“Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured,” “unintellectual,” and “poor in math” because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows call “high culture”—like knowledge of Goethe’s inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting. Yet the person making these statements is likely to be addicted to his iPod, wear blue jeans, and use Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his PC, with some Google searches here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And globalization has allowed the United States to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable components and assign them to those happy to be paid by the hour. There”
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities--”
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the “normal,” particularly with “bell curve” methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.”
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.”
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*”
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Priya’s 2025 Year in Books
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