Hey everyone,
Welcome to the 10th edition of Mellow Wisdom. We’re on to double digits and as promised things are going to get bigger and better. We’re almost at 100 subscribers. I realize it’s a vanity metric with ~ 20% of the folks who’ve subscribed haven’t even read a single issue. Everyone else, thank you for giving me your most valuable resource - your time and attention.
I spent the week before in person with my new teammates at Stoa School. And it was magical. We worked hard during the day and the nights were lit up with some magnificent discussions and jaw-dropping conversations around some of my favorite themes — pop-culture, society, tech, psychology, and philosophy among others. I asked my teammates lots of hard questions and in return got a ton of great recommendations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical, and (mostly) practical problems with probability.
Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) covering broad facets of uncertainty.
Taleb is currently a distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder ("antifragile").
Taleb refuses all honors and anything that "turns knowledge into a spectator sport".
Taleb traveled the conventional route of education to real-life and theory to practice in inverse sequence from the common one, moving from the practical to the philosophical to the mathematical. He started as a trader, then got a doctorate in mid-trading career; he wrote literary books before writing technical papers, and his work became progressively more technical and formal with time.
I have read a lot of Taleb quotes on Twitter but honestly, they’ve been hard for me to digest up until last week. 😇
I plan to spend the next month or 2 reading Incerto to internalize some of his ideas. He provides a great framework on how to live and act despite uncertainty and limited knowledge.
One question that I ask everyone I meet and interact with is - what does success mean to you? I get amazing answers.
Some of Taleb’s ideas that caught my eye this last week:
Taleb’s definition of success:
Antifragility
Taleb describes that something is antifragile when it gets better with chaos, disorder, and time whereas anything fragile hates volatility.
Nature is the ultimate example of something antifragile as it can adapt and gets stronger with difficult times.
This is a tweet-sized gist of an entire book, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. Powerful.
When asked — What is one thing that a recent college graduate can do to be Antifragile?
“I wrote a chapter in antifragile: get passing grades and follow voraciously your curiosity on the side instead of competing in school. In the end what matters is your curiosity, nothing else. And read nothing that doesn't interest you but interests someone else.”
This is something that I did in my B school subconsciously and got a ton of value out of the experience. Confirmation bias. 😬
When asked — What is the most important skill or trait a human being can have in the modern world?
A sense of honor. It puts you above everything else.
How To Be Considerate
Punctuality: Being late is an insidious form of disrespect for others, particularly when you lay the blame on some external factor, as if such minor outliers had never happened before. (Some people never bother apologizing: they are presenting the double signal that they are both inconsiderate and, underestimating outliers, have no control over their lives). So the only “goal” I had for 2007 was to be punctual to perfection, regardless of snow storms, airline delays, traffic jams, murders, episodes of hyperventilation, revelations, wars, etc. Failure was no option. Clearly it carries what may appear to be “costs”: inability to cram too many appointments into the same day. But I see them as benefits –not only do I escape the vulgarity of “optimized” business life but, in addition, I give whomever I am meeting the highest form of respect, with no cheap signaling. The other cost is that it forces me to get to where I am going much earlier than planned, then read in a café, or listen to a French couple arguing in public, etc. I also fly wherever I am going one day ahead, then kill time walking around. If I keep it up for 2008, then I will be closer to the dignified obituary: “he was (almost) never late”.
Davos: I turned down an invitation to speak at the World Economic Congress in Davos (for no honorarium) – in spite of the argument for “interaction with global leaders” (they sent me a list of hotshots: almost no one worth having conversation with). I’d rather spend time working in a café, with real people around.
Low Carb Philology
Art De Vany converted me to a way of thinking about our fitness for the pre-agricultural world. It hit me that the fruits that we eat are, like bread, the product of agriculture, not nature. Fruits are not so natural, after all.
Fruits in the Mediterranean were not as sweet then as they are today. I am convinced of that, on two accounts. First, consider the taste of traditional fruits. They have been bred for progressive increases in sweetness (sweetness is addictive and contagious: the crusaders did not know about dessert before they encountered what became the sorbet and the honey-sweetened cake ). Husbandry is a selective process leading to sweeter and sweeter fruits owing to the treadmill effect of the artificial. Second, examine the names of fruits in ancient Mediterranean languages: for a fruit to have been prevalent, it would need to have a name in the Hebrew Bible, or possible the younger classical Greek. Non-indigenous names would logically be fruits that were imported.
The word Apple exists in old Semitic languages (Tapouach, תַּפּוּח, Taphaha تفاحة), though it may just mean “fruit” (I assume that apple was the forbidden fruit –the sweetest then). But the old apple then was not what we would call apple today. I remember apples from the Kadisha valley near my house in Amioun. There are areas in the holy mountain that have resisted tinkering --altitude is too high for the inhabitants to have a choice of what to grow. I recall the taste of these apples during my childhood –and the variations, Sfarjl. They were not sweet. Nor were grapes sweat. Fruits had an acidity to them I don’t find anymore. They were low-carb.
Higher carbs items, such as the orange, did not exist in the ancient world –no name for orange. Bitter lemons grew then. The orange came from Southern India and was slowly and progressively invasive –in Dickensian times, a single orange was the ideal Christmas gift. And not just in Victorian England: In France, too, it was a delicacy. In modern Greek, they bear the name πορτοκάλι, portokali as the Portuguese marketed them. So were tomatoes –imported from Central America (a tomato is technically a fruit). So were carrots –roots were bitter in the ancient world.
Berries (tut) were the main fruit. But strawberries they were not: they were small, wild and tart. There is no biblical name for strawberries.
I am about to go to Brazil –papaya, (modern) bananas, mangoes. All these are newly prevalent in our diet. What is sweet is not so natural.
Gossip
The accepted idea is that conversation is a means to communicate ideas, practical information and intentions, for a useful purpose, with some gossip and self-serving showoff here and there to enliven it. Yet most conversation is gossip and self-serving showoff , with ideas, practical information and intentions here and there to justify them.
Trust and Belief
You watch a James Bond movie, with your hero chased by villains. You know that it is not a real life situation, that the person is just an actor –that the blood is some brand of tomato juice and that the criminal is a nice guy in real life. But you ignore this background information for the purpose of the movie. You have decided to trust, to suspend your inquisition and trust what the creator of the movie had in mind.
Likewise, you do not exercise your first-order interpretation skills when looking at art. To “understand” religion you also have to “understand” art –something idiot savants have trouble with because they fall for the literal.
I often come across social media posts citing Taleb’s books are hard to summarize, my goal in the next few weeks is to try to summarize and distill some of his ideas just to test if I understand them.
I love the idea of a T-shaped person, adapting it to my content diet to produce quality output is an experiment worth doing.
Until next week.
- Vaibhav
Newsletter of the Week
Erik Torenberg’s Thoughts - The On Deck Co-founder shares some amazing insights every week. My favorite editions recently — See your career as a product and Reality is up for grabs.