Money Talks and Bullshit Walks (Toward Nassim Taleb?)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is smart-- and he won't let you forget it-- and while there's some fascinating stuff in his new book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, it's hard to know what to believe and what not to believe, and the book is definitely abrasive and fragmented, but he will get you thinking, you're just going to have to do more research to flesh out what he's saying . . . here are a few things that struck me:

1) Taleb prefers the Silver Rule to the Golden Rule . . . the Silver Rule is sort of the Negative Golden Rule: "Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you," and Taleb prefers it because it is more Libertarian and less restrictive-- the Silver Rule encourages you to mind your own business-- you're not doing things unto others and guessing what they would like . . . it lines up nicely with our First Amendment rights;

2) Taleb really hates Steven Pinker and all the non-mathematical non-stock-trading intellectuals associated with him, and while Taleb claims there are major statistical problems with Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature, this claim doesn't seem logical and more of a sour grapes character assassination attempt and Pinker has a reasoned and rational rebuttal to Taleb's jealous and rather weird claims . . . Taleb wants to apply his "Black Swan" reasoning to Pinker's thesis but Pinker has already anticipated this in his book . . . it's a fairly strange obsession and I don't really get his hatred of intellectuals, aside from the fact that he considers them the ultimate evil because they make pronouncements without having "skin in the game" and contribute to the "monoculture" of thought;

3) Taleb thinks we should take a more statistical, skin-in-the-game look at politics offers a great reminder of how important scale is in determining our values and morals:

"A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism . . .

I am, at the Fed level, a libertarian:
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist . . ."

4) Taleb likes to throw around the fact that he's Lebanese and grew up in Lebanon, and he frequently mention the many religious groups and sects that live there and in Syria-- I find this interesting because I lived there-- but I can see how the explanation of the dynamics of the Druze and the Shi'ites might grow tiresome to some audiences . . . I think he likes these examples because he's a big fan of the "the Lindy effect," he likes rules and institutions and foods and objects that have survived a long time-- the Lindy effect is the "theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy" . . . so things like the cup and the Ten Commandments are going to be around a long time because they've been around a long time . . . these are the kinds of rules and books and thoughts that Taleb trusts-- including advice from your grandmother and superstitions-- because they have weathered the test of time . . . he's not a progressive and he loves the fact that Trump got elected, confounding all the liberal, pseudo-intellectual types;

5) Taleb is at his best when he's talking about probability . . . he explains (hypothetically) that while terrorism and people falling down in the bathtub may take the same number of lives in any given year, why we have to treat terrorism so much more seriously . . . because it would take an incredible statistical anomaly to double bathtub deaths, but it only takes a major event or two to exponentially increase the deaths from terrorism . . . terrorism has the potential to reveal "unknown unknowns" or "black swans" or whatever you want to call them, but things can happen on the long tail that take many many lives . . . so he gets into the idea of how much tolerance we should show the intolerant, and when it comes to Salafi Islam, he believes we should be showing them no tolerance, because they have the potential of creating those kind of black swan events that pseudo-intellectuals-- who are too liberal-- don't assess with the correct amount of risk . . . it's something we all have to think deeply about, and it's the most important part of his reasoning;

6) on a more positive statistical note, he argues against Thomas Piketty's extreme take on economic inequality, and uses an idea called "ergodicity" to show that people move all over the map as far as where they lie in the income ladder over the course of time . . . so any one person might be in the top ten percent in one part of their life, then in the middle, then maybe at the bottom; I'm not sure I understand all the math, but it's an interesting take . . . although it seems that salary isn't the real culprit in income inequality, it's acquired wealth-- which is why I like Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax . . . I would never want to put words in Taleb's mouth, because he's so unpredictable and irascible, and I doubt he would like a wealth tax, but it does fit more into his worldview that acquired wealth doesn't have any risk to it, so it might as well be taxed and used for infrastructure or schools or clean energy or something interesting;

7) in the end, I wish there was more math and less railing against some imagined intellectual class with no skin-in-the-game . . . Taleb really believes that entrepreneurs should be venerated and I agree with him . . . it's much easier to be a salary-slave and the longer you do it, the more skin-in-the-game you have to protect your job and your reputation, but that doesn't mean you can't do good work; it's worth reading Taleb's books, but you just have to take everything with a grain of thought and take your time with each page and idea and think about what he's saying and if it really holds water.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Giving Heuristics the Finger

I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book Antifragile, and while I can't say it was fun and delightful, like a Malcolm Gladwell, I will say that it is a book you must read -- while Taleb is no great stylist, his thinking is logical, powerful, anti-establishment, anti-intellectual and apolitical -- which is refreshing; while this book frequents some of the same financial territory as The Black Swan, Taleb also ranges far, wide, and crazy with his thesis about systems that gain from volatility versus systems that are fragile, systems that fall apart in volatile times; I love what he has to say about books and technology . . . he explains that probabilistically, they age in an opposite fashion from humans: when you see an old human, you infer that he will probably live less time than a young human, but you should think in the reverse in regards to technology and books -- the longer the item has been around, the longer it probably will be around . . . we are stuck with cars and bicycles and cups and chairs for a long time, and the same with Shakespeare and Homer and Herodotus (Taleb tries only to read books that have been around for a long long time, and he claims only to drink things that have thousands of years of trials: coffee, tea, wine and water . . . he is a wacky guy) and what his philosophy ultimately comes down to is that you can only trust opinions from people with "skin in the game" and so he hates managers and governments and large institutions and pundits (especially Thomas Friedman, who he claims helped encourage the U.S. to invade Iraq, though he himself wouldn't be put in any danger if this happened) and pretty much anyone who doesn't have their own money on the line each and every day . . . he's brash, obnoxious, smart, frustrating, and also offers some diet and weight-lifting tips along with the finance and philosophy.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Some Restaurants You Should Frequent, Dammit

I'm not going to offer a full review of trader and quantitative analyst turned philosopher and power-lifter Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, other than to say that it is evocative, provocative, bold, brash, learned, and contemptuous -- and if you are at all involved in finance, then you have probably read -- or at least know about -- his previous book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable . . . which explains not so much how financial collapses happen, but how to prepare and even profit from them (as Taleb did with his hedge funds) but I'm using his ideas for more selfish reasons; he often uses the restaurant business to flesh out his "anti-fragile" metaphor, as "restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is anti-fragile, for that reason . . . had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, then overall business would be either stagnant or weak," and you can see where this is going -- subsidies and intervention will actually destroy the health of a working system . . . and while logical folks know that opening a restaurant is risky business (though not as risky as urban legend has it) we love the fact that people keep trying, and Taleb explains this in his typical hyperbolic fashion: "in order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic" because this person has taken heroic risk that is beneficial to others . . . but BEFORE this happens, please patronize the following restaurants, because they are inexpensive, awesome, and BYOB . . . I don't want them to become fallen soldiers . . .

1) El Gallo Giro 2 . . . a Mexican joint on Route 1 in Edison, just past Open Road Honda . . . they have awesome mole sauce and you can get enchiladas with pork or chicken or chorizo smothered in the stuff, their burritos are ridiculously huge and their tacos and guacamole are fantastic as well, this is our replacement for Taqueria la Juquilita, which changed hands and isn't as good as it once was;

2) Cafe La Terrassa, in New Brunswick, which has a new menu and a new take-out menu . . . this place is amazing, but slightly off the beaten path and never as crowded as it should be, and I will be really pissed off if it doesn't make it, so I am relying on you to eat there (and these reviews are totally unsolicited, as I have received no food, drink, coupons, sexual favors, or preferential seating for my favorable opinions).

He Hates to Say It . . . But He Loves to Say It

You're not supposed to like saying "I told you so" but in his book The Black Swan, all Nassim Nicholas Taleb has to say about the current financial crisis is: "I told you so"-- and there's nothing more enjoyable than saying "I hate to say it, but I told you so."

Dave's 105 Books to Read Before You Die (Which Will be Sooner Than You Think)

Everyone seems to have a top hundred list of something, and so here are my top hundred books (plus five bonus books in case you finish the top hundred too quickly) and each author is only represented once, so while Shakespeare and Italo Calvino may actually deserve more than one slot, for the sake of variety there are no repeats; also, there is fiction, non-fiction, and everything else on this list . . . and I should point out that once you finish reading all the books on this list, then you will be much smarter than me, because though I've read them all, I'm not sure I remember anything from them:

1.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2.   Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.   The Lives of the Cell by Lewis Thomas
5.   Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
6.   If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
7.   Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
8.   Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
9.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. V by Thomas Pynchon
11. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
12. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13.  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Into the Wild by John Krakauer
15.  Music of Chance by Paul Auster
16.  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
17.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
18. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
19. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
20. The Bible
21. Henry IV (part 1) by William Shakespeare
22. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
23. The Stories of John Cheever
24. Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver
25. The Image by Daniel Boorstin
26. Clockers by Richard Price
27. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
28. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
29. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
30. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan
31. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
32. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch  by Philip K. Dick
33.  Chaos by James Gleick
34.  The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky
35.  Watchmen by Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons
36.  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
37.  The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
38.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
39.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
40.  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
41.  Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
42.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
43.  War With The Newts by Karel Kapek
44.  The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
45.  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
46.  Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
47.  White Noise by Don Delillo
48.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
49.  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
50.  Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
51.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
52.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
53.  Bully For Brontosaurus by Stephen J. Gould
54.  The Drifters by James A. Michener
55.  Geek Love by Catherine Dunne
56.  The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
57.  Human Universals by Donald Brown
58.  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan
59.  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
60.  The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson
61.  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
62.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
63.  American Splendor by Harvey Pekar/ Robert Crumb
64.  The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz by Hector Berlioz
65.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
66.  The Castle by Franz Kafka
67.  Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
68.  Naked by David Sedaris
69.  Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
70.  The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
71.  The Big Short by Michael Lewis
72.  Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
73.  Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
74.  Monster of God by David Quammen
75.  Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
76.  Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
77.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
78.  Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
79.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
80. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
81.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright
82.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
83.  Manchester United Ruined My Life by Colin Shindler
84.  Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
85. From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
86. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
87. The End of the Road by John Barth
88. Neuromancer by William Gibson
89. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
90. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
91. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
92. Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
93. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
94. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
95. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
96. The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
97. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
98. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
99. 1493 by Charles C. Mann
100.  Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
101.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
102.  The Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
103.  Methland by Nick Reding
104. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
105. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Dave's 2019 Book List

Another year, another book list . . .

I read forty books in 2019-- a number which seems about average-- and for the most part, I kept it eclectic: fiction, non-fiction, genre stuff, graphic novels, economics, history, and even some self-help. My friend and fellow English teacher Kevin pointed out that I don't read enough books by women. While I definitely consume some chick-lit every year, he is right. Only six of the forty books were by women authors (but several of the books by men are about women, so that should count for something). I might remedy this in 2020 . . . but I might not. Books are one of the few things in life that you have control over. If books by women appeal to me, I'll read them. If not, Kevin can fuck off.

I did go down a couple of rabbit holes.

I read the entire Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu . . . and it wasn't easy. I'm quite proud of this and highly recommend these books to diehard sci-fi fans. I also read four mystery novels set in Wyoming. I don't know how this happened, but I really enjoyed the Longmire stuff by Craig Johnson.

I wrote about my seven favorite books of the year over at Gheorghe:The Blog, so you can check that post out if you like, but if you want just one book to read, here it is:

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.

This selection may be a result of the serial positioning effect, but the best book I read in 2019 is the last book I read in 2019.

The book is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, mainly during the 1970s and 1980s, but there is a frame story that is completely topical. The story is scary and compelling and violent and incredibly researched. It will dispel any romanticized notions you have about the IRA. The British are portrayed as no better.

These books provided a lot of material for me to write about. If it wasn't for books, my dog, my wife, and my absurd children, this blog would have died long ago.

Thank you books!

1) The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

2) An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

3) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

4) God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright

5) Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail by Rusty Young (and Thomas McFadden)

6) The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

7) The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

8) The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

9) Death's End by Cixin Liu

10) Atomic Habits by James Clear

11) Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

12) Glasshouse by Charles Stross

13) Educated by Tara Westbrook

14) The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

15) Redshirts by John Scalzi

16) Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

17) The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson

18) The Walking Dead 31: The Rotten Core by Robert Kirkman

19) The Walking Dead 32: Rest in Peace by Robert Kirkman

20) The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson

21) FreeFire by C.J. Box

22) Old Man's War by John Scalzi

23) Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson

24) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

25) The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block

26) Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

27) Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop

28) The Last Colony by John Scalzi

29) Locke and Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

30) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

31) Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

32) The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

33) Real Tigers by Mick Herron

34) Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic by Ben Westhoff

35) Slow Horses by Mick Herron

36) Giants of the Monsoon Forest by Jacob Shell

37) Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell

38) Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

39) Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff

40) Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe