Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock – in other words, if you are alive – something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.
It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don’t know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.
The theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite – ex cura theoria nascitur.
Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again;.
Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.
Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.
To grasp the difference between Universal and Particular, consider that some dress better to impress a single, specific person than an entire crowd.
Bad-mouthing is the only genuine, never faked expression of admiration.
We expect places and products to be less attractive than in marketing brochures, but we never forgive humans for being worse than their first impressions.
If you find any reason why you and someone are friends, you are not friends.
Life’s beauty: the kindest act toward you in your life may come from an outsider not interested in reciprocation.
One of the problems I face in life is that whenever I tell people that the Gaussian bell curve is not ubiquitous in real life, only in the minds of statisticians, they require me to “prove it” – which is easy to do, as we will see in the next two chapters, yet nobody has managed to prove the opposite.
Ex cura theoria nascitur.
We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer – our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.
This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation “theory” is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs “chimeras” rather than theories.
Montaigne was neither one of the academics of the Sorbonne nor a professional man of letters, and he was not these things on two planes. First, he was a doer; he had been a magistrate, a businessman, and the mayor of Bordeaux before he retired to mull over his life and, mostly, his own knowledge. Second, he was an antidogmatist: he was a skeptic with charm, a fallible, noncommittal, personal, introspective writer, and, primarily, someone who, in the great classical tradition, wanted to be a man.
At the time of writing, forty-four years later, nothing has happened in economics and social science statistics – except for some cosmetic fiddling that treats the world as if we were subject only to mild randomness – and yet Nobel medals were being distributed.
The fact that you survived is a condition that may weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the shallow notion of “cause.
Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.
In fact, the reason I felt immediately at home in America is precisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations. Once established, an idea or a product is later “perfected” over there. Volatility.