Black Swans: Stories

Product Information

Krishnadas, Devadas (2015). FUSE: Foresight-driven Understanding, Strategy and Execution: Move The Future. Marshall Cavendish. p.163. ISBN 9789814721455.

The confirmation bias and the round-trip fallacy, including how we confuse an absence of evidence with an evidence of absence, and the difference between negative empiricism vs naive empiricism. In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-book sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference—if you add the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to a group of 1,000 people, it will drastically shift the average.

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But by remembering "to know what we don't know" and understanding some of the limitations built into our brains by memory and logical fallacies, we can be prepared to make better decisions than before. Or, at least, we'll have a better grasp on how risky and unknown life is. In scalable professions, you do the same work whether you produce a hundred units or 1000. For a podcast, the effort to reach 10 people might be similar to that of reaching 10 million people. In writing, the same effort is taken to attract one reader, or several hundred million – JK Rowling doesn’t have to write a book each time someone reads it.

Despite (or perhaps because of) their extreme unpredictability, they compel human beings to account for them—to explain after the fact that they were in fact predictable. I continued to think Taleb is more a popularizer than an innovator. But even if so, that's not so shabby. He's trying to revolutionize the way we think, and the more we rehearse that, the better. This read like if Kit from Pretty Woman, or ummm Vivian, played by Julia Robert’s character in the film, wrote stories of their lives and their friends before she meets Richard Gere and goes nowhere.He would like for us to realize our overuse of normal-curve thinking, which makes us minimize risk and have no expectations out of the ordinary: like the turkey whose experience all goes to show how human beings love him and care about him and prove it by feeding him--until Thanksgiving day arrives and he's dinner. The subject of these nine stories by Babitz ( Sex and Rage) is Hollywood: brilliant and beautiful couples who somehow get along; charming yet moody men and their odd needs; and “Eve,” the narrator, who cautiously reveals in herself the vices of a naughty but not really bad girl.”— Publishers Weekly Many of the major turning points in your personal life (e.g. how you met your spouse, your biggest gains and losses) were also likely to have been unexpected, i.e. they didn’t come from standard events on your daily schedule.