Quotes from Black Swan
If you hear a prominent economist using the word equilibrium or normal distribution don’t argue with him just ignore him or try to put a rat down his shirt
I don't know whether god exists but i know i have nothing to earn from being an atheist if he doesn't exist where as i have plenty to lose if he does hence this justifies my belief in god
In the end, we are being driven by history
We can easily narrow down the reasons we can't figure out whats going on. There epistemic arrogance, how people are fooled by reduction and finally flawed tool of inference
For an event to be a black swan it doesn't just have go be rare or wild. It has to be unexpected it has to lay outside the tunnel of our possibilities.
Opportunities are rare, much rarer than you think.
Many people don’t realize they’re getting a lucky break in life when they get it
Let governments predict, it makes officials feel better about what they say
Its not a good idea to trust corporations with matters such as rare events because the performance of these executives isn’t observable in the short them so they gain the system to get rewards
Markets arent good predictors of wars, no one in particular is a good predictor of anything
Do not waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists except to play pranks on them
No philosophy could be effective unless it took account of our deeply grain imperfections
I believe that you can be dead certain over something and ought to be so you can be more confident about disconfirmation than confirmation
Some truths only hit children
In peoples minds the relationship between the past and future doesn't learn from the relationship between past and the past previous to it
When we think about tomorrow we dont frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday or the day before yesterday. Due to this we fail to learn the difference between our past predictions and subsequent outcomes
An initial advantage follows someone through their entire life.
Zip of law: you use the current words based on how often you used them in the past. The more you use the words, the more you will use them.
The long tail is dominated by several small guys each specialized in their own domain.
The mainstream is dominated by a few giant actors.
Globalization, because it connects everything to everything, makes possible a global collapse. It reduced volatility and gives the impression of stability, but what it does really is creating devastating Black Swans.
The merging of banks makes financial crises less likely, but deadlier.
Be human. Accept that being human comes with a volume of biases and reflexes inherent to who we are. This may prevent us from predicting well, but this is who we are.
Don't rank beliefs and predictions by their plausibility, but according to how much harm they could make.
Small failures are necessary in life.
Likewise, dictatorships that appear stable are more at risk than democracies that aren't, like Italy.
Someone with epistemic humility will doubt his own knowledge until exhaustion.
There is an asymmetry between the past and the future which is too fuzzy for us to imagine.
We imagine that the solutions to our problems of today are definitive solutions, without imagining that people in the past also had definitive solutions.
We laugh at people in the past, without realizing that people in the future will laugh at us.
It's not that we mispredict, but that we have a hard time learning from our past mistakes.
In theory, randomness is an intrinsic property. In practice, randomness is incomplete information, called opacity.
Everything invented was invented out of randomness. Someone searched for something and found something else (you look for India and find America).
What is more striking is that people that found these inventions often did not realize how big they were - nor did their contemporaries.
Forecasters don't predict the change brought by technology and science, but these changes are also slower than expected. Watson, IBM founder, said the world would not need more than a few computers.
The church didn't care much for Galileo.
Darwin's paper, upon being received, wasn't deemed interesting nor revolutionary.
Engineers make tools that seemingly do nothing, until they lead to discoveries which lead to other discoveries.
Human beings are consistently overconfident about how much they know.
People tend to underestimate severely the probability of a future Black Swan.
Professional forecasters are often more affected than others by these biases.
The processing of additional input tends to make them more overconfident but not more accurate.
In Black Swan prone environments, experts such as stockbrokers and economists exhibit no more forecasting ability than simple extrapolations. They tend to herd and make lots of excuses for inaccuracies.
Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we Know, and underestimate uncertainty