
A career decision influenced by Nassim Taleb - mwsherman
https://clipperhouse.com/what-i-learned-from-taleb/
======
rossdavidh
While I agree he made the right decision, and I also agree that Taleb has
interesting things to say that bear on career choices, I don't think he needed
Taleb's ideas on risk to make this choice. In programming, becoming obsolete
is not a risk, it is guaranteed. This is just short term pain vs. long term
pain. Which is also a difficult decision, but not one you need to have read
"Fooled By Randomness" or "Black Swan" to understand.

Losing your job (eventually) if you become obsolete isn't tail risk, it's the
most likely scenario. And losing your job right when everybody else is losing
their job is also not tail risk, it's the most likely scenario. So, if you're
not learning anything new, you aren't at risk from a black swan, you're
doomed.

If anything, it relates more to the idea of "Antifragility"; many small shocks
strengthen you. The small shock of learning a new technology (and feeling
underproductive while you're on the steep side of the learning curve) is the
small shock that makes you stronger. Don't let yourself avoid those small
shocks for too long.

~~~
mathgeek
I think one difference that the author isn't necessarily seeing is that the
"black swan" event has already happened (the end of guaranteed pensions).

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niklasd
A concise abstract of Talebs last book can be found here
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-
ga...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-game-by-
nassim-nicholas-taleb-digested-read)

Besides the problems I have with Taleb I'm happy that the OP had the courage
to quit his job and that it worked out. Courage is a good charater trait, and
in this case it got rewarded.

~~~
jimnotgym
That's really well written. I didn't know a lot about Taleb until I saw his
attack on (now Dame) Professor Mary Beard on Twitter. I have genuinely never
seen anyone so arrogant, he lead an attack on her understanding of the
ethnicity of Romans in the UK. Mary Beard is a renowned classics scholar at
Oxford, and the attack went along the lines of "You know nothing compared to
me because I'm a black belt in probability". He had one study that showed
little residual DNA to suggest that there were black Romans in Britain. She
had a Hackernewsesq response

1) We know one of the Roman governors was from Africa, but don't know his
ethnicity

2) Maybe [something about recessive genes I think] the DNA aged out of the
record

3) Maybe most of the Romans went home at the end of the occupation!!!!!!! This
one made me think of that Feymnan trait of complete skepticism. Taleb seemed
to struggle with the idea that there is not much firm proof of anything that
happened in Roman Britain, but not having firm evidence to back up your claim
doesn't make you wrong.

It seemed to me, and this is only an impression, that the main problem Taleb
had with her is that she was a woman, and a smart one too.

~~~
niklasd
After having seen Talebs Twitter feed, I can't take him serious. He might have
(had) some good ideas, but I find it really hard to trust the judgment of a
person who berates others on Twitter (e.g. he calls Pinker a charlatan) and
think hes the only genius around.

And it also seems that people like Pinker don't take him serious anymore
(which seems to aggravate him even more).

PS: [http://quixoticfinance.com/empty-
statistics/](http://quixoticfinance.com/empty-statistics/) talks about the
Taleb-Pinker feud and rebukes Taleb.

~~~
sheepmullet
> but I find it really hard to trust the judgment of a person who berates
> others on Twitter

Feuds between intellectuals have been a staple for decades.

You are letting personality problems obscure insights.

~~~
niklasd
Not so sure about that. I'm using a heuristic method. Since I'm not a
statistics expert and sometimes can't properly assess Talebs statements, I ask
myself: "Can I trust the judgement of this person?". Looking at the way he
feuds with others (feuds between intellectuals don't all include crude
insults), I feel that a person with proper judgement wouldn't behave that way.
The same goes for his academic standing, which seems to be poor. These are two
red flags.

This said, that doesn't mean he won't offer insight. It just that since I
don't have time to read everything, I'll use my heuristic method to look for
potential places for insight. In this case it would rather lead me to Pinker
et al.

~~~
sheepmullet
> I feel that a person with proper judgement wouldn't behave that way.

Then my question to you would be why do you feel that? Is it based on
evidence?

Many of the worlds greatest scientists and philosophers have been jerks e.g.
Aristotle was a massive sexist.

Or look at the long list of geniuses who were unstable like Galois.

Taleb has always put his money where his mouth is - to me that's a better
indicator than poor manners.

~~~
niklasd
> Then my question to you would be why do you feel that? Is it based on
> evidence?

Well signaling is a thing thats been developed since humanity exists. For me
thats evidence enough. If singaling would be inefficent, it would not still be
such an important factor in human interaction.

It's the same with job interviews. No matter how smart you are, you better be
on time and show some manners. Because if you don't, you'll be asked: "If you
are that smart, why don't you understand that you are not getting a job this
way?" and frankly, there's not a good anwser to that.

~~~
sheepmullet
> If singaling would be inefficent, it would not still be such an important
> factor in human interaction.

That really depends.

If you avoid a bad hire 10% of the time by rejecting everyone who is late then
that can be a good trade off for you even though you have rejected many great
candidates. There is a significant cost to a bad hire.

On the other hand you can read a chapter of a book at your local library for
free and for a minimal time investment and then decide if you want to keep
reading it.

I'd rate Talebs work as significantly more influential and insightful than
Pinkers although I agree with Pinker more often.

------
trentmb
I feel like im in the authors worst case scenario, as a PHP dev coming up on
three years experience, im having a hard time even getting interviews at
java/.net shops.

I've lost track of the times ive heard "you have a math degree? Not CS?"

~~~
cryptozeus
Do you have product like op created in his personal time ? I have seen people
without any degree get hired in FANG. If you don't have exp in java .net then
you need to show ghis to a company by creating public projects.

~~~
trentmb
Thats the plan, up until last week ive been without a personal computer
though.

~~~
topkai22
If you are looking outside pure software shops (FANGs and startups, etc...)
getting a .NET or Java certification can be useful. I think they are a bit
ridiculous, but they help get past clueless HR types and open up the convo to
other parts of your resume.

------
pwaai
After reading Fooled by Randomness, I tried to replicate Nassim Taleb's
strategy of buying far OTM options in anticipation of a particular stock being
outed as a fraud.

I made a killing when a certain blockchain company traded on NASDAQ was
investigated by the SEC and soon faced delisting.

With those winnings, I went all in-purchasing near expiry far far far OTM put
options, expecting imminent OTCBB quotes.

It took 2 months for it to happen and my put options expired worthless.

So what I learned is that I suck at trading and I should not gamble.

~~~
21
When Taleb did this strategy, he was buying options years out.

~~~
pwaai
I think before the market crash in the 80s, he bought a bunch of put options
for pennies which ended up being probably several hundred
dollars.....literally a 100,000% ROI from a blackswan event

he's still living off that FU money....not sure how rich he is but I estimate
20MM

------
archlight
I am in this situation where I really hope I could apply some risk framework
to help me make decision.

I recently signed an offer with a company, US bank with large python
community. Now I am counter offered with more pay and promotion and internal
transfer to a new team. Conventional wisdom is never accept counter offer. but
this one I am giving second thought as it is not for original role but
transferred to new team. I will be only one in my location and I will be
building MVP for business users. it will be exposed to a lot of tech stack but
it won't be scale as large as new company.

However to join a new company, there is always uncertainties like team and
project. I had bad experience before. It is difficult to find it out through
interview only. It seems to confirm this as I find that hiring process is a
bit not taken seriously. It is greenfield project but no coding tests. There
is no front end expertise in the team so I was only got asked things like "you
worked with angularjs right?". Hiring manager is recruiting three altogether
which he thinks will be good team.

risk is about managing uncertainties. I hope decision like this can be priced
so it is easier to decide.

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anonu
I don't know if I can really agree with the risk classifications the author
makes in relation to his career.

I would simply sum what the author is trying to say in one word "Complacency".
Having a decent well-paying job can blind you to whether you're on a good
career path.

A good career path is one where you are challenging yourself, you learn
something new everyday and you position yourself to take on new projects or
new leadership roles (if that's your thing).

------
paultopia
The idea of latent risk is interesting, but it doesn't seem like the
interesting part of a latent risk is it's riskiness. It's true that smoking a
cigarette a day accumulates your risk of dying early, but the important part
is the accumulation. We can see that if we replace smoking cigarettes with
eating donuts, and replace dying early with suffering from obesity. Then we've
got exactly the same phenomenon---a bunch of small decisions that are rational
taken singly, but disastrous when put together. But there's nothing risky
about it---if you eat 5 donuts a day and leave everything else about your life
equal, you will become obese with probability 1.

We don't have a really great theory of this kind of boil-the-frog-by-inches
phenomenon yet (unless Jon Elster has buried one somewhere in one of his many
books, which wouldn't surprise me... and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if
Elster anticipated a lot of Taleb somewhere, he's done so so much work on
rationality over time), but latent risk probably isn't it.

~~~
Tycho
This just seems like an incorrect analysis, not a limit of rationality. Dosage
matters. Dosage specifies a quantity _and_ a time frame. One donut _per day_
is fine. Five donuts is not.

~~~
paultopia
One donut per day isn't fine, not for a person who was already consuming
maintenance calories. A single dunkin donuts donut hovers around 300 calories.
A pound of fat is ~ 3500 calories, so a donut per day is ~35 pounds a year.

The BMI formula is (lbs/height_inches^2)*703. Allegedly, average male height
in the us is just shy of 5'10, female 5'4, so let's just run with 5'7, or 67
inches, as a canonical height. So doing a tiny bit of algebra and taking a
derivative, you get ~.16 bmi per pound. A person with 25bmi is classified as
normal; 30 as obese. That means that in a little bit over a year you can go
from normal to obese on one donut a day.

~~~
Tycho
Why would you assume i meant this was on top of maintenance calories? I find
it so bizarre that people look at food this way, that the main challenge is to
not over-eat. To somehow eat more without incurring surplus calories. The real
challenge is to acquire the necessary number of calories to support your
activity. Once you achieve that goal, stop eating, _duh._

~~~
paultopia
Narrow answer: the maintenance calories thing was implicit in my original
comment (in the "and leave everything else about your life equal," i.e., in
addition to the stuff you're already eating, which is presumably hovering
around some equilibrium).

Broad answer: the number of people who struggle with their weight is pretty
good evidence that the main challenge is, in fact, to not overeat for millions
of people.

~~~
Tycho
I think the framing of the question is part of why people struggle. People
obsess about gym/running and eating certain types of food. All of that is
completely unnecessary. Whatever your level of activity is, eat to that goal.
Sometimes i’ll be eating something like a donut and someone will say “do you
_know_ how many calories are in that??” as if it’s impossible to simply eat a
snack and count it towards your daily energy requirements accordingly. Or as
if there are two types of food - ones which keep you alive and ones which
taste good but contain these bad things called calories which make you fat and
which pose an endless battle against temptation. Another thing which people
bring up is slowing metabolism which also seems irrelevant since it’s simply
the rate of conversion, not the yield. If people struggle i would frame it in
terms of willpower - much harder to resist excessive binge eating after a
strenuous workout than after something leisurely like a walk. /rant

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cryptozeus
Good article but didn't summarize properly at the end.

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ak39
Nice read but the use of latent risk to explain his choices (both in tech
stack and career) could just as easily (if not more appropriately) be
explained through opportunity costs and trade offs.

~~~
chubot
I don't follow. You can imagine that you have two offers: one job pays
$80K/year and one pays $100K/year.

Then by taking the first job, there is an opportunity cost of $20K/year,
because you can only have one job at a time, and you had a "better" offer.

But there could be a different latent risk in the 2 jobs. So using that model
leads you to evaluate the two opportunities differently. You need another
concept to explain the choice; opportunity cost alone doesn't do it.

