[fr] Notes de lecture de "The Black Swan", sur l'impact des événements hautement improbables.
One of the things I did yesterday during my time offline was read a sizeable chunk of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
It’s a fascinating read. (Thanks again to Adam Hill for saying I should read it.) I just find myself a little frustrated that I can’t effortlessly copy-paste quotes from the book into a text file or my Tumblr as I read. (And no, I wouldn’t want to be reading this online. I like books. They just lack a few features. Like searchability, too.)
Anyway, I’ve been twittering away while I read, and here are a few things I noted. These are not exact quotes, but paraphrases. Consider them “reading notes.” (And then a few me-quotes, hehe…).
- oh, one quote I did copy to Tumblr (check it, if you’re lucky, you might find more quotes!)
- Finding Taleb’s concepts of Mediocristan and Extremistan fascinating and insightful.
- Probably in Extremistan: number of contacts, length of relationships? Not sure.
- High-impact, low-probability events (Black Swans) are by nature unpredictable. Now apply that to the predator problem.
- We confuse ‘no evidence of possible Black Swans’ with ‘evidence of no possible Black Swans’ and tend to remember the latter.
- ‘No evidence of disease’ often interpreted as ‘Evidence of no disease’, for example.
- Taleb: in testing for a hypothesis, we tend to look for confirmation and ignore what would invalidate it.
- Interesting: higher dopamine = greater vulnerability to pattern recognition (less suspension of disbelief)
- So… Seems we overestimate probability of black swans when we talk about them. Terrorism, predators, plane crashes… And ignore others.
- Anecdotes sway us more than abstract statistical information. (Taleb)
- That explains why personal recommendations have so much influence on our decisions. Anecdotes, rather than more abstract facts or stats. (That’s from me, not him.)
- Journalists according to Taleb: ‘industrial producers of the distortion’
Update: Anne Zelenka wrote a blog post taking the last and, unfortunately, quite incomplete citation as a starting-point. Check my clarification comment on her blog. And here’s the complete quote:
Remarkably, historians and other scholars in the humanities who need to understand silent evidence the most do not seem to have a name for it (and I looked hard). As for journalists, fuhgedaboutdit! They are industrial producers of the distortion. (p. 102)
Update 2: Anne edited her post to take into account my comment and our subsequent discussion. Thanks!