The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
The effort is justified only when the stakes are high and when you are particularly keen not to make mistakes. Furthermore, you should know that correcting your intuitions may complicate your life. A characteristic of unbiased predictions is that they permit the prediction of rare or extreme events only when the information is very good. If you exp
... See moreDaniel Kahneman • Thinking, Fast and Slow
Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions caused by bubbles don’t disappear when they pop. The internet craze of the ’90s was the biggest bubble since the crash of 1929, and the lessons learned afterward define and distort almost all
... See morePeter Thiel, Blake Masters • Zero to One
6 discussion topics on which David agrees with Taleb:(1) [p. 286] The sterilized randomness of games does not resemble randomness in real life; thinking it does constitutes the Ludic Fallacy (his neologism). This is exactly right, and mathematicians should pay attention. In my own list of 100 instances of chance in the real world, exactly 1 item is... See more
David Aldous • Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable. Random House, 2007.
Extremes are fairly easy to envisage; anticipating realities that will arise from combinations of inertial developments and unpredictable discontinuities remains an elusive quest.