密底算盤

見２０１０年２月２５日的都市日報

塔勒布 在 【黑天鵝】的名句

舊年（２００９）在深圳書城買了本"THE BLACK SWAN: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"中譯本，發覺題材非常新鮮，有很多發人心醒的內容。但由於是中譯本，始終不知原著的語句。

上星期，終於在圖書館借到原英文本（２００７年版），現節錄一些我覺得非常有意思的內容，和大家分享：

Page xviii
Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes:

1. Rarity – It lies outside the realm of regular expectations
2. Extreme Impact – It carries an extreme impact
3. Retrospective predictability – Human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Page xix
Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

Why does reading the newspaper actually decrease our knowledge of the world?

Life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks.

Page xx
Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this stage of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not.

Page xxvii
You need a story to displace a story.

Ideas comes and go, stories stay.

Page 3
History doesn't crawl; it jumps.

Page 8
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplets of opacity. They are:

1. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) then the realize;
2. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and
3. the curse of learning - the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories - when they "Platonifiy."

Page 10
These events were unexplainable, but intelligent people thought they were capable of providing convincing explanations for them – after the fact. Furthermore, the more intelligent the person, the better sounding the explanation.

Page 21
(Financial) independence is person-specific: I have always taken aback at the high number of people in whom an astonishingly high income led to additional sycophancy as they became more dependent on their clients and employers and more addicted to making even more money.

Page 25
Publishers now have a theory that "truck drivers who read books do not read books written for truck drivers"
香港有沒有這些出版商呢？

Page 40
The uberphilosopher Bertrand Russell presents a particularly toxic variant of my surprise jolt in his illustration of what people in his line of business call the Problem of Induction.

Page 54
An acronym used in the medical literature is NED, which stands for No Evidence of Disease. There is no such thing as END, Evidence of No Disease. Yet my experience discussing this matter with plenty of doctors even those who publish papers on their results, is that many slip into the round-trip fallacy during conversation.

Page 59 footnote
Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have , the more justified you will feel in your views.

Page 80
One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistics.

Page 96
Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others.

Page 111
Recall the confirmation fallacy: governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact, they engage in what can be labeled as phony "philanthropy," the activity of helping people in a visual and sensational way without taking into account the unseen cemetery of invisible consequences.
咁似香港Ｄ區議員！

Page 112
Our neglect of silent evidence kills people daily. Assume that a drug saves many people from a potentially dangerous ailment, but runs the risk of killing a few, with a net benefit to society. Would a doctor prescribe it? He has no incentive to do so... A life saved is a statistics; a person hurt is an anecdote.

Page 120
My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering that "I don't know."

Page 152
We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our success to our skills, and out failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.

Page 181
The only criticism one might have of Hayek is that he makes a hard and qualitative distinction between social sciences and physics. He shows that the methods of physics do not translate to its social science siblings, and he blames the engineering-oriented mentality for this. But he was writing at the time when physics, the queen of sciences, seemed to zoom into our world. It turns out that even the natural sciences are far more complicated than that. He was right about the social sciences, he is certainly right in trusting hard scientists more than social theorizers, but what he said about the weaknesses of social knowledge applies to all knowledge. All knowledge.

Page 198
Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and appearances fool us.
好有佛理！

Page 222
Luck is the grand equalizer, because almost everyone can benefit from it.

Page 225 footnote
The giant firm J.P. Morgan put the entire world at risk by introducing in the nineties RiskMetrics, a phony method aiming at managing people's risk, causing the generalized use of the ludic fallacy.

Page 226
True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur...I shiver at the thought. I rephrase here: we will have fewer but more severe crises. The rarer the event, the less we know about its odds. It means that we know less and less about the possibilities of a crisis.

希望大家有同感！