Thread by @SJosephBurns

Ten lessons from “The Black Swan” by N.N. Taleb:

A Thread 🧵

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors,but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable. Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy & action

“It is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.”

Beware of bias.

“The reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.”

“You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.”

“Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.”

“Everything studied about social life focuses on the “normal,” particularly with “bell curve” methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty.”

“It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations.”

“Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.”

“This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.”

“An ad hominen attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.”