The book is poorly organized. Feels like Uncle Taleb wrote it in more like a stream-of-consciousness mode and packed it to get published. Taleb is blunt, obstuse, and very often right. The Economist even described reading it as as "being trapped in a cab with a cantankerous and over-opinionated driver."

You can read more of my notes if you click.

My Notes

As per the insights, the book talks why people without "skin in the game" (without consequences for their actions) screw everything up. Then the books goes onto explain the variations of this core idea in the forms of overlooked assymetries in our society.

I liked the Via Negativa concept: actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen feedback loops, making the entire system unfamiliar to its owner. In short, substracting is safer than adding, or demolishing can sometimes be the best way of building. Many insights to glean into startups and project management.

There are some overlaps of the same Via Negativa framework I saw among other thinkers

• Durov runs an entire 30 billion USD company with only 44 core engineers. "Sometimes firing one developer from the project can speed up the ship" - from the Lex Fridman Podcast.
• Henry Ford also employed a similar "focus only on what is necessary and strip away any form of noise" in his car manufacturing. Hit billions. Wrote about it in hsi book.
• On Writing Well author Zinsser also says, "strip away all that fancy jargon and you will find you, your voice."

I also (unaware) ended up applying the same framework at Agora: strip away all that college application nuance--only focus on teaching creative writing. Though, much in a basic form.