According to Pericles and Thucydides, “Courage is when you sacrifice your own wellbeing for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.’ As we can see it fits into our table of preserving the sustainability of the system.
A foolish gambler is not committing an act of courage, especially if he is risking other people’s funds or has a family to feed. And other forms of sterile courage aren’t really courage. In the financial and almost all other industries other there, we focus on ‘probabilities’, the utilimate term used in almost all industries out there, from financials, to aviation to ecology.
Let us call the first set ensemble probability, and the second one time probability (since one is concerned with a collection of people and the other with a single person through time). Now, when you read material by finance professors, finance gurus or your local bank making investment recommendations based on the long term returns of the market, beware. Even if their forecast were true (it isn’t), no person can get the returns of the market unless he has infinite pockets and no uncle points. The are conflating ensemble probability and time probability.
If the investor has to eventually reduce his exposure because of losses, or because of retirement, or because he remarried his neighbor’s wife, or because he changed his mind about life, his returns will be divorced from those of the market.
Antifragile revolves around the idea that people confuse risk of ruin with variations –a simplification that violates a deeper, more rigorous logic of things. It makes the case for risk loving, systematic “convex” tinkering, taking a lot of risks that don’t have tail risks but offer tail profits. Volatile things are not necessarily risky, and the reverse.
Intersection notepad 