Black Swans: Stories

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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. Easterbrook, Gregg (April 22, 2007). "Possibly Maybe". The New York Times . Retrieved December 20, 2020. I didn't find him as arrogant as others said he is (try Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, now that's arrogance), mainly because of his intelligence, and humor which made me snort from the beginning to the end. Yes, he's trashing some celebrities' statements in the field, but the way he does it is quite witty and hilarious (albeit not that nice). The combination of the 2 sets of factors above means that: humans are terrible at prediction, yet we keep making predictions without realizing how frequently we’re off the mark. Taleb calls this the “scandal of prediction”. If you see an ice cube sitting on a table you can predict the future: it will melt into a little puddle of water. But if you see a puddle on the table, and that's all you see, there could be a thousand stories of what it is and how it came to be there. The correct explanation may be 1001--or one which will never be found.

The ideas are interesting. Many are quite compelling. But it really seems Taleb's main point is "everyone else is an idiot." It seems the details why are secondary to that point.

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Chapter four brings together the topics discussed earlier into a narrative about a turkey before Thanksgiving who is fed and treated well for many consecutive days, only to be slaughtered and served as a meal. Taleb uses it to illustrate the philosophical problem of induction and how past performance is no indicator of future performance. [14] He then takes the reader into the history of skepticism. 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 a contradiction; this book is a story, and I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives.... You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. [6] Part one: Umberto Eco's antilibrary, or how we seek validation [ edit ] The world is not fair. Unfairness and inequality are no epiphenomena but part and parcel of reality.

Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. 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 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”. Massage therapist,” for example, is a “nonscalable” profession. There is an upper limit on how many clients you can see—there’s only so much time in a day, and therapists’ bodies fatigue—and thus there’s only so much income you can expect from that profession. This is a book that raises a number of very important questions, but chief among them is definitely the question of how the interplay between a good idea and an insufferable author combine to effect the reading experience?Interesting how the author growing up in Lebanon, tipping from a peaceful equilibrium into civil war, tells his story of the world disregarding improbable events through oversimplification and overreliance on the bell curve Fascinating storytelling on a potentially dull narrative in respect to psychological challenges of humans to deal with highly improbable events. Imagine you put ten people in a room. Even if one of those people is Shaquille O’Neal, the average height in the room is likely to be pretty close to the human average (Mediocristan). If one of those people is Jeff Bezos, however, suddenly the wealth average changes drastically (Extremistan). The Unreliability of “Experts” They compel human beings to explain why they happened—to show, after the fact, that they were indeed predictable. Anybody who has read Richard Dawkins will be familiar with the arrogance with which Taleb states his claims and dismisses the thinking of others. It is almost enough to make one toss the book away.

Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable." Except when it's not. We are social animals" - how true is this statement! I never realized this until I worked more than a year from home. I have always considered myself somewhat antisocial, but I was proved wrong. When I returned to the office, I felt like I was in vacation, and this feeling didn't left me yet. And I don't have problems at home, it's just that I never realize how much I missed my colleagues, friends, our jokes and interactions. Above statement has a continuation: "hell is other people" - also true, but some of them can be heaven too: a sparkling conversation, a good joke, a meaninful look, a kind gesture, a shared moment - all these can make someone feel good for a long time.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. 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.. Once upon a time there was a clever young financial professional called Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Of Lebanese - or, as he preferred, Levantine - descent but working in New York, he was an option trader and quantative analyst. Mistrusting the "bell-curve" models used by many financial institutions to mitigate risk, he wrote a book called Fooled by Randomness about the delusions of control and reliability under which labour much of Wall Street, many other businesses - and, indeed, individual human beings.