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This is an atrocious misrepresentation of

's ideas, and reads like someone's read the blurb of Black Swan and that's it. Why? Completely ignores his Barbell Theory: 90% safe, 10% risky.

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Commoncog

@commoncog

May 21, 2019

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The Dangers of Treating Ideas from Finance as Generalised Self Help commoncog.com/blog/the-dange

Replying to

and

Hmm, why do you think that’s the case? Keep in mind that I’ve read all of

@nntaleb

’s books, think the man is a genius, and have been spelunking into his technical literature. (See also my summary of the Kelly criterion: commoncog.com/blog/time-allo)

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and

Probably this phrase: "People read Munger and Taleb and think their advice applies to life in general." Well, it does, because Taleb explicitly writes about the barbell as applied to life. Whereas the article reads as if Taleb only ever wrote on how to handle the risky side.

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and

Personal example: I started a luxury service business. The economy plummeted in my local area, and it was no longer worthwhile to keep going. But I had a fall-back plan and went back into my previous field. No ruin. Was it a bad decision to start a business?

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and

Yeah, so you’ve just described a decision making process in an irregular domain, which is exactly what Taleb’s methods are about. But in regular domains, his methods aren’t as important.

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and

But in "writing software, managing people, and dealing with clients" the barbell applies in that the safe 90% is what all your competitors do too, the 10% is what differentiates you.

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and

Also, if you like the barbell idea, I think you’ll enjoy Taleb’s papers on the Kelly criterion. The barbell concept is a non technical description of the intuition that powers the Kelly formula. twitter.com/nntaleb/status for instance.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

@nntaleb

Apr 25, 2018

KELLY CRITERION My lecktchur notes to students. Thanks to @ole_b_peters who showed how stoooooopid decision theorists have been not getting time vs/ ensemble returns.