Sublime

One of the most incomprehensible features of a crowd is the tenacity with which the members adhere to erroneous assumptions despite mounting evidence to challenge them.

Fisher wrote in his book Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits:

is essential to arrive at some idea of this ratio in the important ventures of your life. Your career, your marriage if you’re in one, your investments.

aggregating the judgments of an equal number of people who know lots about lots of different things is most effective because the collective pool of information becomes much bigger.

If we knew our fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose combined ability would equal that of all the rest. Life and history do precisely that, with a sublime injustice reminiscent of Calvin’s God.

a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning.

The “above-average” effect is pervasive.

To see how the narrative can lead to a mistake in the assessment of the odds, do the following experiment. Give someone a well-written detective story—say, an Agatha Christie novel with a handful of characters who can all be plausibly deemed guilty. Now question your subject about the probabilities of each character’s being the murderer. Unless she

The less frame