Edge Perspectives With John Hagel has the article Getting Stronger through Stress: Making Black Swans Work for You. In the article he has a very helpful explication of the meaning of Nassim Nicholas Taleb new book Antifragile.

The real opportunity, in Taleb’s view, is to learn and grow from volatility and unexpected events – not to return to where you were, but to become even better as a result of the exposure and experience.  This is the essence of antifragility, a term that Taleb feels he has to coin because the English language doesn’t have a word that adequately captures this property of systems. While they may not be perfect synonyms, Taleb is seeking to describe the properties of adaptive or evolutionary systems that become better and reach even higher levels of performance as a consequence of encountering and overcoming challenges.  They are dynamic rather than static. They thrive and grow in new directions rather than simply sustain themselves. They actually need random events to strengthen and grow and they become brittle and atrophy in the absence of these random events.

I think it will be very helpful to have some idea of where Taleb is going as you start to read his new book. Sometimes, I  find a lot of promise in a Taleb book about what he is going to tell you, but I walk away feeling that the promise has not been fulfilled to my satisfaction.  I do learn a lot, but not as much as I had hoped.  I know Taleb is trying to tell me something profound, but I never quite get a firm handle on the actionable part of what he is trying to tell me. Perhaps the new book with the help of the introduction of the above article will be even more fulfilling than his previous books.

The way I came to find the article may be an antifragile example in itself. By looking at the statistics of where the traffic to this blog is coming from, I found that an author on Scoop.it had referred to my post about Taleb.  The Scoop.it “magazine” was Generative Systems Design by Anne Caspari.  Her site pointed to the article Antifragile system design principles in Wired.com.  The Wired.com article pointed to the article that is the subject of this blog post.  Each layer along the way added to what was in the layer below.

The Republicans are pushing the video below.

The Republicans ask the question,

Why is the Obama administration willing to negotiate with Putin on Syria, but not with Congress to address the Washignton’s spending problem?

1. The Washington spending problem is not spending enough to stimulate the economy. The Republicans want to spend less. What’s to negotiate?
2. Negotiation with Putin breaks the deadlock on an insoluble problem and brings about an almost perfect solution.  (Bombing Syria would might have let loose the chemical weapons into terrorist’s hands.  Syria’s turning these weapons over to international control for eventual destruction accomplishes exactly what we said we want to accomplish.)
3. It is more likely that Putin will stick to his negotiated promise than it is that Boner will stick to his.

It is a sad day when we find that the Russian leader is more amenable to reason and negotiation than is the Republican party. It’s odd that the Republicans would want to focus our attention on this fact. Maybe they really do have a death wish.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show does a good job of pointing out the inconsistencies in people’s positions on two Constitutional Amendments in The Bill of Rights.

The hard part to understand is that neither side of the debate on one of the amendments is consistent with that side’s position on the other amendment.

As described in the book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, now that each side has decided how they feel about the two amendments, they need to figure out why they made the decision they made. The decision is based on your gut feeling, and then you make up rationalizations to explain it. So let’s hear the rationalization for how you decide one way one one amendment, but decide the opposite way on the other amendment. I want to hear this so I can figure out why I take the positions I do on these amendments. I at least recognize my cognitive dissonance even if I don’t know what to do with it.

This is a great outreach program of the NRA to make sure we all have equal rights, especially second amendment rights.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Larry Summers Got a Bad Rap on Stimulus: Obama is the Problem by William K. Black. The article begins as follows:

I am a strong supporter of Janet Yellen and believe her support for the fiscal and monetary policies best designed to produce a stronger, prompter recovery from the Great Recession makes her the superior replacement for Ben Bernanke.  The criticism of Larry Summers’ position on fiscal stimulus, however, was generally inaccurate.  Within the Obama/Biden administration, the best known economists (Summers, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein) proved dramatically better economists than did the non-economists who eventually came to dominate Obama’s economic policies (Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, and William Daley).  Summers, Romer, and Bernstein were strong voices in favor of fiscal stimulus.  Summers deserves some additional praise because he had to break from his mentor’s (Bob Rubin’s) pro-austerity dogmas to reach his anti-austerian position.

I wasn’t sure if it were Summers or someone else that was giving bad advice to President Obama on the stimulus.  If William Black wants to defend Summers on this aspect of his economics advice, then I am willing to listen.  There are some links that I am going to have to follow to see if there is an explanation of just where Summers stood compared to Romer.  He might have stood correctly in opposition to Geithner, Lew, and Daley, but still be more tepid about stimulus than Romer.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page has a link to the video Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discusses Antifragility at NYPL.

I always find it easy to understand the concept and the value of what he is promoting. I also have a devil of a time figuring out how to achieve the concept and its value.

This talk is no exception. However, there is a hint that the how to is discussed more in his new book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, than in his previous books.

Even understanding the difference between anti-fragile and robust took a fair amount of perseverance as I watched the video. In the end, I am very glad that I did not quit. Had I seen the full title of the book beforehand, it might have helped a little.

Talking Points Memo has the story Obama Blasts GOP ‘Extortion’ And Threat Of ‘Apocalypse’ Over Debt Limit.

Obama is determined not to repeat the mistake he made by letting Republicans use the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip. He likened the GOP’s position to a hypothetical Democratic Congress demanding that a Republican president agree to tax hikes in exchange for lifting the borrowing limit. Earlier this year, when the debt limit deadline was coming up, Obama refused to negotiate, and as a result, Republicans caved and raised it.

The point is that refusing to negotiate with the House Republicans is the correct strategy.  It worked before, and it will work again.  If the Republicans were to carry out their threat, the impact would be that enough voters would vote to turn the House back to a Democratic majority.  Its a heads Obama wins, tails the Republicans lose situation.

McClatchy has the story U.N. calculations of poison rockets’ paths implicate Syrian guard unit.

“If the U.N. inspectors correctly calculated the trajectories, it certainly seems to indicate that the chemically armed rockets were fired from government-controlled land,” said Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director and weapons expert. “It’s clear and convincing evidence.”
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Austin Long, a security and weapons expert at Columbia University, said his back-of-an-envelope tabulations since the U.N. report came out indicated that the Republican Guard, which is thought to control the chemical stockpiles, very likely moved one rocket system to a secure location near the base and launched.

I have given you links to the biographies of the experts quoted in the article.  Perhaps this will help you to figure out if these are trustworthy experts.  In this house of  cards it is hard to figure out whom to believe.

The Daily Show has an interview with Robert Reich ion two parts.

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 1

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 2

In a previous post, Inequality for All: Robert Reich Warns Record Income Gap Is Undermining Our Democracy, you got to hear Robert Reich interviewed by a “serious” journalist. Comparing the two interviews you will see that both interviews were very good at eliciting different pieces of information. Each interview added to our store of knowledge.

I would have loved to have heard Robert Reich explain to Jon Stewart not only what was done to solve similar problems in the past, but explicitly how it was done then. What happened that allowed a political force to gain enough power to rein in the previous robber baron’s? Let us talk about that history.

Some of the alternative news sources are really getting pathetic with their begging and pleading for support.  I tried to send the following message to one such source, but they are not accepting responses to their pleas.

Seriously, people, you just do not know how to monetize your content in the digital age. You just can’t seem to figure out why your readers are unwilling to make even the smallest monthly payment for a subscription.

Some people choose from hundreds of sources over a month. If they had to pay $1, $3, or $10 for a monthly subscription to each one, that would be anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per month.

I have a blog post  Monetizing Internet Content that explains how to solve the problem while recognizing what the real roadblock is.

Basically, all you alternate media folk, The Daily Kos, The Real News Network, Reader Supported News, Consortium News, Truth-Out, etc. need to get together and create a clearing house that will take in a monthly subscription and provide the subscriber with access to thousands of news sites.

The clearing house distributes micro-payments to all news sources in their service for each article that a subscriber reads.

This distributes the subscriber’s payment in a way that represents the value that the subscriber actually gets from the articles that she or he reads.

Hundreds of times more readers would be willing to pay a substantial monthly fee to get access to an unlimited number of sources than would be willing to pay a very small fee to get access to only one source.

I offer this idea to you, gratis. I want nothing more out of this than a way for me to fairly pay for the value you provide.

It is so frustrating to have the solution to a problem, but no means to get the sufferers of the problem to hear about the solution.  If any of you readers know how to tell internet content providers how to solve their funding problem, I would be really grateful to you for passing this idea along.