Black Swan author's rules for living - Boing Boing
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Black Swan author's rules for living - Boing Boing
So I will diverge from Popper in the following. For things to survive, they necessarily need to fare well in the risk dimension, that is, be good at not dying.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
what’s going on. There are: a) epistemic arrogance and our corresponding future blindness; b) the Platonic notion of categories, or how people are fooled by reductions, particularly if they have an academic degree in an expert-free discipline; and, finally c) flawed tools of inference, particularly the Black Swan–free tools from Mediocristan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)
You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Bed of Procrustes
He defines a black swan as an outlier event that has a consequential impact and that humans seek to explain after the fact.
Michael J. Mauboussin • Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
Because of this fear and thirst for order, some human systems, by disrupting the invisible or not so visible logic of things, tend to be exposed to harm from Black Swans and almost never get any benefit.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle
The key is to properly prepare for whatever the system metes out, extreme or not. For the most part, people are scorched not by black swans, the unknown unknowns, but rather by their failure to prepare for gray swans.