How to spot a phony

"it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity." - page 277

ludic fallacy - "the attributes of the uncertainty we face in real life have little connection to the sterilized ones we encounter in exams and games" - page 125

"so when you hear "expers" presenting the problems of uncertainty in terms of subatomic particles, odds are that the expert is a phony." - page 287

Apparently there is a greater uncertainty principle in quantum physics that states that "one cannot measure certain pairs of values, such as the position and momentum of particles." Your precision is limited.

Nassim's argument is that, although the particles cannot be pinned down, "these uncertainties are very small and very numerous, and they average out!"

In other words, they lie within Mediocristan and therefore, any particular measurement attributed to the position of a particle has relatively no impact on the object at stake. This uncertainty can be ruled out as insignificant towards the greater scientific claims.

Side note on philosophers:
"These people are professionally employed in the business of questioning what we take for granted; they are trained to argue about the existence of god(s), the definition of truth, the redness of red, the meaning of meaning, the difference between semantic theories of truth, conceptual and nonconceptual representations...Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager." - 290

Why the 80/20 can be the 50/01.

This metaphor started when Vilfredo Pareto made the observation that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. People use it today to describe that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people, or 80% worth of effort contributes to 20% of the results. - page 235

Nassim Nicholas Taleb stetches this claim to say that this statement is the equivalent of saying 50% of the work is done by 1% of the workers. You can break down the 20% and observe that only a handful of workers deliver the "lion's share" of the results.

Whether or not I agree with this, the inequality that exists in any hierarchical society puts strain on only a handful of "outliers". His point is emphasized in later chapters when he attacks the Gaussian bell curve. Working with independent, equal outcomes (heads/tails ie) produces such a bell curve. But as soon as one considers the unequal fragility of other natural phenomena, the entire notion of a standard deviation, and all subsequent, statistical measures or risk fails. We enter the Platonic fold, the area where our representation of reality ceases to apply.

It would be interesting to talk about this during a statistics course.

Robustness to error

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - "The most severe mistake made in the interpretation of my Black Swan is to try to define an "Objective Black Swan" that would be invariant in the eyes of all observers." -Prologue xxiii

This phrase is a life saver. It says, 'Don't worry about the future'.

A Black Swan is an event with the following triplet characteristics: rarity, extreme impact and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.