When the Barbell Strategy fails

The “barbell strategy”, as popularized by Taleb, is incredibly useful in some places while incredibly dangerous in others. Let’s explore where and why it applies, and where and why to avoid it (spoilers: one of them is when studying physics).

The original barbell strategy is the idea that half of your investments should be completely safe (storing money in a bank account or a government bond), while the other half should be very risky (volatile tech stocks, etc.). This way you have asymmetric upside, but without the risk of ruin. If you put everything in the middle, then your returns aren’t very good and you might still get destroyed by a chance turn of the market. The middle looks safe, but there is lots of hidden risk.

This idea has been expanded into many other realms. Marc Andreesen recently said that he reads “old books and twitter, and nothing in between”. The old books are the safe investment - they’ve stood the test of time and are guaranteed to give nice continual “returns” in understanding, while twitter/X gives you incredibly valuable nuggets of real-time information in amongst all the hype and memes. The ”middle” in this case is not just Young Adult romantislop or LitRPG novels, but also all the ”serious“ airport psychology books (proven almost entirely wrong btw). The best case for a new non-fiction book is that it nicely repackages something older - or it captures something really novel that you already saw on Twitter from 8 months ago.

Some more examples of the barbell strategy:

Walking and mobility work + heavy compound lifts
Working a stable W2 + experimental side projects
Deep work blocks + unscheduled time

But it doesn’t work for everything. When coming up with situations in which it does apply, I came up notably short, to the point where I asked Claude to help brainstorm - and then rejected most of its ideas as not really fitting well enough.

Here’s some extreme examples where the barbell strategy would be disastrous:

Following the law (murder one guy and suddenly you’re a guy that murders, not a guy that follows the law 99.99% of the time)
Honesty (same as above)
Sleep schedule
Airplane safety

Less disastrous, but still quite important for my readers, is studying physics.

If you’re trying to pass the AP Physics 1 exam, the “safe investment” is to read a textbook (or use PhysicsGraph!) and do the practice problems. What’s the other end of the barbell? If you wanted to stretch the analogy you could say that watching 3blue1brown-style videos, or doing labs and projects are the “other end of the barbell”, but that’s just doing extra work to try to make the analogy fit. Videos, labs, and projects are not necessary for the goal.

If you’re wanting to do physics research it starts applying again - read textbooks, and read papers at the edge of your field, with nothing in between. But until you get to graduate school (or are doing independent research), the barbell strategy will not apply to your physics studies!

Taleb does specify that it only applies to “Extremistan”, not “Mediocristan”. Extremistan is where one good outcome can pay for hundreds of bad ones, as long as you protect your downside. Mediocristan is where consistent effort of a good enough level pays off. However, no one wants to be in “Mediocristan”, so the phrasing plus natural excitement about a novel idea have led people to apply it in places where it’s not appropriate.

In summary, here are two things you should remember:

Make sure to only apply ideas where they actually make sense, no matter how interesting the idea is
If you’re learning physics, use PhysicsGraph dot com