a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by b_b
b_b  ·  2113 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The sacred cows of psychology turn out to be straw men

The thing that makes my blood boil about dumb shit like "antifragile" is that it's a made up word for a word that already exists: "stable". Either he decided to make up a new name because if he used the correct name, people would google "stability" and then think to themselves, "Wow these equations were described many, many years before anyone currently on planet Earth was born," and it would be bad for sales. Or he is so bad at research that he just thought of something and unilaterally decided it was novel. I had not heard of him until antifragile came out and he as all of a sudden on every TV and radio program. However, I have never and will never read anything by him based on this set of facts.





kleinbl00  ·  2113 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My financial planner advised both me and my wife to come up with - and popularize - a unit of measure or industry-related term and apply our names to it. Within industry, being able to describe something in terms of one's name - "His pomposity is at least 4 kleinbl00s" - gives you professional marketing opportunities. It's possible that Taleb knew this and decided that there was no possible way he could assign his name to something and not be laughed out of academia so instead he coined other terminology to give himself a 2nd-degree association.

I would say Carlton Sheets is at least a Taleb and a half away from originality. Tim Ferris? two or three Talebs.