Best of Twitter: Antifragility, Via Negativa, Imposter Syndrome and more

May 18, 2021

This is my weekly list of the most interesting tweets I found—with a little commentary from me.

Small Failures Prevent Big Disasters (Antifragility)

If you remove all the stressors from an environment by delaying risk, you not only make the eventual collapse worse, you make people less prepared for it.

CountBaisse @IRunWithBulls

@TaylorPearsonMe @rhughesjones @Kingspol_econ @TimHarford @JJSwartzwelder @mpigliucci @ElectricAgora @jam_croissant @HowardMarksBook @JohnHMcWhorter You might enjoy this from a couple of weeks ago :) https://t.co/LXYMXqF5yv https://t.co/niKKtuiGtu

If you protect a system, a company, or a child from small failures or stressful situations, most likely you’re setting them up for a larger failure in the future. Ability to deal with smaller/safer failures stresses is important for the system/company/child to grow up to be much stronger. Nicholas Nissim Taleb’s book “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder” is a potentially life-changing philosophy that everyone must be familiar with in these uncertain times. Here is a shorter introduction to the core ideas.

Removing Bad Things Is More Effective Than Adding Good Things: Via Negativa

Nicolai Foss @NicolaiFoss

Evidence of a strong rotten apple effect: "we find that avoiding a toxic worker (or converting him to an average worker) enhances performance to a much greater extent than replacing an average worker with a superstar worker."

Removing a toxic worker from a team (or fixing the toxicity) improves team performance much more than adding a superstar worker to the team. Avoiding stupidity will give you better results in life than trying to become very intelligent. Here’s an older tweet recommending via negativa in the context of mental health:

Dr.Bhooshan Shukla MD डॉ. भूषण शुक्ल @docbhooshan

While treating kids with mental health related issues, first principle of any help - Think systemically, identify active harms and contributors, work on dialling them down as much as possible. active intervention only when above proves inadequate & serious imminent risk

And in fact, this idea applies to all health, not just mental health. And you can get quite a lot of insights by applying this idea to all aspects of your life, not just health. For a more detailed discussion of via negativa see this article from the wonderful Farnam Street blog.

The Importance of Short and to the Point Writing

Taylor 🍕 @TaylorSicard

School: this paper is a minimum 5 pages, single spaced with size 10 font. Real world: you have 8.5 seconds to get your point across.

Successful entrepreneur and VC Shaan Puri has an entire thread on this concept:

Shaan Puri @ShaanVP

In school they want long essays & you study shakespeare. I sucked at that. I get exhausted writing long essays & my grammar was horrible (still is). Lucky for me - in the real world you want: * less words * simple language * stories that get people hooked

Do you think like this before you write an email or a tweet? The most successful people do.

Ryan Stephens 🥃 @ryanstephens

When Shaan is trying to craft a viral tweet, he thinks about the core emotion he's trying to convey to Jenny in her bedroom. Here are a few: •😂LOL •🖕WTF •❤️Awww • 🤯 Ohhhhh (now I understand) •😌Finally! (relief; finally someone said it; you put my feelings into words)

When you’re writing, you must spend far more time on rewriting than on the writing itself. Can you make it shorter? Can you make it clearer? Can you make it a story? Can you add emotion?

Here Paul Graham (founder of Y Combinator and one of the most influential people in the world of tech startups) explains the process of writing and rewriting:

Paul Graham @paulg

Writing is rewriting. Here's me writing the essay "Startups in 13 Sentences." Characters in yellow will ultimately be deleted. Notice how few characters I type make it into the final version. Watch Me Make Mistakesbyronm.com

Reading between the lines

Did you know that Neptune was discovered by a mathematician doing calculations on paper and not an astronomer using a telescope? Urbain Le Verrier noticed unexpected perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, deduced that it was caused by the gravitational pull of another planet, and computed the size and position of the planet. He then told astronomer John Galle to look for a planet at a specific time and place in the sky, and that’s how Neptune was discovered.

Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus

Amazing. Studying share price patterns, under the assumption that the efficient markets hypothesis was correct, he deduced what a key material in the hydrogen bomb was. The external validity of his methodology & assumptions confirmed by the US government's burning his paper ;-)

Vincent (Economic History) Geloso @VincentGeloso

Armen Alchian was the inventor of the first event study. He just had to destroy the paper because of national security issues. That's how much of a badass Alchian was #econtwitter https://t.co/QdjIcHNcBw

Here is a completely different example of that kind of deduction. In the 1950s when the US was working on the Hydrogen bomb, one of the important ingredients was a top-secret. Armen Alchian, an economist, used stock market data to see which companies’ stocks went up in correlation with announcements related to the bomb and correctly deduced that the secret ingredient was Lithium. He was forced to destroy this paper and keep the deduction secret because of national security issues.

Do you know other, more recent examples of people deducing important information by guessing from correlated data?

Just for fun

Actual Red Lobster @Christina_Owen

I did not know a stingray had all this skeleton

New to Some

(This section contains tweets where there’s an interesting concept that many might know but it would be new to at least some people.)

Merci Grace @merci

My career advice: Do the thing that most triggers your imposter syndrome.

Do you know about imposter syndrome? Do you ever get the feeling that you are really unqualified for your job? That you don’t quite know what you’re doing and you’ve just been promoted because your boss doesn’t know how clueless you are? Everyone feels like this: If you don’t believe that, read this delightful incident that happened to Neil Gaiman. You need to learn to deal with it: here’s HBR talking about how to overcome imposter syndrome. In fact, as the tweet above says, for fastest growth, do the thing that most triggers your imposter syndrome.

(I’m sure you know someone struggling with imposter syndrome: please forward this to them.)

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