The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
williampeng.com
williampeng.com
No data. No definitions. Just entrepreneurial feel good bullshit.
I stopped reading these types of articles for the purpose of trying to discern any type of value other than trying to understand how delusional people think. There are oh so many of them - I try to make sure I don't get freight trained by them.
The Last Psychiatrist[1] characterizes the previous generation as "The Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of the World"[2] who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.
[1]: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com
[2]: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/10/the_dumbest_generatio...
Prematurely generalize about the environment. ("It happened because <generation X> is an Entitlement Generation.")
People complaining about the entitlement generation are responding to their own fragility in a non-resilient way.
I think baby boomers have a lot to be sorry for, but I hate when people handwave social security for them as a pure "entitlement" when they spent their entire working lives paying into the system.
Also perhaps starting in my generation (though I missed it) and reaching its peak in the generation now coming to adulthood, was the phenomenon of training children to negotiate with their superiors. Parents train their children that they can always get a little more by asking for it. Argumentation, charm, and manipulation are implicitly encouraged. As a result, kids who have expectations laid down by a boss and teacher count on being able to move those expectations simply by asking. When a professor sticks to the grading standard described on the syllabus, many students are honestly shocked and bewildered. They come in, show their distress, plead, negotiate, and get... nothing? You always get something when you ask for it. To people who haven't been brought up that way, that attitude surely sounds like entitlement, and indeed a student behaving that way decades ago would have been branded "spoiled" and mocked among the teachers, but now it is regarded as a socially normal behavior that can't be held against the individual student.
These are two of the new characteristics by which the "entitlement generation" is recognized. I blame these things on the parents, not on the children, and I think they are both regressions, in the sense that they make our culture less pleasant and less efficient. We have entirely lost the value of praise and at the same time obliged ourselves to produce and consume it incessantly. Negotiation is an expenditure of time and energy, and it is wasteful for a professor, or a manager, to entertain a parade of underlings wheedling for exceptions to policy, and to penalize people who spend their time working instead of honing their appeals, when instead everyone might be doing useful work under a policy that is fairly and uniformly applied.
So, I think the "entitlement generation" is accurately diagnosed, though not justly blamed. Their sense of entitlement is just an illusion that their parents programmed into them, an ultimately cruel one, designed to help them "get theirs" in a world of easy growth and riches. It reflects their parents' view of the world as a place where wealth increases inexorably and is handed out most freely to the individuals who, via self-regard and self-assertion, contrive to appear to deserve it most. Now they're adjusting to a world their parents did not prepare them for, and they're bound to look a little foolish at times, through no fault of their own.
On Quora, the second highest response is excellent. It's from Michael O Church, and here's the heart of it:
"Resiliency comes from an ability to realistically analyze setbacks, which often have complex causes. People who aren't resilient have a variety of unhealthy tendencies, listed from the most unhealthy to the least:
* Internalize the rejection. ("It happened because I'm a loser.") This leads to depression and implosion.
* Exaggerate the damage or long-lasting nature (perceived autocorrelation) of the rejection. ("Now that I got fired, I'll never get another job.") This leads to bitterness and "cold" anger, which is more dangerous than the "hot" kind because it's long-lasting and tends toward generalization.
* Get angry about it. ("It happened because he is an asshole.") This leads to "hot" anger and, often, stupid behaviors (revenge).
* Prematurely generalize about the environment. ("It happened because <industry X> is full of sharks.") This doesn't usually impair general psychological health, but it creates an inaccurate model of the world and leads to sub-optimal choices and lost opportunities in the future."
I'm going to have to find some way to get this in front of my face every day for a few months until I internalize it. I have found myself making each of those mistakes at times, and when presented in this manner, it is crystal clear that they are nothing more than reasoning errors.
If that is his understanding of Taleb's book, then he has misread it completely.
Taleb says the best approach is a dumbell strategy, combining conservative choices with convex options whose downside risk is fixed or finite but whose upside is unlimited.
"When you look at the decision tree from that perspective, it seems not so bad: failure is always the same, a zero, while the return (however you define it: monetary, happiness, utility, etc.) is astronomical, and worth it."
Most of us just want a fair shake. We don't want to be given the prize for doing nothing, because that makes it vacuous, but we want a fair opportunity to compete-- not some bullshit meritocracy that has already been set up to make the well-connected rich kids come out the winners. When it comes to excellence, we know that we will have to do the legwork. We just want the entrenched, incompetent morons who are currently in power to get out of the fucking way so we can do something great. We're not asking for a meaningless victory. We're asking to be liberated from the meaningless defeat that most people get.
More or less, yes.
Some people, by luck or otherwise, end up moving up the food chain; others down. But one's parents' social class is a strong predictor of one's own social class.
This isn't about me, personally. I'm fine. However, I think most people in my generation have been screwed, and the ones who have avoided it (present company included) tend to be fairly privileged. If you were born in 1990 in the U.S. with average means, then chances are that you're not beating away venture capitalists with a stick.
What's especially hilarious to me is that the age obsessions of VC-istan are thinly-veiled classism. A meritocracy wouldn't give a shit how old you are. The age narcissism is just a way for rich people to brand themselves, because people of average means don't get their startups bought at age 24. They have to work normal people jobs for a few years. The age bullshit is to keep the latter crowd out.
We need a society where the best people are free to excel, rather than wasting their lives taking orders. We'd have such a better world if the incompetent morons currently running it just stepped down and let some actually smart people take the reins. They can keep all their private jets and gaudy houses, but the decision-making power should go to people who actually have a few brain cells to rub together.
Entitlement, to me, suggests people wanting to be rewarded for just existing, with no desire to actually do anything. I don't see that in my generation. Yes, there's some of it, as there is everywhere, but it's not a defining trait. I see a lot of pissed-off people, but I see people who work really hard.
Holy cow! I never thought about that, but now that you mention it, there's no doubt that explains at least part of it.
I had thought either that they wanted (1) the coolness factor, (2) naive entrepreneurs that they could sway more easily, and/or (3) to make sure there was no family, so the entrepreneurs would work like crazed zombies.
I'm sure those factor in somewhat, but what you mention is probably a bigger factor.
The good thing is that the "real world" doesn't give a shit whether or not you start out rich. In other words, if you can overcome all the obstacles and produce something disruptive that succeeds, you will get the rewards.
[1] http://rejectiontherapy.com
[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/healt...
[3] http://www.entresting.com/blog/100-days-of-rejection-therapy...
And with regard to the anti-fragility thing, this is discussed at length also in Letters from a Stoic. Seneca talks about not being overly dominated by your fears, but also you can be a slave to hope as well. The idea of being happy and free when poor, and cautious when prosperous is also straight out of stoicism.
When I read Seneca in Letters from a Stoic, I get the impression that he's a mental martial arts master, constantly training to be in control of his mind and his happiness, always pursuing excellence.
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...
Likewise http://mises.org/books/stoics.pdf
As a long-time fan of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the links between them and modern anarcho-capitalists like Hazlitt and Mises.