Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I would consult with @IbeSaid who knows solid papers. He directed me to this one.

Recommendation: I've learned from father/grandfather that there is no greater pleasure in life than a free-flowing conversation with an erudite person: 1) @holland_tom is about the most erudite person I've met West of the Alps, 2) His podcasts feel like a conversation.

Some truth by Rip @SS_strength. Principles: 1- You WILL NOT get stronger without getting body fat, forget the image of the steroid-laden "ripped". 2- Never work out body parts separately. 3- Never suffer fools gladly.

One of deepest conversation you may ever listen to, betw @trishankkarthik & S. Wolfram. Touches on computational irreducibility as determining free will, the structure of the universe... Covers w/o knowing: ship of Theseus, mind-body & rigid designators! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6tKBXblzxQ

Excellent post by @Balajis (rehabilitated himself). Contrary to perception, we are NOT sliding into bureaucratocontrolledtechnotyranny. The informational distortion of the net w/conspiracies makes us think we are being increasingly controlled while sliding into a vicious ANARCHY.

Great work!

I can confirm.
I spent ~7 hours watching the 8 episodes.

Remember that what will work in the future must not make a lot of sense now. A lot of what makes sense (in naive first order logic) has already been tried --and failed. @rorysutherland

Beautiful thread. Entropy it is.

‘A breakthrough book. Wonderfully applicable to everything in life, and funny as hell.’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There is something admirable about the school of the Russians: they are thinkers doing math, with remarkable clarity, minimal formalism, and total absence of unnecessary pedantry one finds in more modern texts (in the post Bourbaki era). This is of course surprising as one would have expected the exact opposite from the products of the communist era. Mathematicians should be using this book as a model for their own composition. You can read it and reread it. Professors should assign this in addition to modern texts, as readers can get intutions, something alas absent from modern texts.

I read this book after completing my exposition of overcompensation, how a stressor or a random event causes an increase in strength, in excess of what is needed, like a redundancy. I was also looking for evidence of convex reaction to stressor, or the effect of a mathematical property called Jensen's inequality in domains and found it exposed here (in other words, why a combination low dose (most of the time) and high dose (rarely) beats medium dose all the time. The authors presents the evidence for the phenomenon in the following: 1) acute stressors cum recovery beat both absence of stressors and chronic ones (this includes thermal variations); 2) stressors make one stronger (post traumatic growth); 3) risk management is mediated by the deep structures in us, not rational decision-making; 4) winning causes an increase in strength (the latter are more complicated effects of convexity/Jensen's Inequality).
Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one should seek the familiar.
Bravo!