Flaneur

Here's a nifty term I learned from reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Flâneur (pronounced: [flɑnœʁ]), from the French noun flâneur, means "stroller," "lounger," "saunterer," or "loafer." Flânerie refers to the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym is boulevardier.

The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. It was Walter Benjamin, drawing on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, who made this figure the object of scholarly interest in the 20th century, as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists and writers.

Flaneur

Currently Reading: Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Antifragile - Things That Gain From Disorder"

Aside from businessmen and investors, anyone who is uneasy with uncertainty, like anxiety disorder and OCD sufferers, can benefit from the profound insights of this book. You can learn to face uncertainty, It follows Nassim Nicholas Taleb's other great books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. I highly recommend it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don't understand. 

The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. 

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls "antifragile" is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. 

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile,  Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call "efficient" not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the "Titanic" save lives? 

The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. 

Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. 

Praise for Antifragile:

"Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining."-- The Economist. "A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives."--Newsweek.  "Revelatory . . . Taleb pulls the reader along with the logic of a Socrates."--Chicago Tribune. "Startling . . . richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides . . . I will have to read it again. And again." -- Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal. "Trenchant and persuasive . . . Taleb's insatiable polymathic curiosity knows no bounds. . .  You finish the book feeling braver and uplifted."--New Statesman. "Antifragility isn't just sound economic and political doctrine. It's also the key to a good life."-- Fortune. "At once thought-provoking and brilliant."-- Los Angeles Times.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Changed my view of how the world works." -- Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate "[This] is the lesson of Taleb . . . and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable." -- Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point "[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne."--- The Wall Street Journal "The most prophetic voice of all . . . [Taleb is] a genuinely significant philosopher . . . someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone." --GQ.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Iconoclastic Quant Books

The topics of uncertainty, risk, and finding hidden order in chaos have long interested me perhaps because of my OCD, or perhaps because of my interest in art and design. Even in entertainment, such as crime novels, I have delighted in such scholarly characters as Sherlock Holmes and his offspring. Naturally, some of the best books on risk and uncertainty are found in the business and science sections. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books are great reads on the overconfidence of certain statistict tools and "Quant" models, in terms of controlling risk on Wall Street.