Taleb essays

=== Nature definition ===
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/nature-definition.pdf
"....Antifragility’ as a mathematical idea In his review of my book
Antifragile , Michael Shermer mischaracterizes the concept of ‘antifragility’ (
Nature 491, 523;
2012).
‘Fragility’ can be defined as
an accelerating sensitivity to a
harmful stressor: this response
plots as a concave curve and
mathematically culminates in
more harm than benefit from
random events. ‘Antifragility’ is
the opposite, producing a convex
response that leads to more
benefit than harm.
We do not need to know
the history and statistics of an
item to measure its fragility
or antifragility, or to be able to
predict rare and random (‘black
swan’) events. All we need is to
be able to assess whether the item
is accelerating towards harm or
benefit. The relation of fragility,
convexity and sensitivity to
disorder is thus mathematical
(N.
N. Taleb and R. Douady
Quant. Finance
, in the press) and
not derived from empirical data,
as Shermer implies.
Shermer’s suggestion that I
should offer “a checklist of things
companies or countries can do to
prepare for black-swan events”
overlooks 50 or so such heuristics
based on the identification of
convex responses.
Nassim N. Taleb
Polytechnic
Institute of New York University,
New York, USA.
ntaleb@poly.edu ...."
:Taleb bootstraps Adaptation and uses 'convex' as a dissimilar term for it. He believes that information can be acquired, it can't , only expressed. What any system exhibits is an expression of its attributes,not its acquisition.
Category:Nassim Taleb