Jose Miguel

“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The wise man is always similar to himself.”
― Sextus Empiricus

“After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Let us return to the distinction between Thalesian and Aristotelian for a minute and look at evolution from the following point of view. The frequency, i.e., how often someone is right is largely irrelevant in the real world, but alas, one needs to be a practitioner, not a talker, to figure it out. On paper, the frequency of being right matters, but only on paper—typically, fragile payoffs have little (sometimes no) upside, and antifragile payoffs have little downside. This means that one makes pennies to lose dollars in the fragile case; makes dollars to lose pennies in the antifragile one. So the antifragile can lose for a long time with impunity, so long as he happens to be right once; for the fragile, a single loss can be terminal. Accordingly if you were betting on the downfall of, say, a portfolio of financial institutions because of their fragilities, it would have cost you pennies over the years preceding their eventual demise in 2008, as Nero and Tony did. (Note again that taking the other side of fragility makes you antifragile.) You were wrong for years, right for a moment, losing small, winning big, so vastly more successful than the other way (actually the other way would be bust). So you would have made the Thekels like Thales because betting against the fragile is antifragile. But someone who had merely “predicted” the event with just words would have been called by the journalists “wrong for years,” “wrong most of the time,” etc. Should we keep tally of opinion makers’ “right” and “wrong,” the proportion does not matter, as we need to include consequences. And given that this is impossible, we are now in a quandary. Look at it again, the way we looked at entrepreneurs. They are usually wrong and make “mistakes”—plenty of mistakes. They are convex. So what counts is the payoff from success.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder