Book-Notes

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 18th, 2020 You really ought to subscribe :) What I Learnt from Antifragile (II) I fell sick and missed writing last week. I have to live up the name of the news letter, anyhoo. It would not be erratic without me whiffing once in a while, non? Apologies all around, anyway! The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks Basically a shortcut to figuring out whether you ought to do something or not, based on the risks it entails. How do we take a decision, when we don’t know all the pros and cons? How do we decide in an uncertain world? Simply put, ...

There seems never to be the right time to write or the right amount that I could learn from Antifragile, so I’m just going to take a long, rambling stab at it this morning. It will be a living document that I’ll keep adding to on the blog, sooner or later, but for now, this is just for you, my dear newsletter1 family. Here goes … While I love the way he writes, I don’t have that much a familiarity with English that, I can easily process stuff like this, every time I just want to grab a principle quickly. ...

I want to keep reading books and stories about how folks pick themselves up. It helps me deal with the storms in my life better. It assures me I am not alone. And people often have it worse. Neil Pasricha shares his story in You are Awesome. Most of which are relates with everything we face in our lives. And I was meh. But he also shares his parents stories. And those are really, really inspiring. ...

It’s a Michael Lewis book. That alone, is enough for me to tell you to go read it. Kahneman and Tversky’s work has probably been the biggest influence on my life in recent years, since Taleb.1 We cannot think in probabilities in our daily lives. We keep fooling ourselves, with various biases. And the intuition we have, is because we are really amazing biological machines. And even that is subject to error. Unless the intuition is backed by extensive experience. And even then we can easily be fooled. That basically is the gist of their work (to me, so far). I flunked nearly every experiment in Danny Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.2 We need to think slowly, through every implication, when it comes to the few big decisions in life. ...

If Taleb convinced me that Mathematics was beautiful philosophy, Ben Orlin is the one made me fall in love with it. Change is the Only Constant is beautiful and funny at the same time. It’s the story of Calculus over the ages and through domains. It weaves through life and time, through people, interesting and otherwise. And the way Ben tells it, it bears no resemblance to the dry crap that is taught in schools and colleges. It’s beautiful and wonderful, but not paramount and still subject to the vagaries and complexities of life and nature. ...

Really good book. Gave me a new set of mental models. Notes follow. “Focus on the process, not the luck” “Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat” ...