Thales of Miletus (The First ANTIFRAGILE Anecdote in History!!) + Best Tweets...

By Julio Froment

Jul 14, 2023

Hey friend,

Here’s the best content I found last week 😛

📚 Best Book Passage

(no context needed)

This passage is from the Book series "Incerto", written by Nassim Taleb.

Thales was a philosopher, a Greek-speaking Ionian of Phoenician stock from the coastal town of Miletus in Asia Minor, and like some philosophers, he enjoyed what he was doing. Miletus was a trading post and had the mercantile spirit usually attributed to Phoenician settlements. But Thales, as a philosopher, was characteristically impecunious. He got tired of his buddies with more transactional lives hinting at him that “those who can, do, and others philosophize.” He performed the following prowess: he put a down payment on the seasonal use of every olive press in the vicinity of Miletus and Chios, which he got at low rent. The harvest turned out to be extremely bountiful and there was demand for olive presses, so he released the owners of olive presses on his own terms, building a substantial fortune in the process. Then he went back to philosophizing.

…

Thales put himself in a position to take advantage of his lack of knowledge— and the secret property of the asymmetry. The key to our message about this upside-downside asymmetry is that he did not need to understand too much the messages from the stars.

Simply, he had a contract that is the archetype of what an asymmetry is, perhaps the only explicit asymmetry you can find in its purest form. It is an option, “the right but not the obligation” for the buyer and, of course, “the obligation but not the right” for the other party, called the seller. Thales had the right—but not the obligation—to use the olive presses in case there would be a surge in demand; the other party had the obligation, not the right. Thales paid a small price for that privilege, with a limited loss and large possible outcome.

That was the very first option on record. The option is an agent of antifragility.

- Nassim Taleb (Incerto, pages 188-189)

Picking Nuggets Notes:

“The voice of the Socratic dream vision is the only sign of any misgivings about the limits of logic: Perhaps – thus he might have asked himself – what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

How I’m trying to become more Antifragile…
I try to just put myself in a position where I have more upside than downside (we can call this a “positive asymmetry”), where the upside is unknown and uncapped and the downside is known, bearable and capped. So that uncertainty is my dear friend, rather than my merciless enemy. And I won’t even try to intellectualize or know anything beyond the properties of the bet — the knowledge about its downside, and the potential upside. That’s it. As Nietzsche pointed out: “what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent”.