Fooled by randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Se întâmplă rareori să dai peste o carte care nu conține foarte multe informații utile dar conține o idee. Doar atât! Poate părea puțin sau foarte mult dar nu sunt multe cărți care să împingă către cititor o idee care să-i modifice modul de gândire, care să-i ofere (daca cititorul este potrivit) o nouă perspectivă pe care o poate adăuga la cele deja existente, pentru a privi lumea din jurul lui dintr-o perspectivă personală puternic imbogățită.

Așa este cartea lui Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Fooled by randomness. Este scrisă într-un stil conversațional și ușor, ușor face cititorul să se uite la un alt aspect al lumii pe care oamenii în general (arată tot autorul) nu au evoluat corespunzător pentru a putea să  interacționeze natural cu el. Aspectul, despre care vorbesc, se referă la informația aleatoare și la toate lucrurile aleatoare, haotice existente în lume.

Cartea este presărată cu tot felul de exemple care arată că statistica este înțeleasă prost de cele mai multe ori și în unele cazuri consecințele sunt dezastruoase. Deasemeni autorul arată cum media din zilele noastre produce foarte mult zgomot astfel încât informația utilă devine irelevantă, oferind încă un motiv pentru a sta departe de televizoare, radiouri și știri.

Faptul că autorul argumentează într-o carte o singură idee și ramificațiile ei poate fi și plictisitor dar pentru Taleb asta este mai mult o excepție decât o regulă. Autorul se mai repetă cumva din când în când în argumente încercând să le explice foarte, foarte bine și asta poate plictisi dar așa cum am spus și mai devreme sunt doar excepții.

Citate din carte, pe care le-am marcat pe Kindle.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

One illustration of a dangerous refusal to consider alternative histories is provided by the interview that media person George Will, a “commentator” of the extensively commenting variety, conducted with Professor Robert Shiller, a man known to the public for his bestselling book Irrational Exuberance, but known to the connoisseur for his remarkable insights about the structure of market randomness and volatility (expressed in the precision of mathematics).

In addition to such problems with the perception of risk, it is also a scientific fact, and a shocking one, that both risk detection and risk avoidance are not mediated in the “thinking” part of the brain but largely in the emotional one (the “risk as feelings” theory).

I remind myself of Einstein’s remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.

I suggest reading the hilarious Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal for an illustration of such practice (I was laughing so loudly and so frequently while reading it on a plane that other passengers kept whispering things about me).

I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans).

Buffett, and I certainly do not see the point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. Something about the praise lavished upon him for living in austerity while being so rich escapes me; if austerity is the end, he should become a monk or a social worker—we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one.

The value of the great Benoit Mandelbrot’s work lies more in telling us that there is a “wild” type of randomness of which we will never know much (owing to their unstable properties).

If your mind operates by series of different disconnected rules, these may not be necessarily consistent with each other, and if they may still do the job locally, they will not necessarily do so globally.

Such violations arise from a far more severe problem: People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.

The famous Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner constructed a box for rats and pigeons, equipped with a switch that the pigeon can operate by pecking. In addition, an electrical mechanism delivers food into the box. Skinner designed the box in order to study more general properties of the behavior of a collection of nonhumans, but it was in 1948 that he had the brilliant idea of ignoring the lever and focusing on the food delivery. He programmed it to deliver food at random to the famished birds. He saw quite astonishing behavior on the part of the birds; they developed an extremely sophisticated rain-dance type of behavior in response to their ingrained statistical machinery.
This brings to mind Rabbi Hillel’s story, when he was asked by someone particularly lazy if Hillel could teach him the Torah while the student was standing on one leg. Rabbi Hillel’s genius is that he did not summarize; instead, he provided the core generator of the idea, the axiomatic framework, which I paraphrase as follows: Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you; the rest is just commentary. It took me an entire lifetime to find out what my generator is. It is: We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.