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Showing posts from July, 2023

Book: 20230409 to 20230730, "Antifragile" by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas

20230409 - Prologue Fragile vs Robust vs Antifragile I never thought about this difference before. Interesting. Is it really possible to gain from "bad things"? BOOK I: THE ANTIFRAGILE: AN INTRODUCTION 20230409 - Chapter 1. Between Damocles and Hydra Half of Life Has No Name Please Behead Me On the Necessity of Naming Proto-Antifragility Domain Independence Is Domain Dependent How many colours are there in real world? How many of those colours have name? The black swans will impact us sooner or later. To handle them, we need to live in Renaissance lifestyle ("Early Retirement Extreme"). Based on what I learned from GPT-4, it seems that all knowledge/art/inspiration/intuition/etc. are patterns/models. So, AI doesn't have domain dependence. What it learned from medical area could be used in rocket manufacturing immediately. Human can also do that, but very slow, and only a tiny percentage of people can do that occasionally. 20230425 - Chapter 2. Overcompensation a

Book: 20230401 to 20230709, "Why Nations Fail" by Robinson, James A.,Acemoglu, Daron

20230401 -Preface Why Egyptians filled Tahrir Square to bring down Hosni Mubarak and what it means for our understanding of the causes of prosperity and poverty Maybe "game theory" is the key. If value is distributed fairly, everyone want to work hard to get more value. If value is captured by a small percentage of people, everyone choose to sacrifice other people t obtain more for themselves, which leads to zero total value growth. 20230403 -So close and yet so different Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, have the same people, culture, and geography. Why is one rich and one poor? Why diversity is so important to natural evolution? It makes game theory millions of times more complicated, then be much more stable. How to make a country prosperous? At the moment, I believe there are three steps. 1. Express freedom; 2. Checks and balances of power; 3. Voting rights; The step three is the foundation of the first two steps, but it only has indirect effects on the society. Step