Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Black Swan (2010)
Niet bepaald een makkelijk leesbaar boek, maar het zet zeker aan tot nadenken. De auteur beargumenteerd dat het pragmatisme van Fat Tony bruikbaarder kan zijn dan de wetenschappelijke kennis van dr. John.
You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.
We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events; we attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control.
The speculator George Soros, when making a financial bet, keeps looking for instances that would prove his initial theory wrong. This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one’s ego.
Triangles, squares, circles, and the other geometric concepts that made many of us yawn in the classroom may be beautiful and pure notions, but they seem more present in the minds of architects, design artists, modern art buildings, and schoolteachers than in nature itself.
I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong.
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.
Most people, alas, walk too fast, mistaking walking for exercise, not understanding that walking is to be done slowly, at such pace that one forgets one is walking.
A complex domain is characterized by the following: there is a great degree of interdependence between its elements, both temporal (a variable depends on its past changes), horizontal (variables depend on one another), and diagonal (variable A depends on the past history of variable B). As a result of this interdependence, mechanisms are subjected to positive, reinforcing feedback loops, which cause ‘fat tails’.