I wish this article used something other than COVID to explain such an interesting concept, and I also wish it didn’t end on such an unfounded navel-gazing note, but Danco does a great job of explaining antifragility, so here we are. I first read Taleb’s book on this topic back in 2013, and I think it’s due for a re-read.
Lying with data is easy without going to these lengths. I don’t even understand what they were trying to highlight with this odd transformation.
Investing is hard. Mostly because of the uncertainty, but also because even the parts of it that seem intuitive are underneath quite complex, making us wrong more often than not. This article discusses optimal strategies for repeated bets (aka the Kelly Criterion) in the context of the stock market. Their test seems biased, given the strategy’s return over the bull market of the last ten years, but the article is interesting nonetheless.
We’re humans and, inevitably, we tend make examples out of innocent people when we try to solve hairy problems. I am sure there are ten psychology papers about this somewhere, most unreplicable, and most covered in some pop-science magazine with an accompanying TED talk. I am sorry for Cuddy. What she’s going through must suck. However, I am convinced that the overall movement will benefit the field, and science as a whole.