Nanda

Entrepreneur

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The World in Which We Live Now.
7 Points. Lecture at the Ron Paul Institute Annual Meeting.
Thanks @DanielLMcAdams

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

In South Africa, brands repair potholes.

[Eren Bali @erenbali]

With AI, everybody will make their own software just like how we all 3D print our own furniture.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The protein story is based on statistical BS, amateur data fudging. Bro Science is really for idiots.
1- Some do very well growing muscles on minimal protein ing., others poorly on large doses.
2- Remove the line, see the fraud.
3- One of the authors failed to reveal he was SHILLING for a protein supplement company.
4- For older people, ZERO evidence that supplementation work.
5- There is a variance among individuals but can be partially due to OTHER stuff they do, ingest, etc.

(h/t @maxflowminclout).
cc:@EricTopol

[Nanda @nandapixel]

@PaulSkallas Badminton, volleyball, basketball, cycling, skipping, and grappling sports target these muscles.

Tennis and golf not much on calf.

Any other sport?

[Nanda @nandapixel]

@PaulSkallas Agreed. Now I realise something funny about those expensive treadmills people buy.. A humble bicycle can do wonders for your grip and shoulders.

[Nanda @nandapixel]

@PaulSkallas One is not supposed to grip the golf club tighter. Same for most racquet sports like badminton, tennis, and even cricket, baseball etc. A "loose to firm grip" and proper swing is vital.

If you grip tighter you will get golfers / tennis elbow pain and injury...

[VCs Congratulating Themselves 👏👏👏 @VCBrags]

VCs:
“Be contrarian. Think for yourself. Avoid the herd.”

Also VCs:
2016: VR is the future
2018: Blockchain will change everything
2021: NFTs are the new internet
2022: The Metaverse is inevitable
2025: Defense tech is so hot right now

[Mo Zarrinsadaf @MoZarrinsadaf]

"You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits."
@nntaleb

[LindyMan @PaulSkallas]

Your philosophy changes as you go through life. As a young man, you begin as a realist focused on practicality and what's directly achievable. With success, you grow into an idealist, driven by the belief in larger possibilities

Then, life reveals its uncertainties and you become a skeptic, question all the structures

Finally, as an old man, you become a mystic. so much of life ultimately comes down to luck and forces beyond your comprehension.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Friends, this holiday season, try to reach out to those who have little of no friends, no family, and no reason to cheer. They may be involuntarily stuck in a state of loneliness. They don't need your money; they don't need your gifts.
Maybe just a little bit of attention.

[Wisdom Theory @wisdom_theory]

Never ask a doctor what you should do, by @nntaleb

[Nanda @nandapixel]

No amount of money or advancements in Med. Tech can save us if we are not keeping ourselves fit.

[Jan Nieuwenhuijs @JanGold_]

Few countries as sick as the US.

[Joseph Noel Walker @JosephNWalker]

No author has shaped my worldview more than Nassim Taleb (@nntaleb).

I stumbled on The Black Swan eight years ago, then inhaled the rest of the Incerto.

I've increasingly come to appreciate the importance of its ideas to prolonging the human story.

Was an honour to speak with Nassim on the podcast.

Hard to summarise our conversation, but the timestamps below capture the gist.

Enjoy!

Timestamps:
(0:00:55) - Heuristics for knowing when you're in Mediocristan versus Extremistan.
(0:06:06) - Are certain tail exponents intrinsic?
(0:10:30) - Why hasn't Universa's tail hedging strategy now been fully priced in?
(0:11:52) - Does the power law distribution of startup returns mean VCs should concentrate their bets, or spray and pray?
(0:15:20) - Nassim's 30-minute take on the field of behavioural economics.
(0:48:57) - Nassim's 20-minute take on superforecasting.
(1:11:03) - The Precautionary Principle and AI.
(1:17:28) - What are LLMs doing?
(1:23:10) - War, violence, & "the empirical mean is not the real mean".
(1:39:17) - Covid, & how Western governments think about tail risk.
(1:43:38) - What's the most important thing people in social science get wrong about correlation?
(1:52:58) - How does Nassim explain the perspicacity of the Russian school of probability?
(1:55:56) - Why doesn't Hayek's knowledge argument extend to prediction markets?
(1:58:26) - If mean absolute deviation is a better measure than standard deviation, why has the latter become commonplace?
(2:01:09) - Nassim's next book, and what he's up to at the moment.

[Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. @ParikPatelCFA]

The CEO of Google is Indian
The CEO of Microsoft is Indian
The CEO of Adobe is Indian
The CEO of IBM is Indian
The CEO of Chanel is Indian
The CEO of FedEx is Indian
The CEO of Palo Alto Networks is Indian

But according to X, all we are known for is that we smell bad

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

18/July/2024

A middle aged man, the husband and bystander of my patient, a 58 years old gentlewoman, came into my outpatient one late evening with a request.

Fighting back tears, he asked me to withdraw care, remove the breathing tube and free his wife from the mechanical ventilator, so that she could be shifted in her final gasping state back to the hospital room, so that he could be near her, in private, in their final moment.

It felt like he was asking my permission to help him let his wife go. That he would allow his wife to die, if I allowed him.

There was a reason for this. This was not the woman's first encounter with death. She was diagnosed with cirrhosis seven years ago, when she presented to me in a comatose state in my emergency. It took us two whole days to wake her up while also ensuring that she did not end up on the ventilator.

She went into a particular type of coma - called hepatic coma. When the liver fails -acutely or chronically, toxins such as ammonia build up inside the body, leading to brain dysfunction. Only in her case, the liver had not failed yet and the reason for the increased toxins in her blood was a condition associated with cirrhosis called portosystemic shunt syndrome or PSS. In patients with PSS, large volume of blood from the liver is diverted into gigantic and tortuous abnormal blood vessels called shunts that form in response to an increasing liver pressure that develops due to an progressively stiff and shrinking liver (cirrhosis).

I offered them a shunt closure - a minimally invasive radiological procedure that blocks the shunt and diverts the toxin-rich blood back into the liver, allowing the liver to cleanse it up and relieve stress on the brain. They did not have money at the time and since they were dependent on their only son, and he was trying for a new job, it was not easy for them to go for expensive (but effective) treatments. For two whole years.

Those two years were like the inner circle of Hell for them. And for me. Everytime she developed an increase in toxic blood due to the mildest of triggers - a passing flu or constipation or dehydration, she would go into brain dysfunction. She was hospitalized multiple times for brain dysfunction (called hepatic encephalopathy) and two more times in coma. And everytime, she got ill, the husband, with the help of their neighbor's son would bring her in their small car, driving over 160 kilometers, to my emergency department, her lying in a disoriented state on his lap at the back of the car, wherever I worked (I changed my work across three hospitals from 2017) to help him wake her up.

I remember one time, when she was utterly disoriented and confused for a whole week when she got out of the comatose state, she did not recognize him and he would burst out sobbing in front of her.

In due course, their son left to work in Canada because he was not getting any jobs here and they were unable to make ends meet. The husband had some assets (small plot of land) and their current new home. He sold the land to get his son to Canada where he could start work at a new job, but in a frozen god-forsaken secluded place in a factory cum storage facility, with good pay that only desperate people would opt for. The husband would tell me that his dream was to bring his son home one day, get him a job here and not make him work in a frozen wasteland. His son did not deserve it, but he was forced to do it to pay bills at home and for his mother's treatment. All of them together - that was most dificult in these times. That families had to be purposefuly broken into pieces and scattered, for them to sustain as a family.

Two years later, the husband came to my outpatient with my patient, and told me that they secured enough money for the shunt block procedure. I spoke to the hospital and gave them further concessions and we did the procedure. For the next 4-5 years, she did not have a single hospital admission due to brain dysfunction.

But the cirrhosis was still there and the treatments and surveillance had to be continued and it was all costly in the long term. I told him she was ok for now, but she would require a liver transplantation in the future, because the cirrhosis would usher in other complications, the deadliest of them all, infections and organ failure, and that we should be working towards getting her a cure from cirrhosis.

He said he could never muster up such amount of money (~ INR 2000000) and that we had to face what came and he was glad that he had a strong ally in me to take up the challenges. Because I had snatched her away from death's hands many a time. But he did not know that even I would stumble, fumble and fall when advanced liver failure put out its devilish fangs, bringing in the worst complications, worst of all, severe multidrug resistant bugs.

And it happened. Over the last year, infections started ravaging her body. First it was bacterial, then seasonal viruses gave her pneumonia and then fungus. It started with skin infections, after that her lungs got involved, and then came the devastating blood stream infections. And we fought back every single one of them under extreme aggression with whatever medical science had to offer, to keep her alive. During one such blood stream infection attack, she went into a coma and I told him that she would die, but he reminded me, how strong an ally I was to him and that I would help him wake up his wife. Afterall, I was doing this for many years for his family. And I did it, this time too. And he took her home, only to bring her back a week ago in a comatose state.

This time, it was a foe we had always feared would come into the frame. And it was here, and it was time for us to take up the challenge. But I was exhausted. I was stressed out beyond. I lost my sanctuary. This time, she had a deep skin and soft infection with a devastating bacteria called extremely drug-resistant Klebsiella (XDR-Klebsiella) that responded to no antibiotic. She worsened, and the critical care doctors put her on a ventilator. She went into shock as her heart function collapsed. For the fourth time in her lifetime after the diagnosis of cirrhosis, she was critically ill. She progressed to multiple organ failure and they asked me next steps - upgrade all organ supports, put her on dialysis and get aggressive. Like we always did.

I am only in my early 40s, but I had seen deaths as much as a veteran soldier would, on a bloody battlefield, because I had cared for 1000s of critically ill cirrhosis patients across the years; and all that experience told me that she was going to die. How much ever I tried, the team tried, the disease had brought out its deadliest fangs, one last time, and with the sole intention to defeat us and take her away. I had to concede.

I had to concede, because the husband came into my outpatient, sat himself down, and showed me a thin gold chain on his neck and a golden ring on his left finger, telling me that these were the last two items he had to sell to keep the treatment going for his wife whom we all knew was going to die.

"These are the only two gifts I have from her Sir," he told me. "Please allow me to take her to the room, away from the ventilator, so that I can at least be with her when she dies and also keep her gifts. I dont have anything else. If I let her continue in the ICU, she will finally go, and I will have to sell these gifts to pay the hospital bill and I will have lost everything."

It felt like he was asking my permission to help him let his wife go. That he would allow his wife to die, if I allowed him.

My patient for nearly seven years. I had sacrificed sleep, skipped meals and lost in thought many times, disregarding my family's needs, to keep her alive all this while. But then, this was beyond just medical care. This was honoring death and inviting it home, with dignity. I honored his last wishes and decision.

My patient died late night on 18th July 2024 in the room, with her husband by the side. Only the two of them. Only he was privy to see her breathe her last, like how she was privy to all his memories in death. He got to keep the chain and the ring because the hospital bill was not burdening.

I wont see him again. Our last goodbye ended in my outpatient, with me holding his hands tightly clasped, while his tears wet mine. Maybe he will spend the rest of his life in that small home of his rich with the memories of his wife. Or maybe he will make a journey to a frozen god-forsaken secluded place to be with the only family he has left.

[Nanda @nandapixel]

"Actually they never followed you. You were following them...."

[molson 🧠⚙️ @Molson_Hart]

Some idle thoughts on social media (SM) and the role it should play in one’s life:

SM should never be your reason for doing anything.

Once you take actions, especially costly ones, for likes, followers, replies, going viral etc, you have lost.

SM is not a good judge of anything.

The worst content goes viral. The truly contrarian but right stuff goes nowhere. There is no relationship between # followers and whether or not a person’s posts line up with reality.

So if SM is a poor judge, ignore it. Don’t let it tell you what to do.

So then how to use SM?

It’s a tool. It’s a thing in the background.

If there’s something you want to do, if there’s something you want to say, if there’s something you want to write to crystallize in your own mind, put that on SM, but don’t do those things for SM.

Let SM amplify who you are and what you’re doing, not determine it.

Let it call the shots and you will be very unhappy.

When you stack followers with a particular viewpoint, catering to a particular audience, you have not actually built a following.

You have built a prison for yourself.

Go outside of that viewpoint, start to say something that does not serve that audience and your followers will desert you.

Actually they never followed you. You were following them. So when you stop, they are gone.

Doing stuff for SM will warp your thinking and turn you dysfunctional.

You want to do stuff for yourself, stuff that makes you feel good? Fine. Stuff that will stand the test of time? Great. But stuff for the algorithm? That’s like having a bad job that pays poorly with a capricious delusional boss.

Some guy is going to read the first 50% of this and not finish and going to reply for clout “then why you write all this bro, if not for social media”?

1. Because I want to, I am motivated in the moment; this is not a planned post
2. I want to crystallize these thoughts in my mind
3. Because I see social media really fuck people up and if I can help others see the light that makes me feel good
4. Because it’s an emotional release; fuck the posers on this app

That’s why.

If it goes nowhere, I still win.

If it helps people, great.

If it gets likes (unlikely, it’s too far out of the normal conversation), that’s cool too, but that’s not what I’m here for.

Social media a tool, not a raison d’etre, so that it as such.

🤝 ✌️

[Nanda @nandapixel]

@nntaleb Best wishes 💐💐💐 and looking forward to reading it.

[Nanda @nandapixel]

🤣🤣🤣

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

In finance, people pay money for instructions on "how to get rich and retire" to people who are probably not rich and certainly not retired.