Issue 14: What I've been reading...
Time spent with Uncle Nassim.
Dearest reader,
It’s now been just over a month since I relocated to Minneapolis. My younger brother will be flying in tomorrow, and my sister will be coming in next week. This is the first summer the three of us siblings will spend together at our family home here since the summer of ‘21, and I’m quite excited to have some shared downtime with them.
Over the past month, I’ve been re-reading a lot of Nassim Taleb’s work. I’ve re-read Fooled by Randomness, Skin in the Game, and am currently revisiting Antifragile. I picked up Chaos Kings this week (this one’s not by the man, but features him as a key protagonist), and have so far enjoyed the first couple chapters (more as entertainment).
I first came across the work of Taleb in 2015. I was 20, living in Jeddah at the time. I was working for my great uncle (maternal grandmother’s brother), which involved being engaged in a vast array of miscellaneous tasks and activities—the usefulness of which I cannot now, looking back to that time, seem to recall. Of the experience, I think my co-op advisor, upon hearing my recount, explained it most diplomatically: “It sounds like you got a lot of life experience; professional skills, I’m not so sure…”
The Black Swan, the first work I read by Taleb, gripped me right away. We live in a world that is dominated by rare and unpredictable events that have a disproportionate impact on—well, everything. As soon as I came across this explanation of our world, it kind of cemented itself as a key fixture in my mind, dramatically influencing my worldview. I devoured Antifragile immediately after finishing The Black Swan. If the former explains our world, the latter provides a kind of “decision-making toolkit” for how to live and operate in it.
Re-reading these works today feels almost like a kind of “knife-sharpening” exercise. Since 2015, in most circumstances where I’ve found myself having to make decisions of consequence under uncertainty—especially in recent years where such decisions have been more frequent—I’ve typically leaned heavily upon heuristics explained in these works.
That’s all I got for today. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a fabulous weekend ahead of you.
Love,
Reef