(The Impact of the highly improbable) by Nicholas Taleb, an essayist principally interested in the problems of uncertainty and knowledge; the “brain child” of Karl Popper – the great critical rationalism philosopher – and empiricist philosopher David Hume. Intersecting philosophy, mathematics, finance, literature and cognitive science, Taleb nevertheless stays down to earth, being (“by day”) a mathematical trader!
 |
Our minds are often deceiving us: assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature; we are hard wired to “find” patterns/logic based on previous experiences. The problem of induction tells us that we cannot always learn from our experiences. Large change comes not uniformly but in unpredictable spurts. The world is largely governed by the the random, the unpredictable! (not by the predictable and the average like many would like to think!) this explains our inability to predict the future… |
We learn from repetition – at the expense of events that have not happened before. Events that are nonrepeatable are ignored before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while).
The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.
Enlightening, funny, almost aggressive, somehow pretentious and even slightly amoral, I found this book just perfect!...