If you see an ice cube sitting on a table you can predict the future: it will melt into a little puddle of water. But if you see a puddle on the table, and that's all you see, there could be a thousand stories of what it is and how it came to be there. The correct explanation may be 1001--or one which will never be found. Although the world is ran by unpredictable events, it doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from them. Taleb closes with a bunch of practical tips to benefit from the uncertainty in the world. A key difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan is the scalability. Something is scalable if it can grow exponentially with little/no additional resources. A massage therapist is a non-scalable profession since he/she can only serve so many clients in a day. However, a singer in the digital age is a scalable profession since he/she can perform a song once, record and disseminate it widely. Scalability can create vast inequalities, extremities and winner-takes-all situations. Top singers earn vastly more than average singers, even though they aren’t proportionately more talented. Despite (or perhaps because of) their extreme unpredictability, they compel human beings to account for them—to explain after the fact that they were in fact predictable. This review will be comprised of two parts: a review of the ideas presented and a review of the way in which it is written

The author's tone throughout the book, slightly irreverent, didn't annoy me as much as it seems to have bothered other readers. I enjoyed learning a new way to look at reality, but, as I mentioned before, this is a dense read and I wouldn't consider it "fun" reading either.

Shortform note: It’s unclear how Taleb defines “predicted.” Plenty of science-fiction writers and cultural commentators anticipated recent technologies like the Internet and augmented and virtual reality.)

I read SEX AND RAGE last year and LOVED IT so much I knew I HAD to read this! First off, I’m obsessed with the new cover! And second, I’m still obsessed with Eve’s writing! She is a keen observer and has a way of drawing you in. She writes without judgment, without apologizing, and with so much confidence.Types of uncertainty: Extremistan vs. Mediocristan Differences between Extremistan vs. Mediocristan Picture a turkey cared for by humans. It has been fed every day for its entire life by the same humans, and so it has come to believe the world works in a certain, predictable, and advantageous way. And it does...until the day before Thanksgiving. Babitz’s talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures." — The New York Times Book Review

Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather. As exemplified by figures like Beyoncé and Jeff Bezos, social and economic advantages accrue highly unequally in Extremistan. This read like if Kit from Pretty Woman, or ummm Vivian, played by Julia Robert’s character in the film, wrote stories of their lives and their friends before she meets Richard Gere and goes nowhere. What stands out about Babitz's writing is her voice: smart, unapologetic and knowing, like Dorothy Parker magically time traveling to the modern era . . . Rereading Babitz is a delicious, guilty pleasure." — AltaHer articles and short stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire magazines. She is the author of several books including Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; Sex and Rage; Two By Two; and L.A. Woman. Transitioning to her particular blend of fiction and memoir beginning with Eve's Hollywood, Babitz’s writing of this period is indelibly marked by the cultural scene of Los Angeles during that time, with numerous references and interactions to the artists, musicians, writers, actors, and sundry other iconic figures that made up the scene in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. An anti-academic academic weaves a non-narrative narrative about predicting the unpredictable into the theory that rigid theories are bad. Puhvel, J. (1984). "The Origin of Etruscan tusna ("Swan")". American Journal of Philology. 105 (2): 209–212. doi: 10.2307/294875. JSTOR 294875.

But by remembering "to know what we don't know" and understanding some of the limitations built into our brains by memory and logical fallacies, we can be prepared to make better decisions than before. Or, at least, we'll have a better grasp on how risky and unknown life is. The combination of the 2 sets of factors above means that: humans are terrible at prediction, yet we keep making predictions without realizing how frequently we’re off the mark. Taleb calls this the “scandal of prediction”. Right at the end it occurred to me that this is religion. He tells you how to sustain yourself in the absence of worldly support, how to stand up to others and say your piece, how to wait and be patient, and about the merits of surrounding yourself with like-minded souls. Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud." He rails against misuse of the bell curve by those "who wear dark suits" without ever giving a single god damn specific example. He accuses whole fields of study, like economics, of being rife with mathematical theatrics. If that's true I'd love to read about it. But he offers no evidence for this, and is more guilty of this particular offense than any person I know. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2... The inherently unpredictable nature of dynamical systems and variables that behave in inconsistent or nonlinear ways

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these felt a little more outdated than eve usually does (how is she so magically relevant regardless of timing!), but they still had as much of her humor and wit and charm.