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The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Last accessed on Friday February 5, 2016

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To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish. The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.

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In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During the Lebanese war, my parents’ house in Amioun and my grandfather’s house in a nearby village were destroyed in just a few hours, dynamited by my grandfather’s enemies who controlled the area. It took seven thousand times longer—two years—to rebuild them. This asymmetry in timescales explains the difficulty in reversing time.)

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People imagine us skeptics and empiricists to be morose, paranoid, and tortured in our private lives, which may be the exact opposite of what history (and my private experience) reports. Like many of the skeptics I hang around with, Hume was jovial and a bon vivant, eager for literary fame, salon company, and pleasant conversation. His life was not devoid of anecdotes. He once fell into a swamp near the house he was building in Edinburgh. Owing to his reputation among the locals as an atheist, a woman refused to pull him out of it until he recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Belief, which, being practical-minded, he did. But not before he argued with her about whether Christians were obligated to help their enemies. Hume looked unprepossessing. “He exhibited that preoccupied stare of the thoughtful scholar that so commonly impresses the undiscerning as imbecile,” writes a biographer.

Note:esther

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Doubting the consequences of an outcome will allow you to remain imperturbable.

Note:dad dont stress

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This asymmetry is immensely practical. It tells us that we do not have to be complete skeptics, just semiskeptics.

Note:no evdence god exists des not ean he definiteky does not

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Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of possible uncertain states (i.e., by reducing the space of the unknown).

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Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognize the hydrant much faster. Moral? The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

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Like most commodity traders, Brian is a man of incisive and sometimes brutally painful realism.

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