Hello Friend!
Today’s nugget comes from Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile”, and it will help you to tell who is likely to have real expertise, and who is likely to not have it (even when they claim to have it).
You can also listen to this Newsletter edition with the audio tab below.
💡 Nugget
Across all domains, we have:
- People who are truly experts.
- People who think they are experts, but in reality they are not. They have, what Nassim calls, an "Expert Problem".
✦ Nassim Taleb:
Let us ask the following questions: Would you rather have your upcoming brain surgery performed by a newspaper’s science reporter or by a certified brain surgeon? On the other hand, would you prefer to listen to an economic forecast by someone with a PhD in finance from some “prominent” institution such as the Wharton School, or by a newspaper’s business writer? While the answer to the first question is empirically obvious, the answer to the second one isn’t at all. We can already see the difference between "know-how" and "know-what".
...
Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don’t move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the non-repeatable past have an expert problem.
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Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse. Expert problems put you on the wrong side of asymmetry [Downside > Upside].
💭 Thoughts
So the best way to be Antifragile in "things that move" (such as building a business, investing in stocks/businesses...) is to accept that you don't know many (or most) things, and proceed with caution!
“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.” - Isaac Newton
"Anybody who doesn't change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in" - Jeff Bezos
💥 Stuff I Loved
Timestamp range 17:17 - 18:24
Combining the thinking and the doing is what gets you to an exceptional result.
“The Doers are the real Thinkers” - Steve Jobs
“It is very easy to take credit for the Thinking [part]. The Doing is more concrete. And when you dig a little deeper usually you find that the people who did it were also the people who worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.” - Steve Jobs
Timestamp range 21:25 - 27:08
Being in Alignment + Be a Harsh Grader → Absolute GOLD
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Wishing you a lovely weekend!