Black Swans: Stories

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Taleb 2007 PROLOGUE p.xxvii, Taleb call this human tendency the narrative fallacy: we seem to enjoy stories, and we seem to want to remember stories for their own sake.

We tend to easily remember the facts from the past that fit a narrative, while we tend to neglect others that do not appear to play a causal role in the narrative. The simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight, to be far more explainable than it actually was, or is. Wherever there is a market move, the news media feel obligated to give the reason. A December 2003, news headline by Bloomberg News : With the rapid advance of technology—computer chips, cellular networks, the Internet—it stands to reason that our predictive capabilities too are advancing. But consider how few of these groundbreaking advances in technology were themselves predicted. For example, no one predicted the Internet, and it was more or less ignored when it was created.

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I did have issues with some things like: “he was tan but you didn’t want to get too tan less you’re mistaken for the wrong sort in LA and beat over the head by the LAPD.” — I’m paraphrasing but: ma’am… WHAT? Anyway.. you know what.. I’m just gonna continue on.. Everything was about L.A. I'm not from L.A. or even the USA so the L.A. parts really were boring for me, which means 80% of the parts were boring in the end. She talks so much about L.A. about how amazing it is, at least she is aware that the USA is not better than Europe like most think. She really thought she can make her boyfriend move to L.A. because she wouldn't leave it of course! The love for L.A. left me speechless and I'm happy I'm not an American. Statisticians, it has been shown, tend to leave their brains in the classroom and engage in the most trivial inferential errors once they are let out on the streets." Monaco, Alex (September 2, 2020). "9 Books About Your Life That Will Make Your Life better". alexmonaco.net . Retrieved December 20, 2020.

Certain professionals ... don't know more about their subject matter than the general population." Except when they do. I'm not a philosophy fan, nor economics, and read (by choice) very few books on it; almost everyone today is a philosopher and has a lot of advices for the others. However, the author conveys his ideas and expertise in relation to other sciences, which from my PoV, I have found to be very refreshing, reliable, and accurate. I don't pretend to have advanced economics studies (although I have a master's degree in one of its branches but that's when our ways parted) therefore I can't attest or contradict his knowledge in this book, but I do agree with most of his experiences and life advices, because my life led me, more or less, to the same conclusions. Below quotes resonated the most with me: Take discoveries, for example. At any given moment, there are scores of scientists, scholars, researchers, and inventors around the world working diligently to better our lives and increase our knowledge. But what often goes unremarked is that the discoveries with the profoundest impact on our lives are inadvertent— random—rather than the reward for careful and painstaking work. Groarke, Louis (2009). An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing. McGill–Queen's University Press. p.151. ISBN 9780773535954. ISSN 0711-0995.In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-book sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference—if you add the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to a group of 1,000 people, it will drastically shift the average. I continued to think Taleb is more a popularizer than an innovator. But even if so, that's not so shabby. He's trying to revolutionize the way we think, and the more we rehearse that, the better. In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art”. The world is not fair. Unfairness and inequality are no epiphenomena but part and parcel of reality. I read SEX AND RAGE last year and LOVED IT so much I knew I HAD to read this! First off, I’m obsessed with the new cover! And second, I’m still obsessed with Eve’s writing! She is a keen observer and has a way of drawing you in. She writes without judgment, without apologizing, and with so much confidence.

In chapter nine, Taleb outlines the multiple topics he previously has described and connects them as a single basic idea. In chapter thirteen, the book discusses what can be done regarding “epistemic arrogance”, which occurs whenever people begin to think they know more than they actually do. [15] He recommends avoiding unnecessary dependence on large-scale harmful predictions, while being less cautious with smaller matters, such as going to a picnic. He makes a distinction between the American cultural perception of failure versus European and Asian stigma and embarrassment regarding failure: the latter is more tolerable for people taking small risks. He also describes the " barbell strategy" for investment that he used as a trader, which consists in avoiding medium risk investments and putting 85–90% of money in the safest instruments available and the remaining 10–15% on extremely speculative bets. [16] [17] Argument [ edit ] Taleb is actually on to something important if you can tolerate his self-importance enough to filter his verbage to get his good ideas. A central idea is that we assume everything in the world is Gaussian and then we base all our decisions about life on our Gaussian models. But the significant, life-changing, society-changing, events are outside the Gaussian. Things like 9-11. They belong to Extremestan, not Mediocristan.Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud." He rails against misuse of the bell curve by those "who wear dark suits" without ever giving a single god damn specific example. He accuses whole fields of study, like economics, of being rife with mathematical theatrics. If that's true I'd love to read about it. But he offers no evidence for this, and is more guilty of this particular offense than any person I know. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2... There is no question here, Taleb is an erudite and intelligent scholar. His take on epistomology and the scientific method breathe fresh air into the subject and gloss it with some 21st century context.