Understanding Taleb’s convexity paper
Understanding Taleb’s convexity paper
本文讨论了对纳西姆·尼古拉斯·塔勒布《理解是凸性（反脆弱性）的糟糕替代品》一文的解读，阐述成功的真正原因及如何利用随机性取得好结果等内容。关键要点包括：
1.
成功的关键因素：成功的真正原因是收益的不对称性（凸性），它能帮助我们制定规则以利用随机性。
2.
凸性的特点：凸性类似特殊期权，收益大于损失，可利用不确定性，长期来看意外事件可能带来更多好处。
3.
“选择性”的作用：凸性背后的“选择性”很重要，能让人从不同结果中选优弃劣，拥有选择自由。
4.
研究与决策：做研究时“凸性偏差”很关键，收益函数越凸、情况越不可预测，偏差越大；研究不应依赖计划，尝试不同事物、分散精力更好。
5.
学习与实践：我们通过实验学习，技术常先于科学出现，简单的发明或技术往往更重要。
6.
记录失败经验：关注不起作用的事情有助于缩小行动范围。
7.
研究与彩票的区别：研究与买彩票不同，研究有潜力产生无上限的巨大回报 。
⏰ 剪存时间：2023-01-16 17:29:45 (UTC+8)
✂️ 本文档由 飞书剪存 一键生成
I learned a lot from Daniel Vassallo about benefiting from randomness. He said many times a paper titled Understanding is a Poor Substitute for Convexity (Antifragility) is his favorite work by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s about science, but the ideas also apply to business and life (or any other system that has a big “convexity bias”).
But if you are like me who couldn’t finish the first paragraph, I made a simplified version with the help of GPT so you can get the rough ideas.
Disclaimer: This is just for my personal study. Please read the original paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb here .
Historians have studied how scientific and technological discoveries have been made, but they have missed something very important. People have argued that luck is more important than a plan. But luck cannot be used to make a plan. The real reason for success is something called asymmetry (or convexity) of payoffs. Knowing about this special math can help give us rules and guidelines to help us make discoveries.
The story of luck versus knowledge is strange. We have more evidence for results that happen by luck than for those that happen because of plans. In some complicated and hard to understand areas like medicine or engineering, a plan does not work in most cases. This means we have come to where we are today mostly by accident, but we still use plans to try and make things happen in the future. We know that this is not quite right, but we do it anyway.
Technology and science have been able to improve over time, but it can’t be because of luck or making mistakes. Luck cannot lead to long term gains (otherwise it would not be chance); if we make mistakes, it won’t always work because planes can crash, buildings can collapse, and knowledge can get worse. So, the success must come from something else. That something is a special kind of exposure which is like a payoff function. That function has bigger gains than losses, and the math property of this asymmetry is convexity (see Figure 1). Convexity is like a special kind of option that can take advantage of uncertainty and messiness. This way, we can make rational, organized plans to make use of randomness and get good results.