E number of competitors and thesuccessful the entrepreneur who implements the idea The same applies to the shoe and the book businessesor any kind of entrepreneurship The same applies to scientific theoriesnobody has interest in listening to trivialities The payoff of a human venture is in general inversely proportional to what it is expected to beConsider the Pacific tsunami of December Had it been expected it would not have caused the damage it didthe areas affected would have been less populated an early warning system would have been put in place What you know cannot really hurt you Experts and Empty Suits The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history given the share of these events in the dynamics of events But we act as though we are able to predict historical events or even wore as if we are able to change the course of history We produce thirty year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summerour cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors but our absence of awareness of it This is all theworrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts wars are fundamentally unpredictable and we do not know it Owing to this misunderstanding of the casual chains between policy and actions we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorancelike a child playing with a chemistry kit Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs means that certain professionals while believing they are experts are in fact not based on their empirical record they do not knowabout their subject matter than the general population but they are much better at narratingor worse at smoking you with complicated mathematical models They are alsolikely to wear a tieBlack Swans being unpredictable we need to adjust to their existence rather than navely try to predict them There are so many things we can do if we focus on anti knowledge or what we do not know Among many other benefits you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans by maximizing your exposure to them Learning to LearnAnother related human impediment comes from excessive focus on what we do know we tend to learn the precise not the general What did people learn from the episode Did they learn that some events owing to their dynamics stand largely outside the realm of the predictable No Did they learn the built in defect of conventional wisdom No What did they figure out They learned precise rules for avoiding Islamic prototerrorists and tall buildings Many keep reminding me that it is important for us to be practical and take tangible steps rather than to theorize about knowledge The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific The French after the Great War built a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion Hitler just almost effortlessly went around it The French had been excellent students of history they just learned with too much precision They were too practical and exceedingly focused for their own safety We do not spontaneously learn that we dont learn that we dont learn The problem lies in the structure of our minds we dont learn rules just facts and only facts Metarules such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules we dont seem to be good at getting We scorn the abstract we scorn it with passionWhy It is necessary here as it is my agenda in the rest of this book both to stand conventional wisdom on its head and to show how inapplicable it is to our modern complex and increasingly recursive environment But there is a deeper uestion What are our minds made for It looks as if we have the wrong users manual Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect if they were things would be easier for us today but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about itmy counterfactual introspective and hard thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a tiger while his nonthinking but faster reacting cousin would have run for cover Consider that thinking is time consuming and generally a great waste of energy that our predecessors spentthan a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we doexcept of course when we think about it Recursive here means that the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops causing events to be the cause ofevents say people buy a book because other people bought it thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet wide winner take all effects We live in an environment where information flows too rapidly accelerating such epidemics Likewise events can happen because they are not supposed to happen Our intuitions are made for an environment with simpler causes and effects and slowly moving information This type of randomness did not prevail during the PleistoceneA NEW KIND OF INGRATITUDEIt is uite saddening to think of those people who have been mistreated by history There were the potes maudits like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud scorned by society and later worshipped and force fed to schoolchildren There are even schools named after high school dropouts Alas this recognition came a little too late for the poet to get a serotonin kick out of it or to prop up his romantic life on earth But there are evenmistreated heroesthe very sad category of those who we do not know were heroes who saved our lives who helped us avoid disasters They left no traces and did not even know that they were making a contribution We remember the martyrs who died for a cause that we knew about never those no less effective in their contribution but whose cause we were never awareprecisely because they were successful Our ingratitude towards the potes maudits fades completely in front of this other type of thanklessness This is a farvicious kind of ingratitude the feeling of uselessness on the part of the silent hero I will illustrate with the following thought experiment Assume that a legislator with courage influence intellect vision and perseverance manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect and employment on September it imposes the continuously locked bulletproof doors in every cockpit at high costs to the struggling airlines just in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World TradeCenter in New York City I know this is lunacy but it is just a thought experiment I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect courage vision and perseverance this is the point of the thought experiment The legislation is not a popular measure among the airline personnel as it complicates their lives But it would certainly have prevented The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statues in public suares not so much as a uick mention of his contribution in his obituary Joe Smith who helped avoid the disaster of died of complications of liver disease Seeing how superfluous his measure was and how it suandered resources the public with great help from airline pilots might well boot him out of office Vox clamantis in deserto He will retire depressed with a great sense of failure He will die with the impression of having done nothing useful I wish I could go attend his funeral but reader I cant find him And yet recognition can be uite a pump Believe me even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition and that they separate labor from the fruits of labor actually get a serotonin kick from it See how the silent hero is rewarded even his own hormonal system will conspire to offer no rewardNow consider again the events of In their aftermath who got the recognition Those you saw in the media on television performing heroic acts and those whom you saw trying to give you the impression that they were performing heroic acts The latter category includes someone like the New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso who saved the stock exchange and received a huge bonus for his contribution the euivalent of several thousand average salaries All he had to do was be there to ring the opening bell on televisionthe television that we will see is the carrier of unfairness and a major cause of Black Swan blindness Who gets rewarded the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to correct his predecessors faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery Who isvaluable the politician who avoids a war or the one who starts a new one and is lucky enough to win It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we dont know everybody knows that you needprevention than treatment but few reward acts of prevention We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent We humans are not just a superficial race this may be curable to some extent we are a very unfair oneFE IS VERY UNUSUALThis is a book about uncertainty to this author the rare event euals uncertainty This may seem like a strong statementthat we need to principally study the rare and extreme events in order to figure out common onesbut I will make myself clear as follows There are two possible ways to approach phenomena The first is to rule out the extraordinary and focus on the normal The examiner leaves aside outliers andstudies ordinary cases The second approach is to consider that in order to understand a phenomenon one needs to first consider the extremesparticula.
black pdf swan: pdf impact mobile highly pdf improbable mobile The Black pdf Swan: The kindle Swan: The Impact of mobile Black Swan: The pdf Black Swan: The Impact of ebok The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable KindleE number of competitors and thesuccessful the entrepreneur who implements the idea The same applies to the shoe and the book businessesor any kind of entrepreneurship The same applies to scientific theoriesnobody has interest in listening to trivialities The payoff of a human venture is in general inversely proportional to what it is expected to beConsider the Pacific tsunami of December Had it been expected it would not have caused the damage it didthe areas affected would have been less populated an early warning system would have been put in place What you know cannot really hurt you Experts and Empty Suits The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history given the share of these events in the dynamics of events But we act as though we are able to predict historical events or even wore as if we are able to change the course of history We produce thirty year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summerour cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors but our absence of awareness of it This is all theworrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts wars are fundamentally unpredictable and we do not know it Owing to this misunderstanding of the casual chains between policy and actions we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorancelike a child playing with a chemistry kit Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs means that certain professionals while believing they are experts are in fact not based on their empirical record they do not knowabout their subject matter than the general population but they are much better at narratingor worse at smoking you with complicated mathematical models They are alsolikely to wear a tieBlack Swans being unpredictable we need to adjust to their existence rather than navely try to predict them There are so many things we can do if we focus on anti knowledge or what we do not know Among many other benefits you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans by maximizing your exposure to them Learning to LearnAnother related human impediment comes from excessive focus on what we do know we tend to learn the precise not the general What did people learn from the episode Did they learn that some events owing to their dynamics stand largely outside the realm of the predictable No Did they learn the built in defect of conventional wisdom No What did they figure out They learned precise rules for avoiding Islamic prototerrorists and tall buildings Many keep reminding me that it is important for us to be practical and take tangible steps rather than to theorize about knowledge The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific The French after the Great War built a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion Hitler just almost effortlessly went around it The French had been excellent students of history they just learned with too much precision They were too practical and exceedingly focused for their own safety We do not spontaneously learn that we dont learn that we dont learn The problem lies in the structure of our minds we dont learn rules just facts and only facts Metarules such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules we dont seem to be good at getting We scorn the abstract we scorn it with passionWhy It is necessary here as it is my agenda in the rest of this book both to stand conventional wisdom on its head and to show how inapplicable it is to our modern complex and increasingly recursive environment But there is a deeper uestion What are our minds made for It looks as if we have the wrong users manual Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect if they were things would be easier for us today but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about itmy counterfactual introspective and hard thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a tiger while his nonthinking but faster reacting cousin would have run for cover Consider that thinking is time consuming and generally a great waste of energy that our predecessors spentthan a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we doexcept of course when we think about it Recursive here means that the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops causing events to be the cause ofevents say people buy a book because other people bought it thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet wide winner take all effects We live in an environment where information flows too rapidly accelerating such epidemics Likewise events can happen because they are not supposed to happen Our intuitions are made for an environment with simpler causes and effects and slowly moving information This type of randomness did not prevail during the PleistoceneA NEW KIND OF INGRATITUDEIt is uite saddening to think of those people who have been mistreated by history There were the potes maudits like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud scorned by society and later worshipped and force fed to schoolchildren There are even schools named after high school dropouts Alas this recognition came a little too late for the poet to get a serotonin kick out of it or to prop up his romantic life on earth But there are evenmistreated heroesthe very sad category of those who we do not know were heroes who saved our lives who helped us avoid disasters They left no traces and did not even know that they were making a contribution We remember the martyrs who died for a cause that we knew about never those no less effective in their contribution but whose cause we were never awareprecisely because they were successful Our ingratitude towards the potes maudits fades completely in front of this other type of thanklessness This is a farvicious kind of ingratitude the feeling of uselessness on the part of the silent hero I will illustrate with the following thought experiment Assume that a legislator with courage influence intellect vision and perseverance manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect and employment on September it imposes the continuously locked bulletproof doors in every cockpit at high costs to the struggling airlines just in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World TradeCenter in New York City I know this is lunacy but it is just a thought experiment I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect courage vision and perseverance this is the point of the thought experiment The legislation is not a popular measure among the airline personnel as it complicates their lives But it would certainly have prevented The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statues in public suares not so much as a uick mention of his contribution in his obituary Joe Smith who helped avoid the disaster of died of complications of liver disease Seeing how superfluous his measure was and how it suandered resources the public with great help from airline pilots might well boot him out of office Vox clamantis in deserto He will retire depressed with a great sense of failure He will die with the impression of having done nothing useful I wish I could go attend his funeral but reader I cant find him And yet recognition can be uite a pump Believe me even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition and that they separate labor from the fruits of labor actually get a serotonin kick from it See how the silent hero is rewarded even his own hormonal system will conspire to offer no rewardNow consider again the events of In their aftermath who got the recognition Those you saw in the media on television performing heroic acts and those whom you saw trying to give you the impression that they were performing heroic acts The latter category includes someone like the New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso who saved the stock exchange and received a huge bonus for his contribution the euivalent of several thousand average salaries All he had to do was be there to ring the opening bell on televisionthe television that we will see is the carrier of unfairness and a major cause of Black Swan blindness Who gets rewarded the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to correct his predecessors faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery Who isvaluable the politician who avoids a war or the one who starts a new one and is lucky enough to win It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we dont know everybody knows that you needprevention than treatment but few reward acts of prevention We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent We humans are not just a superficial race this may be curable to some extent we are a very unfair oneFE IS VERY UNUSUALThis is a book about uncertainty to this author the rare event euals uncertainty This may seem like a strong statementthat we need to principally study the rare and extreme events in order to figure out common onesbut I will make myself clear as follows There are two possible ways to approach phenomena The first is to rule out the extraordinary and focus on the normal The examiner leaves aside outliers andstudies ordinary cases The second approach is to consider that in order to understand a phenomenon one needs to first consider the extremesparticula.
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