What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.
We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical.
One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.
A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.
I believe that the principal asset I need to protect and cultivate is my deep-seated intellectual insecurity.
Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You.
In a system, the sacrifices of some units – fragile units, that is, or people – are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.
The author cites researcher David Howard’s idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.
The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin. People.
I can find confirmation for just about anything, the.
For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock.
Now for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the role of Black Swans in increasing.
Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution – so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.
Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent – he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.
Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcomes that counts.
We” are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.
We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We.
The best way to prove the arbitrary character of these categories, and the contagion effect they produce, is to remember how frequently these clusters reverse in history. Today’s alliance between Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby would certainly seem puzzling to a nineteenth-century intellectual – Christians used to be anti-Semites and Moslems were the protectors of the Jews, whom they preferred to Christians. Libertarians used to be left-wing. What.
It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied – what physicists call “percolation theory,” in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.
As Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.