Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.
Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager. Why do they do so? Because they accept that this is what people should do with their savings, because “experts” tell them so. The doubt their own sense, but not for a second do they doubt their automatic purchases in the stock market.
It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.
I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.
If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.
Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.
We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.
We flipped a coin to see who was going to pay for the meal. I lost and paid. He was about to thank me when he abruptly stopped and said that he paid for half of it probabilistically.
The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.
When the person is highly intelligent, he can astonish you with the most far-fetched, yet completely plausible interpretations of the most innocuous remark. If.
Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause.
Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-deceit machines.
Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.
The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.
The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.
Mathematics is not just a “numbers game”, it is a way of thinking.
Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.
Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its.
We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it – particularly in intellectual life. The.