Articulating ideas can be hard even when the ideas are very familiar with the transmitter. I listen to Nassim Taleb talk and found myself rewinding the video over and over again to just understand what he was trying to say.
The guy talks in an interesting way that sometimes involves unfinished sentences and jumping back and forth between the main topic and other miscellaneous topics that seem to add some flavor to the main topic.
Like talking about his financial career and inputting his thoughts on the first time he met his interviewer and what food they ate at the restaurant, his system's tolerance for certain foods etc.
This is where I get lost mentally, as it's not unlike going on a road trip and stopping by every sea you notice along the way to get a bath and get back on the road again.
The journey becomes much longer than arguably necessary and by the time you arrive at your destination, well, it doesn't seem you've arrived because so much has happened along the way that pales in comparison to the main point of the conversation.
Even so and somehow, through all these detours, you've absorbed more about the landscape than any direct route could have provided.
This is all a segue into the main realization I did take out from the discussion.
It's remembering or rather cementing the understanding that there are no short roads to going anywhere, even to places with familiar destinations, because the detours themselves are the destination.
Say you want to become a skilled craftsman. You could take a weekend workshop that promises to teach you everything you need to know about woodworking. This looks like the most efficient and straightforward way to learnt this craft and satisfy the wanting.
But the master craftsman spends decades making "unnecessary" mistakes like ruining pieces, learning how different woods behave in various weather conditions, understanding which tools work best when you're tired versus fresh, etc.
Those seemingly inefficient years of trial and error for the latter create an intuitive knowledge that no accelerated course, i.e weekend workshop, can replicate. So much so that when an unexpected problem arises, say the wood splits in an unusual way, the master has reserves of experience to draw from while the weekend warrior is left scrambling.
I understand that there are no shortcuts to antifragility. Some elements of redundancy are part of building antifragility as they provide multiple backup systems when the primary approach fails.
Oour body maintains extra muscle fibers and organs we might never consciously use. In a similar way, robust knowledge requires seemingly unnecessary components that only prove their worth during stress.
However, understanding also that I can't optimize my way to safety, i.e eliminate risk, by taking the most direct route is an unacceptable fact to my logical brain.
Don't black swan events specifically target the "efficient" path?
The trader who only knows textbook strategies gets wiped out by the one scenario the textbook didn't cover plays out.
Somehow my concluding understanding from the discussion is you have to develop skin in the game to become antifragile and any starting route taken towards optimisation for efficiency seems doomed to fail without the former first in place.
Now, I understand why Taleb talks the way he does. He's doing antifragile communication, building redundant pathways to the same insight, I suppose.
Here's the reference of the discussion explored above:
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