What I’m Reading: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb, the former options trader, has been on my mind amidst the COVID-19 Epidemic. I first came across his work in Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article dissecting his trading. Of course, his methodology and philosophy became a series of best-selling books, namely, The Black Swan. Ever the skeptic, Taleb breaks down what he believes is a fundamental flaw in the human cognitive process and that which he has based his life on. This is the Black Swan or the random unforeseen events that we seem to rationalize away and ignore in favor of the normal. By bringing to light problems such as confirmation bias and that narrative fallacy, he highlights how our blindness and unwillingness to accept the improbable can be catastrophic.

What I Failed to Do: Keep Posting

With everything shutting down and everyone spending more and more time at home I found myself less and less interested in trying to write. It took a while to pull myself out of this hole and this roundup is more or less how I’m trying to get back into it. I’m hoping next week I can get back in the habit and start putting out more words.

What I’m Looking Forward to: Road Tripping

Well not so much a road trip as a 4 day U-Haul move, but I’ll take it. I’ll spare you the details but the short version is that I’ll be spending the next few days driving a truckload of things across the country to Texas to wait out the COVID-19 pandemic and let things settle down. I’ve never been on any sort of cross-country road trip (that I can remember), so I’m excited to see how I’ll handle it.