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The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide.
Platonic fold: Boundary where gap between what you know and don't know becomes dangeriously wide.
TOO DULL TO WRITE ABOUT
matters. People in the classroom, not having faced many true situations of decision making under uncertainty, do not realize what is important and what is not—even
What I call the practice of uncertainty can be piracy, commodity speculation, professional gambling, working in some branches of the Mafia, or just plain serial entrepreneurship.
You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read.
Stories are easier to remember and more fun to read.
For reasons I explain in Chapter 5, I call this overload of examples naïve empiricism—successions of anecdotes selected to fit a
story do not constitute evidence.
I stick my neck out and make a claim, against many of our habits of thought, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according to our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated.
Author says world is dominated by the unknown while we focus on the known.
Chapters Map
(Black Swan) leading to the degradation of predictability and the need to be robust to negative Black Swans and exposed to positive ones.
Need to be robust (resiliant) to black swans and exposed to poistive black swans.
* The Idea of Robustness: Why do we formulate theories leading to projections and forecasts without focusing on the robustness of these theories and the consequences of the errors? It is much easier to deal with the Black Swan problem if we focus on robustness to errors rather than improving predictions.
Recursive here means that the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.
Recursive - feedback loops cause snowballs to form.
Likewise, events can happen because they are not supposed to happen.
Events that can't happen can happen because they aren't supposed to happen and we leave ourselves exposed to them.
By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.
You will get more unread books as you get older. the unread books multiply for me based mostly references of books I'm reading
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.
Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.
The black swan comes from the books we haven't read.
and our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical.
the Black Swan problem in its original form: how we tend to generalize from what we see.
I present the three facets of the same Black Swan problem: a) The error of confirmation, or how we are likely to undeservedly scorn the virgin part of the library (the tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge, not our ignorance),
b) the narrative fallacy, or how we fool ourselves with st...
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c) how emotions get in the way of ...
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d) the problem of silent evidence, or the tricks history uses to hid...
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discusses the lethal fallacy of building knowledge from the world of games.
Chapter One THE APPRENTICESHIP OF AN EMPIRICAL SKEPTIC
Everything becomes explainable—Always
ANATOMY OF A BLACK SWAN
The Levantine cities were mercantile in nature; people dealt with one another according to a clear protocol, preserving a peace conducive to commerce, and they socialized quite a bit across communities.
Levantines had been granted Roman citizenship, which allowed Saint Paul, a Syrian, to travel freely through the ancient world.
On Walking Walks
It is one thing to be cosmetically defiant of authority by wearing unconventional clothes—what social scientists and economists call “cheap signaling”—and another to prove willingness to translate belief into action.
I discovered that it is much more effective to act like a nice guy and
be “reasonable” if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage.
“Paradise” Evaporated
a Black Swan, coming out of nowhere, transformed the place from heaven to hell. A fierce civil war began between Christians and Moslems, including the Palestinian refugees who took the Moslem side.
It may be that the invention of gunfire and powerful weapons turned what, in the age of the sword, would have been just tense conditions into a spiral of uncontrollable tit-for-tat warfare.
the war removed much of the crust of sophistication that had made the Levantine cities a continuous center of great intellectual refinement for three thousand years.
The number of cultured people dropped below some critical level. Suddenly the place became a vacuum. Brain drain is hard to reverse, and some of the old refinement may be lost forever.
The Starred Night
that the planets are in something called equilibrium, so we did not have to worry about the stars hitting us unexpectedly. To me, that eerily resembled the stories we were also told about the “unique historical stability” of Lebanon. The very idea of assumed equilibrium bothered me.
HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY
You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what’s inside the box, how the mechanisms work.
This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen.
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity.
the illusion of understanding,
the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact,
the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people,
Nobody Knows What’s Going On
The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.
