dBlackSwan-101

Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of history. By history, I don't just mean those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract buyers). History,
I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority.
... You are in a classroom listening to someone self-important, dignified, and ponderous (but dull), wearing a tweed jacket (white shirt, polka-dot tie), pontificating for two hours on the theories of history... Then you realize that a large part of what he is saying reposes on a simple optical illusion! But this will not make a difference: he is so invested in it that if you questioned his method he would react by throwing even more names at you.
... It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain. We shall call this distortion a bias, i.e., the difference between what you see and what is there.

dBlackSwan-98 !!

Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity. The problem with business people, Nero realized, is that if you act like a loser they will treat you as a loser—you set the yardstick yourself. There is no absolute measure of good or bad. It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.
But you need to remain understated and maintain an Olympian calm in front of others.

dBlackSwan-97-98

I will rapidly present Nero's idea. His premise was the following trivial point: some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina. But you need such stamina.
... You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.

dBlackSwan-91

As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive affect," than on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small "affects" across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.
... Mother Nature destined us to derive enjoyment from a steady flow of pleasant small, but frequent, rewards. As I said, the rewards do not have to be large, just frequent—a little bit here, a little bit there.
... The problem, of course, is that we do not live in an environment where results are delivered in a steady manner—Black Swans dominate much of human history. It is unfortunate that the right strategy for our current environment may not offer internal rewards and positive feedback.
The same property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period rather than have it spread out over a longer one.

dBlackSwan-89-90

We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.
... Even a philosopher the caliber of Hume spent a few weeks sick in bed after the trashing of his masterpiece (what later became known as his version of the Black Swan problem) by some dim-thinking reviewer—whom he knew to be wrong and to have missed his whole point.
... It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.

dBlackSwan-88

Well, the news is that the logical part of our mind, that "higher" one, which distinguishes us from animals, can override our animal instinct, which asks for immediate rewards. So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much. And not all of the time.

dBlackSwan-86-87 !!

Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your "found nothing" as information and publish it...
... Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. "How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication.
Or it may never come.
Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

dBlackSwan-85

... we live in a society where the reward mechanism is based on the illusion of the regular; our hormonal reward system also needs tangible and steady results. It too thinks that the world is steady and well behaved—it falls for the confirmation error. The world has changed too fast for our genetic makeup. We are alienated from our environment.

dBlackSwan-80 !!

Most of our mistakes in reasoning come from using System 1 [the experiential] when we are in fact thinking that we are using System 2 [the cogitative]. How? Since we react without thinking and introspection, the main property of System 1 is our lack of awareness of using it!
Recall the round-trip error, our tendency to confuse "no evidence of Black Swans" with "evidence of no Black Swans"; it shows System 1 at work. You have to make an effort (System 2) to override your first reaction. Clearly Mother Nature makes you use the fast System 1 to get out of trouble, so that you do not sit down and cogitate whether there is truly a tiger attacking you or if it is an optical illusion. You run immediately, before you become "conscious" of the presence of the tiger.
Emotions are assumed to be the weapon System 1 uses to direct us and force us to act quickly. It mediates risk avoidance far more effectively than our cognitive system. Indeed, neurobiologists who have studied the emotional system show how it often reacts to the presence of danger long before we are consciously aware of it—we experience fear and start reacting a few milliseconds before we realize that we are facing a snake.
Much of the trouble with human nature resides in our inability to use much of System 2, or to use it in a prolonged way without having to take a long beach vacation. In addition, we often just forget to use it.

dBlackSwan-71-72

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.
So we pull memories along causative lines, revising them involuntarily and unconsciously. We continuously renarrate past events in the light of what appears to make what we think of as logical sense after these events occur.
By a process called reverberation, a memory corresponds to the strengthening of connections from an increase of brain activity in a given sector of the brain—the more activity, the stronger the memory. While we believe that the memory is fixed, constant, and connected, all this is very far from truth. What makes sense according to information obtained subsequently will be remembered more vividly. We invent some of our memories...
... logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.

dBlackSwan-69

We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is.
And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived "chaos of human experience."
Indeed, many severe psychological disorders accompany the feeling of loss of control of—being able to "make sense" of—one's environment.

dBlackSwan-66-67

Why is it hard to avoid interpretation? It is key that,...brain functions often operate outside our awareness. You interpret pretty much as you perform other activities deemed automatic and outside your control, like breathing.
What makes nontheorizing cost you so much more energy than theorizing? First, there is the impenetrability of the activity. I said that much of it takes place outside of our awareness: if you don't know that you are making the inference, how can you stop yourself unless you stay in a continuous state of alert? And if you need to be continuously on the watch, doesn't that cause fatigue? Try it for an afternoon and see.
... our minds are largely victims of our physical embodiment. Our minds are like inmates, captive to our biology, unless we manage a cunning escape.

dBlackSwan-64

... counter to what everyone believes, not theorizing is an act—that theorizing can correspond to the absence of willed activity, the "default" option. It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And this theorizing disease is rarely under our control: it is largely anatomical, part of our biology, so fighting it requires fighting one's own self. So the ancient skeptics' precepts to withhold judgment go against our nature. Talk is cheap,...

dBlackSwan-63-64

We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters. The first of the problems of human nature that we examine in this section, the one just illustrated above, is what I call the narrative fallacy. (It is actually a fraud, but, to be more polite, I will call it a fallacy.) The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event.
... The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

dBlackSwan-61

And we may have learned things wrong from our ancestors. I speculate here that we probably inherited the instincts adequate for survival in the East African Great Lakes region where we presumably hail from, but these instincts are certainly not well adapted to the present, post-alphabet, intensely informational, and statistically complex environment.

dBlackSwan-60 !

So it seems that we are endowed with specific and elaborate inductive instincts showing us the way. Contrary to the opinion held by the great David Hume, and that of the British empiricist tradition, that belief arises from custom, as they assumed that we learn generalizations solely from experience and empirical observations, it was shown from studies of infant behavior that we come equipped with mental machinery that causes us to selectively generalize from experiences (i.e., to selectively acquire inductive learning in some domains but remain skeptical in others). By doing so, we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.

dBlackSwan-59-60

The following point further illustrates the absurdity of confirmation. If you believe that witnessing an additional white swan will bring confirmation that there are no black swans, then you should also accept the statement, on purely logical grounds, that the sighting of a red Mini Cooper should confirm that there are no black swans.
Why? Just consider that the statement "all swans are white" implies that all nonwhite objects are not swans. What confirms the latter statement should confirm the former. Therefore, the sighting of a nonwhite object that is not a swan should bring such confirmation. This argument, known as Hempel's raven paradox, was rediscovered by my friend the (thinking) mathematician Bruno Dupire during one of our intense meditating walks in London—one of those intense walk-discussions, intense to the point of our not noticing the rain. He pointed to a red Mini and shouted, "Look, Nassim, look! No Black Swan!"

dBlackSwan-59

Sadly, the notion of corroboration is rooted in our intellectual habits and discourse....
... 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.

dBlackSwan-57-58

... Popper's biggest idea was his insight concerning the fundamental, severe, and incurable unpredictability of the world...
... But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.

dBlackSwan-55-56

By a mental mechanism I call naïve empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas, with tools, and fools, anything can be easy to find. You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence. For instance, a diplomat will show you his "accomplishments," not what he failed to do. Mathematicians will try to convince you that their science is useful to society by pointing out instances where it proved helpful, not those where it was a waste of time, or, worse, those numerous mathematical applications that inflicted a severe cost on society owing to the highly unempirical nature of elegant mathematical theories.
Even in testing a hypothesis, we tend to look for instances where the hypothesis proved true. Of course we can easily find confirmation; all we have to do is look, or have a researcher do it for us. I can find confirmation for just about anything, the way a skilled London cabbie can find traffic to increase the fare, even on a holiday.