Antifragile: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Black Swan: Forecasting is really hard, perfect forecasting is impossible.
No, you've missed the point of the book (or haven't read it). It's about that some things become better in the presence of error/noise/damage/volatility. But not all things, some other, fragile things, become worse and worse as damage accumulates. And that there's no word for such a property, so he calls it "Antifragile". And then the book goes in great detail about lots and lots of examples (with the usual rambling).
I think the name for that property is "age". :)
Do you have an example of something that gets better in the presence of accumulated damage? Maybe giving something the "weathered" look on purpose? I can really only think of subjective examples.
Things that get worse with accumulated damage definitely abound in physics. One example that came immediately to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-carrier_injection
Collectively DNA reproduction has been antifragile and kept up a continuous chain of existence for at least 4 billion years.
Consider a portfolio of out of the money options, with some short closer to the money options to "collect premium". This is how Taleb made good amount of his money while trading options back in the day (I personally call such setups "a Taleb trade"). He himself describes it as "trades that make little money on small moves, lose medium amounts on medium moves, win a lot on big moves". But this has absolutely nothing to do with Lindy.
A Lindy "trade" would be something like hoarding gold. It's been around for sooooooo long.
People may "nod their head yes" when you give the one sentence descriptions, and think they understand it. But then they ACT in a different way, especially when they have "skin in the game".
Taleb actually has a name for that: "domain dependence". That is, you can nod your head in agreement while reading a book, but then when confronted with the exact same situation in real life, you act as if you don't have that knowledge, or you act contrary to it.
I've noticed this in programming vs. computer science. In a test or interview situation, someone might say they'll do things one way. But then their production code they do it a different way, just because that's the common way they've seen it done, in that particular situation.
This can be good or bad -- sometimes the textbook way is actually better; sometimes not. You can also flip it around -- it also applies to the person asking the question. They might expect a certain answer of the interviewee, but when they have skin in the game, they do something else.
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I also don't agree with the one sentence description of the Black Swan. I'd say the most important idea is that outliers are often ignored, but they're precisely what drives history. [1] And also that they're more likely than naive mathematics would suggest, i.e. "fat tails".
To use an example that's HN friendly, every successful company is an outlier. And we always seem to be talking about the biggest outliers of them all (e.g. FAANG, none of which existed when I started using computers.) Making statements about the average new company isn't informative, because the average one fails and doesn't matter.
[1] Thiel has a similar sentiment, something like "every big moment in business happens exactly once. The next Google isn't making a search engine, etc."
And even people who "know" that they're two separate domains fail to ACT like they know it.
If you're trying to predict what happens with 52 cards or a six-sided die, well that's easy. Everything works out nice and cleanly, with no ambiguity.
But if you're trying to predict markets, the math is intractable, for fundamental reasons. An example is that Michael Lewis talks about the "Value At Risk" that Wall St. metric in one of his books, leading to the 2008 crash. That's clearly casino math applied to real life, failing catastrophically.
The charitable interpretation is that people saying "well this only happens once in 100 million years" are genuinely naive. The other interpretation is that they know that their gains will be privatized and their losses will be socialized, so they have no incentive to use math that's not nonsense.
This is basically the "ludic fallacy" [1], although I think "casino math fallacy" is easier to remember. You're applying the math of games to real life, which is wrong exactly where it matters (in the fat tail).
The ideas in Antifragile are to me an good application of the bets to make in life and love. Skin in the game is to evaluate the bets (actions) of others. Doctor prescribing statins...hmmm...what are his incentives around the upsides/downsides of it?
Fooled by Randomness is a prescription of how to evaluate systemic performance (or failure). Black swans is eh...just about black swans or how outlier events in power law distributions can fool us by not showing up for a long time and then ...watch out.
Nassim can appear to be overly verbose but his books defy summarization. I recommend reading them but given my own experience can empathize by the contra opinions.
Antifragile: be convex when applicable.
Black Swan: not all distributions are made the same.
"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book"
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
[0] https://necsi.edu/systemic-risk-of-pandemic-via-novel-pathog...