See my highlights of Antifragile.
From Wikipedia:
One of its applications is in his definition of the most effective (that is, least fragile) risk management approach: what he calls the 'barbell' strategy which is based on avoiding the middle in favor of linear combination of extremes, across all domains from politics to economics to one's personal life. These are deemed by Taleb to be more robust to estimation errors. For instance, he suggests that investing money in 'medium risk' investments is pointless because risk is difficult if not impossible to compute. His preferred strategy is to be both hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive at the same time. For example, an investor might put 80 to 90% of their money in extremely safe instruments, such as treasury bills, with the remainder going into highly risky and diversified speculative bets. An alternative suggestion is to engage in highly speculative bets with a limited downside.
Taleb asserts that by adopting these strategies a portfolio can be "robust", that is, gain a positive exposure to black swan events while limiting losses suffered by such random events.[54] Together with Donald Geman and Hélyette Geman, he modeled the "maximum entropy barbell" which consists in "to constrain only what can be constrained (in a robust manner) and to maximize entropy elsewhere", based on an insight by E.T. Jaynes that economic life increases in entropy under regulatory and other constraints.[55] Taleb also applies a similar barbell-style approach to health and exercise. Instead of doing steady and moderate exercise daily, he suggests that it is better to do a low-effort exercise such as walking slowly most of the time, while occasionally expending extreme effort. He claims that the human body evolved to live in a random environment, with various unexpected but intense efforts and much rest.
In an interview on Charlie Rose, Taleb said that he was pleased that none of the criticism he received for The Black Swan had any substance, as it was either unintelligent, ad hominem, or style over substance, which convinced him to "go for the jugular" with a huge financial bet on the breakdown of statistical methods in finance.[72]
Taleb received an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut in 2016 and also gave a commencement address to the graduating class in which, describing his life, he stated:
I hesitate to give advice because every major single piece of advice I was given turned out to be wrong and I am glad I didn’t follow them. I was told to focus and I never did. I was told to never procrastinate and I waited 20 years for the Black Swan and it sold 3 million copies. I was told to avoid putting fictional characters in my books and I did put in Nero Tulip and Fat Tony because I got bored otherwise. I was told to not insult the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the more I insulted them the nicer they were to me and solicit Op-Eds. I was told to avoid lifting weights for a back pain and became a weightlifter: never had a back problem since.
If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been. One should never do anything without skin in the game. If you give advice, you need to be exposed to losses from it.
