Nassim Taleb on being an autodidact

From Antifragile:

My idea was to be rigorous in the open market. This made me focus on what an intelligent antistudent needed to be: an autodidact—or a person of knowledge compared to the students called “swallowers” in Lebanese dialect, those who “swallow school material” and whose knowledge is only derived from the curriculum. The edge, I realized, isn’t in the package of what was on the official program of the baccalaureate, which everyone knew with small variations multiplying into large discrepancies in grades, but exactly what lay outside it… 

Again, I wasn’t exactly an autodidact, since I did get degrees; I was rather a barbell autodidact as I studied the exact minimum necessary to pass any exam, overshooting accidentally once in a while, and only getting in trouble a few times by undershooting. But I read voraciously, wholesale, initially in the humanities, later in mathematics and science, and now in history—outside a curriculum, away from the gym machine so to speak. I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship. The enterprise needed to be totally effortless in order to be worthwhile. The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether—when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement. The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom. 

(I confess I still use that method at the time of this writing. Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.)

Carl Sagan quote

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

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Related book: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Related previous post: Inspiration from the universe...

Maybe the most valuable $2.99 one can spend...

If you have a Kindle...

Link to: Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders

Graham and Dodd on the ‘Relation of the Future to Investment and Speculation’

“It may be said, with some approximation to the truth, that investment is grounded on the past whereas speculation looks primarily to the future. But this statement is far from complete. Both investment and speculation must meet the test of the future; they are subject to its vicissitudes and are judged by its verdict. But what we have said about the analyst and the future applies equally well to the concept of investment. For investment, the future is essentially something to be guarded against rather than to be profited from. If the future brings improvement, so much the better; but investment as such cannot be founded in any important degree upon the expectation of improvement. Speculation, on the other hand, may always properly—and often soundly—derive its basis and its justification from prospective developments that differ from past performance.”

Insights From Nassim Taleb

Link to article: 35 Brilliant Insights From Nassim Taleb

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Taleb quotes from the article:

The artificial gives us hangovers, the natural inverse-hangovers.

The only problem with the last laugh is that the winner has to laugh alone.

Intelligence without imagination: a deadly combination.

There is no more unmistakable sign of failure than that of a middle-aged man boasting of his successes in college.

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

One of life's machinations is to make some people both rich and unhappy, that is, jointly fragile and deprived of hope.

[If] someone is making an effort to ignore you he is not ignoring you.

The danger of reading financial & other news (or econobullshit) is that things that don't make sense at all start making sense to you after progressive immersion.

It's a sign of weakness to worry about showing signs of weakness.

Friends, I wonder if someone has computed how much would be saved if we shut down economics and political science departments in universities. Those who need to research these subjects can do so on their private time.

I trust those who trust me and distrust those who are suspicious of others.

A good man is warm and respectful towards the waiter or people of lower rank.

Journalists feel contempt for those who fear them and a deep resentment for those who don't.

When someone starts a sentence with the first half containing "I", "not", and "but", the "not" should be removed and the "but" replaced with "therefore.”

High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort, physical effort in place of mental expenditure, & mental expenditure in place of mental clarity.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.

Journalists cannot grasp that what is interesting is not necessarily important; most cannot even grasp that what is sensational is not necessarily interesting.

Never buy a product that the owner of the company that makes it doesn't use, or, in the case of, say, medication, wouldn't contingently use.

Just realized that to politely get rid of someone people in Brooklyn say "call me if you need anything."

Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.

We often benefit from harm done to us by others; almost never from self-inflicted injuries.

You will never know if someone is an asshole until he becomes rich.

When someone writes "I dislike you but I agree with you", I read "I dislike you because I agree with you."

A great book eludes summaries. A great aphorism resists expansion. The rest is just communication.

For a free person, the optimal - most opportunistic - route between two points should never be the shortest one.

What counts is not *what* people say, it is *how much* energy they spend saying it.

Used skillfully, a compliment will be much more offensive than any disparagement.

I trust those who are greedy for money a thousand time more than those who are greedy for credentials.

Just as eating cow-meat doesn't turn you into a cow, studying philosophy doesn't make you wiser.

It is a great compliment for an honest person to be mistaken for a crook by a crook.

Many want to learn how to memorize things; few seek that rare ability to forget.

If you have something very important to say, whisper it.

The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain "why" you did something.

A book that can be summarized should not be written as a book.

Howard Marks quote

I've posted this quote before, but was reminded of it recently and since it is probably especially relevant today, I thought it was worth posting again.

“If you buy a cheap stock when the market is high, it is a challenge because, if the market being high is followed by a general decline in prices, then for you to make money in your cheap stock, you have to swim against the tide. If you buy when the market is low, and that lowness is going to be corrected by a general inflation, and you buy your cheap stock, then you have the tailwind in your favor….I think it is unrealistic and maybe hubristic to say, “I don’t care about what is going on in the world. I know a cheap stock when I see one.” If you don’t follow the pendulum and understand the cycle, then that implies that you always invest as much money as aggressively. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I have been around too long to think that a good investment is always equally good all the time regardless of the climate.” –Howard Marks

Alphaville interview with Michael Pettis (audio)

Found via Calculated Risk.

In this edition of Alphaville's exceedingly regular podcast, Cardiff Garcia, Kate MacKenzie and David Keohane chat to Michael Pettis Professor of Finance at Peking University about China's growth rate, the Shibor spike and associated drive to constrain credit growth, the risk of social unrest and the dangers of social control, and the state of the Chinese music scene... naturally.

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Related book: The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy

John Mauldin: The Bang! Moment Shock

What is it about humans that we fail to see a crisis in advance, yet when we look back, its likelihood or inevitability so often seems blindingly obvious? Rather than a flaw, our under-reliance on foresight as opposed to hindsight is perhaps a necessary evolutionary design feature that has allowed us to make rapid progress as a species (especially over the last few thousand years), but in a complex modern society it can really create quite the crisis for individuals. This week we resume our musings about Cyprus, to see what that tiny island can teach us about our own personal need to engage in ongoing critical analysis of our lives and investment portfolios. Cyprus is not Greece or France or Spain or Japan or the US or … (pick a country). I get that. No two situations are the same, but there may be a rhyme or two here that is instructive.

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Rock-A-Bye Baby

I’ve always thought that singing “Rock-a-bye baby” offers a bizarre lesson to our young, encouraging them to be lulled gently to sleep by describing a scene that should have them wide-eyed with terror. Let’s get this straight. You’ve got this baby, in a cradle, teetering on some fractured bough, at the top of a tree, complacently rocking with each breeze, with baby, cradle, and all facing an inevitable disaster that’s inherent in the situation itself. And everyone is OK with this.

You can see why I chose this song for this week’s market comment.

Reason-Respecting...

Short excerpt from Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin:

People can't be persuaded by what they don't understand. We underestimate the importance of giving people a reason. It is often easier to get people to change with a well-explained reason backed by solid evidence. Tell them so they understand why a specific action is needed, what the expected objective is, and why you think the action is right.

Of course, this doesn't work in every case. Sometimes you don't change people's opinions by showering them with logic. In Jonathan Swift's words: "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place." Aristotle adds: "For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct." Sometimes it is better to appeal to emotions than to reason since people are more moved by what they feel than by what they understand.