What are you reading?

[Faust]

Did you read Barbarians at the gate? Not great writing by any means but quite interesting.

No, but I read Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee :-) That was good.

A day and a 100 pages in, I'm loving The Bonfire...

[Real Real]

di Lampedusa's the Leopard, and Harrington on Cash Games vol 2.

[Magician]

I love Tom Wolfe. I think it's really impressive how well he can handle vastly different strata of American society. I read Electric Kool Aid acid Test right after Bonfire and would recommend anyone else to do the same.

Definitely lives up to the hype.
(though the bonfire film is shite.)

[Fade to Black]

I Am Charlotte Simmons is pure literary junk though. What a trashy book. Karl Lagerfeld is more in tune with the spirit of today's youth than that guy.

[boysdontcryy]

^^^

that book changed my life

The Black Swan? How did it? Ha.

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The Black Swan? How did it? Ha.

If the book's message resonates with you and changes the way you look at successes or failures in your lifetime, then you will understand how it has changed me. Not only that, but the book really showed me the way forward at a time when I was directionless. Did for me what On the Road probably did for a lot of idle youth...

[skecr8r_l8r]

Yeah, it is a fucking sick book. I'd actually recommend his other work, Fooled by Randomness, more though. He predicted this fall with scary precision. And then Benoit Mandelbrot's works, if you really like mathematics and randomness. He is one of my living scientific heroes and not a tenth as recognized as he ought to be. But when we realize the full magnitude of his thoughts I'm positive that he will stand side by side with the likes of Gauss, Erdös, and Nash.

I'm currently reading Albert Schweitzer - 5 Studies of Goethe..

[Real Real]

This reminds me of a thread I was thinking about posting. I was going to call it something like "Your Bible", idea being that you would post whatever book (if any) you had that you have repeatedly turned to for guidance and moral wisdom throughout your life - which is, I imagine, what the bible (or koran, torah, etc) is religious people.

Mine is Montaigne's Essays. I can open that book to any page, read it for a half-hour or an hour, and feel more centered - reminding myself of whatever core principles I have.

[Faust]

Go for it, man!

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Yeah, it is a fucking sick book. I'd actually recommend his other work, Fooled by Randomness, more though. He predicted this fall with scary precision. And then Benoit Mandelbrot's works, if you really like mathematics and randomness. He is one of my living scientific heroes and not a tenth as recognized as he ought to be. But when we realize the full magnitude of his thoughts I'm positive that he will stand side by side with the likes of Gauss, Erdös, and Nash.

I read Fooled by Randomness first, which prompted me to move on to Black Swan.

The story of how I came across this book, and my relationship with the friend (mother's friend actually, a couple) who gave it to us is a perfection reflection of the ultimately existential irony that Taleb has expressed throughout his philosophy.

I don't think he predicted the fall. But the book seems poignant in our current economic landscape because precisely it indicated that the only "truth" of the stock markets, which FBR expands on, and ultimately extends to the larger plane of human history, is that everything is uncertain, UNPREDICTABLE, so the more likely that we don't see something happening, the more likely that ineffable "thing" will hit us so much harder when it comes. And I think this can swing in an either positive or negative direction. The book really untapped something in my brain that before coming across Taleb, my life seemed to be heading fast in the direction of the directionless.

I have just now come up with a plan for what I hope to achieve in my professional life, inspired by this book. A lot of it plays on uncertainty and how neglect of it due to our overconfidence in our experience and knowledge opens us further to the damage something unexpected brings, but it does not really provide any concrete solutions or "methods" as many mental/spiritual/financial 'bibles' tend to preach. And that's what I like about it...the world is uncertain, the minute we walk out the door there are infinite sequence of events that could unfold our eyes. We don't know whether the person who will make us rich or our next wife might very well be sitting on the bus that is just coming our way. With this in mind, it's easy to become paranoid and insane in calculating all the 'what ifs' , but on the other hand it's made me a lot more relaxed and easygoing by believing that success is often due to chance, so if I want to be successful, fuck it, just maximize my opportunities to random chance by seeing everything as a possibility. All this probably sounds wordy and pretentious in my verbose writing style, but at one point Taleb sums this philosophy up quite well: "Go to parties."

The book's also led me to see a lot of visionaries and leaders in our society in a different light. To expand on what he mentions, I now define "Luck" and "Success" differently. I can say "luck" is the result of your efforts measured by its absolute result, whereas "success" is, given our knowledge of our environment (and possibly its uncertain nature as well), the best extent to which we can make the most out of this unlimited playing field. Here's an analogy which I actually told Kunk a few days ago in facebook chat:

Bill Gates is luckier, but Steve Jobs is more successful.

Warren Buffett is luckier, but George Soros is more successful.

i think it is not so coincidental that Jobs and Soros in their own trajectories, whether deliberately or not, capitalized on the idea of maximizing exposure to chance as well as going with counter intuitive strategies. Hence, most of the things we already know exist, the Next Big Thing isn't there because everybody else is already there - so look for it where nobody else is looking. If there is no demand for a particular product/service/etc., then it is up to the entrepreneur to create that demand. Things in our world that 'make sense' often didn't until an example showed up to illustrate that it could.

These books by themselves I think are more useful than a lot of classical MBA textbooks and case studies, just because they are so much more open ended. I think business schools can teach one 'business,' but they can't really teach 'business sense' which really depends on a more abstract understanding of perception and how to manipulate it to your advantage. It really is more of thinking in a 'round' sense, which is why now I don't hold a lot of 'practical' academic fields in much regard, because by teaching you through theories and models and case studies, it actually boxes in your thinking further, narrowing your vision of what could/couldn't work.

Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power is another favorite of mine, although this one has a decidedly more sinister tone.

[skecr8r_l8r]

He might not have predicted Fall entirely, but he does literally point out that Fannie Mae is a barrel of dynamite and talks in multitudes of the growing interconnection of the economic world. But I agree with the notion that it is the preconceived unlikeliness of certain things that makes us much more vulnerable, and in turn surprises everyone so much more. I guess it's a truism that everyone forgot to point out.

I think history, as he also points out, has a tendency to find the malignancy in his randomness theory, and that's why I have to disagree with the two analogies you posted. Working with chance is apparently for some a viable business strategy, and even in the long run. But Jobs is only more successful in terms of Taleb's theories, yet Bill Gates has a vastly larger fortune, vastly larger company and a vastly longer history of correct choices (though they may not all be possible to validate retrospectively). A random streak might of right choices might seem long, but Gauss' distribution also proves that at a certain point the chance of Gates to continue his streak becomes infinitely small.

The passing of time has a tendency to change how companies are understood and how well they are doing, and this is a thing he kinda ignores. What usually happens is a failure of the company to re-work and re-interpret it's formulas of success in a changing world. This is what happened to Microsoft and I.B.M. Though it shouldn't be neglected that Microsoft still has 80-90% market shares in the key markets, and it still sell it's products in huge numbers. One might like Apple and Jobs more for what they do, but their outlook is so different.

What I'm saying is that going for chance isn't the only business strategy and not necessarily the best. Microsoft and Apple has to exist with each other.

I also strongly dislike the cult-following of MBA's and their great prowess. But thats because this whole cash-rules-everything-around-me religion makes me sick to my guts. (And I also hate communism and most forms of socialism, so I guess that kinda leaves me worthlessly in the middle.)

I'm now reading Spring Snow by Mishima Yukio. I've never been so overloaded with word-imagery as by him, wow. Everything is likened to some sort of change to the body's inner organs, like a golden butterfly basking in a stomach and a drop of ink that blurs the vision of the heart. He even pull's a Joyce and spends three continuos pages describing grass and water. Lovely.

[kompressorkev]

current read:

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

[Raw Edge]

2066 by Bolano

[WiZARDBEEZ]

http://books.google.com/books?id=k7rFHiVNpPQC&dq=author+michael+alien+religion&pg=PP1&ots=SkNZOnaYKJ&source=in&sig=seeRbQ71bI9JHCAvjgjc4O1eTVI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=11&ct=result#PPP1,M1

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Just started Liver by Will Self. My first time reading Self, and even though I'm only 17 pages in, i love how the writing is completely unhinged and the guy is capable of conjuring imagery and a descriptiveness I wish I had. Simply put, this dude RAW.