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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Significance: How did I decide that it was perfect noise? Take a simple analogy. If you engage in a mountain bicycle race with a friend across Siberia and, a month later, beat him by one single second, you clearly cannot quite boast that you are faster than him. You might have been helped by something, or it can be just plain randomness, nothing else. That second is not in itself significant enough for someone to draw conclusions. I would not write in my pre-bedtime diary: Cyclist A is better than cyclist B because he is fed with spinach whereas cyclist B has a diet rich in tofu. The reason I am making this inference is because he beat him by 1.3 seconds in a 3,000 mile race. Should the difference be one week, then I could start analyzing whether tofu is the reason, or if there are other factors.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1) Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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