- Insight: Ad hominem attacks against people are flattering, and indicate that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your ideas.
The Black Swan
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published date: 2007
Category: Philosophy
Index Topics & Notes
- Insight: Embracing amor fati can help you to embrace adversity, mistreatment, even health problems.
- Reference: Seneca is the inspiration for Nietzsche to coin amor fati: to love fate.
- Reference: Tversky and Kahneman experiment (1974) - Wheel of Fortune as an anchor for questions about UN African Nations.
- Example: Sales projections or targets can lead our beliefs about what is possible rather than realistic evaluations.
- Insight: We can find it hard to work without a point of reference.
- Example: University philosophers are in the business of questioning society and all the things we take for granted. However when it comes to their personal finance are happy to allow a portion of their salary be paid into a pension plan and invested in the stock market without question each month, and trust that experts will invest it to their benefit - they have the domain dependence of skepticism.
- Example: Doctors historically have been biased towards action because of the illusion of control (that their actions could make a difference), even if "doing nothing" is the best course of action.
- Insight: We fool ourselves with stories because we have a strong desire to find distinct patterns, which stories provide.
- Insight: We like to summarise and simplify, to reduce complexity - the problem is that we often over-interpret and miss the details that provide truth and reality.
- Insight: The narrative fallacy distorts our mental representation of the world - especially with rare events.
- Insight: We have a tendency to look at sequences of facts and want to weave an explanation into them or find a "logical" link or relationship.
- Insight: Explanations or stories bind facts together - we have a tendency to believe we "understand" when we can find a logical story which makes us feel good.
- Insight: We can avoid the narrative fallacy by framing our explanations or stories as conjectures and then running experiments.
- Insight: Misunderstandings of rare events can be largely attributed to the narrative fallacy.
- Insight: We tend not to be introspective enough to realise that we have less understanding of the world that we think.
- Insight: Stories can be effective in conveying the right message or actual truths.
- Insight: Narratives tend to work in sound bites, are easier to digest which explains the prevalence of stories to explain events or convey ideas.
- Principle: Favour experimentation over stories, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.
- Principle: Make predictions of the future, and review over time.
- Principle: Be open minded rather than sticking to one narrative.
- Insight: "The planning fallacy shows a consistent bias in people's planning ability, even with matters of a repeatable nature - though it is more exaggerated with nonrepeatable events."
- Definition: Things that are scalable.
- Insight: Power laws can be seen across many systems, and the exponent around critical points is the same across systems in the same group, even when many aspects of the systems are different.
- Reference: Willis and Yule - noticed the power laws in biology: the richer in a species a genus is, the richer it will tend to get over time. To note - in Yule's model the species never die out.
- Reference: Vilfredo Pareto - noticed the power laws the distribution of income and wealth.