers and thinkers from Shakespeare to Jobs, liberally “stole” inspiration from the doers and thinkers who came before. Here’s how to do it right. *** “If I have …
Nassim Taleb
The Best of Farnam Street 2018
We read for the same reasons we have conversations — to enrich our lives. Reading helps us to think, feel, and reflect — not only upon ourselves and others but upon our ideas, and our relationship …
Winner Takes it All: How Markets Favor the Few at the Expense of the Many
Markets tend to favor unequal distributions of market share and profits, with a few leaders emerging in any industry. Winner-take-all markets are hard to disrupt and suppress the entry of new players …
Thought Experiment: How Einstein Solved Difficult Problems
Thought experiments are a classic tool used by many great thinkers, which enable us to explore often impossible situations and predict their implications and outcomes. Mastering thought experiments …
The Probability Distribution of the Future
The best colloquial definition of risk may be the following: “Risk means more things can happen than will happen.” We found it through the inimitable Howard Marks, but it’s a quote …
The Green Lumber Fallacy: The Difference between Talking and Doing
“All that glitters is not gold,” the saying goes. The aesthetics of things often fool us. People we call ignorant might not be ignorant. People we call smart might not be smart. The Green …
Frozen Accidents: Why the Future Is So Unpredictable
“Each of us human beings, for example, is the product of an enormously long sequence of accidents, any of which could have turned out differently.” — Murray Gell-Mann *** What parts of …
Life Advice: Be Careful of Life Advice
Nassim Taleb, the modern philosopher best known for his ideas on Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragility, gave his first commencement address at an American University in Beirut. Like him or …
Avoiding Falling Victim to The Narrative Fallacy
The narrative fallacy leads us to see events as stories, with logical chains of cause and effect. Stories help us make sense of the world. However, if we’re not aware of the narrative fallacy it can …
The Map Is Not the Territory
The Great Mental Models Volumes One and Two are out. Learn more about the project here. The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of …
How Warren Buffett Keeps up with a Torrent of Information
A telling excerpt from an interview of Warren Buffett (below) on the value of reading. Seems like he’s taking the opposite approach to Nassim Taleb in some ways. Interviewer: How do you keep up …
Nassim Taleb: How to Not be a Sucker From the Past
The fact that new information exists about the past in general means that we have an incomplete roadmap about history. There is a necessary fallibility … if you will. In The Black Swan, Nassim …
The Lucretius Problem: How History Blinds Us
The Lucretius Problem is a mental defect where we assume the worst-case event that has happened is the worst-case event that can happen. In so doing, we fail to understand that the worst event that …
Fooled By Randomness: My Notes
I loved Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Taleb. This is the first popular book he wrote, the book that helped propel him into an intellectual …
12 Books Every Investor Should Read
If you’re looking for something to read that will improve your ability as an investor, I’d recommend any of the books below. All 12 of them are deeply informative and will leave an impact on you. 1. …
A Definition of Antifragile and its Implications
While a lot of people casually use the word, not many people have read: Antifragile, where Nassim Taleb defines it for us. Just as being clear on what constitutes a black swan allows us to better …