/lit/ - Literature

Is this what a person of average intelligence larping as a genius looks like?

Hey, I'm trying to keep my skin in the game and not play the pseudoethics game, but the fragalistas keep on buggin me with naive intervention. My bs-detector is off the charts and honestly I'm pissed off. Seriously Steve stop lecturing birds how to fly you fucking turkey. So, how do I barbell myself a way out of this shit and get antifragile as fuck? My mind is on Lindy and I'm ready to overcompensate. Oh and Steve, double fuck you, you bs-vendor IYI. You're such a randomness phobe, if you don't watch out I'm gonna be the Black Swan and you better via negativa me or you're gonna be the turkey.
Yeah I'm a bit angry at the nitpickers and life in extremistan is tough at times. Anyway, I'm hoping my fellow antifrags can help a man like me out. Give me some heuristics and non-sucker info. And by Baäl, Steve, I'm tired of you and your fragalista ways. Bugger off!

>One property of the option: it does not care about the average outcome, only the favorable ones (since the downside doesn't count beyond a certain point). Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don't count - there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book, or the equivalent of losing points in a soccer game, and the absence of negative domain for book sales provides the the author with a measure of optionality.
>Further, it helps when supporters are both enthusiastic and influential. Wittgenstein, for instance, was largely considered a lunatic, a strange bird, or just a b***t operator by those whose opinion didn't count (he had almost no publications to his name). But he had a small number of cultlike followers, and some, such as Bertrand Russell and J.M. Keynes, were massively influential.
>... you are better off having a high percentage of people disliking you and your message (even intensely) combined with a low percentage of extremely loyal and enthusiastic supporters.
Agree? It is what I got in mind for my attempt at a book. Oh by the way I made the typos for free.

>“Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”

Nassim Taleb in Antifragile:

>My parents had an account with the largest bookstore in Beirut and I would pick up books in what seemed to me unlimited quantities. There was such a difference between the shelves of the library and the narrow school material; so I realized that school was a plot designed to deprive people of erudition by squeezing their knowledge into a narrow set of authors. I started, around the age of thirteen, to keep a log of my reading hours, shooting for between thirty and sixty a week, a practice I’ve kept up for a long time. I read the likes of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bishop Bossuet, Stendhal, Dante, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Céline, Schultz, Zweig (didn’t like), Henry Miller, Max Brod, Kafka, Ionesco, the surrealists, Faulkner, Malraux (along with other wild adventurers such as Conrad and Melville; the first book I read in English was Moby-Dick) and similar authors in literature, many of them obscure, and Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Jaspers, Husserl, Lévi-Strauss, Levinas, Scholem, Benjamin, and similar ones in philosophy because they had the golden status of not being on the school program, and I managed to read nothing that was prescribed by school so to this day I haven’t read Racine, Corneille, and other bores. One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Émile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense. Perhaps joining an underground anti-government group motivated me to look into Marxist studies, and I picked up the most about Hegel indirectly, mostly through Alexandre Kojève.

>When I decided to come to the United States, I repeated, around the age of eighteen, the marathon exercise by buying a few hundred books in English (by authors ranging from Trollope to Burke, Macaulay, and Gibbon, with Anaïs Nin and other then fashionable authors de scandale), not showing up to class, and keeping the thirty- to sixty-hour discipline

>>9773078
You have to read it in random order, otherwise you are fragile