The 3 best books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Imagine a conspiranoic writing self-help books. It would be something like an inexhaustible list of recommendations that would cover, namely: from your own screwed head in aluminum foil, to the installation of a micro-garden on your floor to self-supply food.

The question would be which of the hypotheses of the insane writer of the moment would end up being true and necessary. Because in the madman's cabals some success always ends up being produced.

And the thing is that Nassim Nicholas Taleb, more lucid to the extreme than crazy, he offers us those self-help books to understand the unintelligible but what finally happens. Those imponderables that seem marked by Murphy's law and that end up being pointed out in popular philosophy as the "shit happens"

In the end, everyone who peeks into later wisdom behind the lattice, if not directly trompe l'oeil, is of much greater interest and more gratifying reading. Taleb is that guy who has gone and returned, I don't know exactly reaching where, but evidently having crossed unsuspected thresholds.

So if you want to read something different, go ahead without reservation. I don't know if it will help you, but I assure you that you will learn to decipher the black swans that surround us, whether in the form of that improbable fortune that makes the most beautiful girl notice you or becoming the most disconcerting bitch you can imagine. .

Top 3 Recommended Books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The black swan. The impact of the highly improbable

That the coronavirus became a black swan called Covid-19, for me (not so much for Taleb himself), no doubt. Because the virus in question, or at least its original form, has been around for centuries. But it had to be now to lash out at us with the feeling of guilt for globalization, which it did enhance, but no one knows if it is the cause of such sinister evolutionary drift.

Serve this approach to enter a book of mathematics made physics, of probabilities that take shape to occur. On this occasion we observe, basically the good side of the black swans made euromillions of chance. But remember that every oddity can be perfectly fatal in its essence. The success of Google and You Tube, and until 11/XNUMX, are "black swans." For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans are an integral part of our world, from the rise of religions to the events of our personal lives.

Why can't we identify this phenomenon until it has already happened? According to the author, this is because humans insist on investigating things we already know, forgetting what we do not know. This prevents us from recognizing opportunities and makes us too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate and categorize, forgetting to reward those who know how to imagine the “impossible.”

Elegant, surprising, and with reflections of universal scope, El cisne negro it will transform our way of looking at the world. Taleb is an entertaining, resourceful, and irreverent writer with a deep understanding of such disparate subjects as cognitive science, the business world, and probability theory. In fact, El cisne negro it is a real black swan in itself.

El cisne negro

Antifragile. The things that benefit from clutter

The very Marie Kondo she would be proud of this title made statement or premise of her theories. After the black swan, here comes the coaching part of the matter, the attempt to focus that lottery of existence as a game in which whoever can roll the most dice will have a better chance of making the play happen. Who knows? After all and so much when it comes to self-help, coaching, and emotional intelligence, it may just be about rolling the dice.

En The black swan, Taleb raised a problem (that of the repercussions caused by things that nobody can foresee ...) and in Antifragile offers us a definitive solution: how to profit from disorder and chaos, while protecting ourselves from fragility and adverse events. What Taleb calls “anti-brittle” goes beyond robustness, benefiting from shocks, uncertainties, and stress, just as human bones grow stronger when under stress and strain. The "anti-fragile" require clutter to survive and flourish. Taleb focuses on uncertainty as something desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an anti-fragile way. Anti-fragile is immune to prediction errors.

 Extremely ambitious and multidisciplinary, it offers us a program on how to behave - and prosper - in a world that we do not understand, and that is too uncertain for us to try to understand and predict. Taleb's message, documented and ingenious, is revolutionary: What is not anti-fragile will surely perish.

Antifragile: The things that benefit from clutter

Play your skin. Hidden asymmetries in everyday life

Thinking from mathematics can sound cold, far from reality, aseptic, without the possibility of harboring emotions. But mathematics leads the way in artificial intelligence, as if it were only a pi number away from achieving the sovereignty of the ideas with which we usually collide in vain endeavors and contradictions.

Vain or not, pretentious of course, Taleb's explanations are based on the same criticism with which any of us begin to distance ourselves from one thought or another with its usual axiomatic disguises. Only in the end Taleb at times distances himself from that subjective world built around us and lets himself be carried away by that existentialist mathematics, the only one who knows the core of all this. In one of his most provocative books Taleb redefines what it means to understand the world , succeed in a profession, contribute to a just and equitable society, detect absurdity and influence others.

Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, or from the giant Anteus to Donald Trump, Taleb demonstrates how the willingness to accept one's risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and prosperous individuals in all walks of society. A challenge to the old beliefs about the values ​​of those who lead military interventions, make financial investments and spread religious beliefs.

Play your skin. Hidden asymmetries in everyday life

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