By: Tonette Kellett on October 27, 2022
Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman is a book about two systems of thinking, an automated one and an “effortful” one. [1] This book is filled with so many ideas that a reader could discuss. For the purpose of this post, I have chosen four topics from the book to consider briefly. The first of…
By: Henry Gwani on October 27, 2022
Moving beyond fragility and resilience, Nassim Nicholas Taleb draws our attention to a new word to the English language: antifragility. He defines this as the ability to benefit, thrive or grow when exposed to “shocks … volatility, randomness, disorder, … stressors … risk, and uncertainty[1].” Unimaginable as this may seem, the author notes that antifragility…
By: Becca Hald on October 27, 2022
I am struggling this week with what to write about Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. As I have delved into this book, I feel like I understand the concepts well enough, but the writing feels illusive. My thoughts have ranged from a popular meme which says, “That moment you turn down the radio so…
By: Roy Gruber on October 27, 2022
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb proved to be a challenging read for me. Subtitled “things that gain from disorder,” this philosophy book dealing with information theory caused me to stop reading and start watching some explanatory videos about the book. One video, in particular, influenced my post, and I need to acknowledge the source that…
By: Troy Rappold on October 27, 2022
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2012 book, “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Asks how do we deal with the dangers posed by increasing uncertainty and volatility in a world that has grown ever more interdependent and complex. How can we not just withstand it, but profit from it? He goes to great length to define his…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on October 26, 2022
Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder is precisely what I would picture if I were asked to describe a philosophical and informational theory book. Taleb, a Lebanese-American statistician and philosopher, dives deep into the necessity of stressors as a pathway towards growth. While I do feel the book was a bit long winded…
By: Shonell Dillon on October 26, 2022
Campbell introduced us to ” The Hero’s Journey”. He explained that there is a start or “call to adventure” that starts mans journey. Campbell goes on to explain that there are several other steps that follows this start. In the midst of the journey challenges and temptations come. He explains that proceeding these challenges there…
By: Kristy Newport on October 26, 2022
The morning I left on my trip to Africa, I was in a state of near panic. I had an hour and half from my drop off at the airport curbside until I needed to get to the gate where my plane would be waiting to take me to Newark, New Jersey. I did not…
By: Sara Taylor Lattimore on October 26, 2022
Stories of heroes surround us from history to pop culture to the neighbor next door. The stories of heroes who have done monumental things and changed the course of the world to stories of heroes who overcame a personal struggle. In the book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the reader finds compilation of a…
By: Michael Simmons on October 26, 2022
Nassim Taleb centers his book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder around the base concept that individuals and systems must pursue something beyond resiliency in the face of adversity. He proposes that we must become antifragile, and that there are three modes which all forms can take: fragile, robust, anti-fragile. Taleb writes, “[…] the fragile…
By: David Beavis on October 26, 2022
A crucial decision was before me. The stakes were high. A poor decision would affect the lives of others, not just me. The pressure was on. But everything happened so fast that I did not even realize the pressure was on. In fact, I didn’t have time to think about what would happen if I…
By: Eric Basye on October 26, 2022
Taleb is a Lebanese American statistician, trader, and analyst who also became a well-known author. One book, the Black Swan, came out in 2007 and was touted as one of the most influential books since WWII.[1] I found it helpful to have a rudimentary understanding of The Black Swan as the prologue of Antifragile suggests…
By: Andy Hale on October 26, 2022
“Who wants to go through pain in order to come out stronger on the other side?” I can almost hear my high school coaches screaming it in my ear as they pushed us to train harder, run faster, and push ourselves further. While I don’t endorse the toxic masculinity that typically comes with male-driven athletics,…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on October 25, 2022
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, author and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman brings together decades of his research, along with discoveries of other psychologists and economists, to present his findings on how human beings think. In particular, he highlights his idea that the human brain utilizes two systems in our thinking processes that affect our…
By: Laura Fleetwood on October 23, 2022
Is there a formula for the human experience? Author and professor, Joseph Campbell believed that there was and he described it in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this work, Campbell combined his extensive knowledge of world-wide mythology with modern (at the time) psychology to theorize and describe a monomyth that all…
By: Daron George on October 22, 2022
In his book Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about how there is a monomyth or a hero’s journey motif in all of mythology. The hero’s journey is a cycle “that begins and ends in the hero’s ordinary world but the quest pasts through an unfamiliar special world[1]“. Along this journey, there are some…
By: Audrey Robinson on October 22, 2022
I graduated high school as an agnostic, believing God’s existence could not be proved or disproved. During my last year of high school and throughout my years in undergraduate school, I buried myself in mythology. As an English Literature major in undergraduate school, I enjoyed reading the Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Inferno as…
By: Dr. Michael O'Neill on October 22, 2022
Prior to completing Joseph Campbell’s, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I experienced an epiphany. I felt as if I had read this book many times. I knew I had been here before somehow though it was my first time through this book. Why did it feel so familiar? Was this a spiritual reaction? A…
By: Denise Johnson on October 21, 2022
I moved into my place in Sequim nearly a year ago, and with moving comes the seemingly endless unpacking. For me, every box was an adventure of new or a rediscovery of a different life. Some boxes revealed my life before I had a passport, while others were filled with treasures from previous generations. One…
By: Greg McMullen on October 21, 2022
How to Read Numbers brings great insight on how misleading and dangerous numbers and statistics can be and how to spot them.[1] In our society today, we have never had so much information available to us, but never had so much confusion on who or what to believe. In this time of Covid in the…
