Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, r. May & Aug. 2024

 Page 4 Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health. Most of us are healthy most of the time, and most of our judgments and actions are appropriate most of the time.

Page 6 The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

Page 12 This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Page 41 The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people.

Page 46 Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

Page 55 The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

Page 106 Characteristics of System 1 generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions

Page 126 My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table. The psychologists Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler proposed more subtle ways to resist the anchoring effect in negotiations. They instructed negotiators to focus their attention and search their memory for arguments against the anchor. The instruction to activate System 2 was successful. For example, the anchoring effect is reduced or eliminated when the second mover focuses his attention on the minimal offer that the opponent would accept, or on the costs to the opponent of failing to reach an agreement. In general, a strategy of deliberately “thinking the opposite” may be a good defense against anchoring effects, because it negates the biased recruitment of thoughts that produces these effects.

Page 169 The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. Reliance on the affect heuristic is common in politically charged arguments. The positions we favor have no cost and those we oppose have no benefits. We should be able to do better.

Page 191 Similarly, if you use childhood achievements to predict grades in college without regressing your predictions toward the mean, you will more often than not be disappointed by the academic outcomes of early readers and happily surprised by the grades of those who learned to read relatively late. The corrected intuitive predictions eliminate these biases, so that predictions (both high and low) are about equally likely to overestimate and to underestimate the true value. You still make errors when your predictions are unbiased, but the errors are smaller and do not favor either high or low outcomes.

Page 220 The main point of this chapter is not that people who attempt to predict the future make many errors; that goes without saying. The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable. The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

Page 256 Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

Page 281 And you also know that your attitudes to gains and losses are not derived from your evaluation of your wealth. The reason you like the idea of gaining $100 and dislike the idea of losing $100 is not that these amounts change your wealth. You just like winning and dislike losing—and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning.

Page 302 Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.

Page 316 When Amos and I began our work on prospect theory, we quickly reached two conclusions: people attach values to gains and losses rather than to wealth, and the decision weights that they assign to outcomes are different from probabilities.

Page 338 I sympathize with your aversion to losing any gamble, but it is costing you a lot of money. Please consider this question: Are you on your deathbed? Is this the last offer of a small favorable gamble that you will ever consider? Of course, you are unlikely to be offered exactly this gamble again, but you will have many opportunities to consider attractive gambles with stakes that are very small relative to your wealth. You will do yourself a large financial favor if you are able to see each of these gambles as part of a bundle of small gambles and rehearse the mantra that will get you significantly closer to economic rationality: you win a few, you lose a few.

Page 339 The combination of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse. Individual investors can avoid that curse, achieving the emotional benefits of broad framing while also saving time and agony, by reducing the frequency with which they check how well their investments are doing. Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains.

Page 342 The ultimate currency that rewards or punishes is often emotional, a form of mental self-dealing that inevitably creates conflicts of interest when the individual acts as an agent on behalf of an organization.

Page 344 To implement this rational behavior, System 2 would have to be aware of the counterfactual possibility: “Would I still drive into this snowstorm if I had gotten the ticket free from a friend?” It takes an active and disciplined mind to raise such a difficult question.

Page 367 Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.

Page 371 If the person who lost tickets were to ask for my advice, this is what I would say: “Would you have bought tickets if you had lost the equivalent amount of cash? If yes, go ahead and buy new ones.”

Page 374 “They will feel better about what happened if they manage to frame the outcome in terms of how much money they kept rather than how much they lost.” “Let’s reframe the problem by changing the reference point. Imagine we did not own it; how much would we think it is worth?” “Charge the loss to your mental account of ‘general revenue’—you will feel better!”

Page 381 Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

Page 390 Many point out that they would not send either themselves or another amnesic to climb mountains or trek through the jungle—because these experiences are mostly painful in real time and gain value from the expectation that both the pain and the joy of reaching the goal will be memorable.

Page 396 Some aspects of life have more effect on the evaluation of one’s life than on the experience of living. Educational attainment is an example. More education is associated with higher evaluation of one’s life, but not with greater experienced well-being. Indeed, at least in the United States, the more educated tend to report higher stress. On the other hand, ill health has a much stronger adverse effect on experienced well-being than on life evaluation. Living with children also imposes a significant cost in the currency of daily feelings—reports of stress and anger are common among parents, but the adverse effects on life evaluation are smaller.

Page 396 Can money buy happiness? The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being.

Page 397 higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. There is suggestive evidence in favor of this idea: priming students with the idea of wealth reduces the pleasure their face expresses as they eat a bar of chocolate!

Page 397 Life satisfaction is not a flawed measure of their experienced well-being, as I thought some years ago. It is something else entirely.

Page 411 Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not. Econs are rational by this definition, but there is overwhelming evidence that Humans cannot be. An Econ would not be susceptible to priming, WYSIATI, narrow framing, the inside view, or preference reversals, which Humans cannot consistently avoid.

The Brothers K by David J. Duncan, r. May 2016

p. 17 And his smile fell from his face like ice cream off a little kid's cone.

p. 64 His dad's an up-and-coming preacher, so Micah spends his whole life stuck in church camps, church schools, church basements. And since all he hears there is how good and holy the Church is and how cruel and filthy the Outside World is, and since he hates his good and holy basement life, he assumes he'd rather be in the Outside World, and so tries to prove how much he knows about it - by acting cruel and talking filthy.

p. 125 ...the reason my father did not wax lyrical about warm spring nights or baseball fever was that he wasn't the poet, he was the topic. Papa didn't present the case for baseball, he represented it, and to stand in front of him wondering if the scent of mown grass and plum blossoms made him think of baseball was like asking a bloodstained man with a fly rod and ten dead trout on a stringer if he ever thought about fishing.

p. 152 There are, as far as I can tell, just two types of people who can bear to watch baseball without talking: total non-baseball fans and hard-core players. The hard-core player can watch in silence because his immersion is so complete that he feels no need to speak, while the persona non baseball can do it because his ignorance is so vast that he sees nothing worthy of comment. For the rest of us, watching any sort of baseball-like proceeding without discussing what we're seeing is about as much fun as drinking non-alcoholic beer while fishing without a hook.

p. 179 "You boys are four very different animals, and the older you get, the more unalike you'll get. So I want you to start respecting your differences here and now."

p. 181 "She wants to share her heaven with her kids. Do you understand? She wants the best for you, but gets it mixed up at times with what was once best for her. So it's hard for her to stand back. Hard to let go. Hard  to let you each seek your own sorts of heavens. Understand?"

p. 227: In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ's power to bestow salvation, second, that forcing us to memorize and regurgitate a few of their favorite Bible phrases and attend their church is that salvation, and third, that any discomfort, frustration, anger, or disagreement we express in the face of their moronic barrages is due not to their astounding effrontery but to our sinfulness? ... Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put it this way: "Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right - for let them doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Someone has to do it."

p. 270 One of the great charms of professional baseball used to be that it provided us statistics-lovers with a kind of Mathematical Wildlife Refuge - a nationwide network of painstakingly calibrated and manicured playing fields wherein statistics could frolic about unmolested, appearing to those of us who admired them to possess accurate, consistent, and at times even mythic meanings.

p. 276 Thus did my siblings and I learn one of the hard lessons of life: the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.

p. 304 Obviously, I question his calculations: to slough off half a self in hopes of finding a whole one is not my idea of good math.

p. 319 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What no social, political, or religious problem will ever manage to take into account is the people's inevitable love and reverence for what mankind really does hold in common. The earth and the hearth fire. The rivers and sky. The richness and complexity of human relationships, and of the changing seasons. The divinity they believe infuses it all. This is why revolutions begin with justifiable unrest, and may rise to open rebellion, but also why, after turning to violence, they rapidly begin to subside."

p. 320 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous, or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to 'idealize' a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such 'idealists' choose, their visions always share one telling charecteristic: in their utopias, heavens, or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength. In a 'religiously pure' community, for example, any puritanical blockhead who was unable to love his neighbor or turn the other cheek can suddenly sweep the entire world into the category of 'Damned' and pass himself off as 'Saved.' Similarly, in Mr. Chance's revolutionary army, the rudeness and petulance of a mere spoiled brat can suddenly pass itself off as passionate concern for Vietnamese peasants or the black Southern poor."

p. 322 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What I would wish for the so-called Counterculture is that it be more than a disenfranchised tribe whose sole rite of initiation is disillusionment with the existing culture, as symbolized by one's parents, the Pentagon, and the Ku Klux Klan. I would wish that its members accept neither my tweed coat nor Mr. Chance's knee patches as a sign of authority, but judge us both by the cogency of our thoughts. I would wish that rather than fancy itself 'counter' to the culture, its compassionate ideas would take root in the land and people, and begin to transform them both. But if Mr. Chance does in fact speak for his 'culture,' I fear this breath of fresh air, this grass-roots movement in which even old men like myself have placed such hope, will soon become an empty excuse for youthful effrontery, a faddish cloak for self-indulgence and drug dealers, and a primary cause of a fascistic political and cultural backlash."

p. 329 The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in the long run. - Henry David Thoreau

p. 346 "You call hellfire a virtue?" Hank roared in rebuttal. "I call hellfire a threat," Natasha said, "and 'love thy neighbor' a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats."

p. 429 There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some - like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree - quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground. Peter had one of these kinds of problems.

p. 432 (Everett:) "But there's always something missing. Having things missing, even indispensible things, is a fact of life, don't you think? And life goes on anyhow. Except for the missing parts. Which were indispensable, so of course it goes on all out of whack."

p. 466 Then, by accident, [Everett] glanced too high, and noticed that his buttercups had also begun to list. They were no longer standing the way he'd stood them, no longer engaged in the glorious basking that overwhelmed him on the headland. They were leaning toward the light now, craning toward it. He'd been dead wrong about the blitheness. The buttercups now seemed to know - to understand with that purely physical knowledge that all living things possess - that something was wrong. Their craning was like a cry: they were calling out with all the body language they possessed for a life or a place they had no minds with which to remember. Confused by the intensity of his feelings, Everett tried to defy them: he gave the can a half twist, spinning the blossoms away from the window, then stepped outside and went about his morning chores.

p. 515 And when the night breeze eased into the spruces, when he heard the big trees begin to pronounce the nine-hour-long word that meant Warm Full-Mooned Spring Night, even another instant of waiting was suddenly unthinkable.

p. 516 But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world.

p. 517 I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G. Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it's so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love, and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery, and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G. Q.'s thesis that pro ballplayers - little as some of them may want to hear it - are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

p. 621 Because what is an offering, really? What can human beings actually give to God? What can they give to each other even? And what sorts of receptacle can contain these gifts? Work camps and insane asylums, Indian trains and church pews, bullpens and little blue boxes ... Who belongs in what? When do they belong there? Who truly gives what to whom? These were questions we were all struggling to answer not in words, but with our lives.

p. 641 [Peter's] experience of the inner life, he tells the kids, is more like a blind man learning to get around a dark but beautiful city with one of those long, sensitive canes. Going into wilderness alone is simply a way of getting your cane.

Too long to quote: pp. 210-211, p. 380, p. 625

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, r. Apr. 2015

p. 1 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 accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

p. 11 History and societies do not crawl. They makes jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Ye we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.

p. 48 Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar.

p. 94 A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together - which is better than being ostracized alone. If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.

p. 119 My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.

p. 133 I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs…. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid tunneling.

p. 144 Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to process them.

p. 187 Always remember that "R-square" is unfit for Extremistan; it is only good for academic promotion.

p. 193 …the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we project it as another yesterday.

p. 194 …an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions - yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day.

p. 198 History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help with the future, without some caution…. The empirical doctor's approach to the problem of induction was to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much - but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that.

p. 210 Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decision around that.

p. 211 This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.

p. 217 Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business).

p. 227 But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! The superstars will always be there…. The disproportionate share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than the unequal distribution of wealth - unsettling because, unlike the income gap, no social policy can eliminate it.

p. 241 I always remember my father's injunction that in medio stat virtus, "virtue lies in moderation."

p. 255 My erudite and polymathic father liked the company of extremely cultured Jesuit priests. I remember these Jesuit visitors occupying my chair at the dining table. I recall that one had a medical degree and a PhD in physics, yet taught Aramaic to locals in Beirut's Institute of Eastern Languages. His previous assignment could have been teaching high school physics, and the one before that was perhaps in the medical school. This kind of erudition impressed my father far more than scientific assembly-line work.

p. 256 The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation…. In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.

p. 268 What I am talking about is opacity, incompleteness of information, the invisibility of the generator of the world. History does not reveal its mind to us - we need to guess what's inside of it.

p. 289 Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers like to call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside these subjects.

p. 290 A scholar should not be a library's tool for making another library, as in the joke by Daniel Dennett.

p. 296 I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures - the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts.

p. 297 Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behaviour, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.

p. 297 I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception…. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportion…. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth - remember you are a Black Swan.

p. 300 After a long but soothing lachrymal episode, Yevgenia thought of the characters in the rainy novel of Georges Simenon and Graham Greene. They lived in a state of numbing and secure mediocrity. Second-rateness had charm, Yevgenia thought, and she had always preferred charm over beauty.

p. 307 …almost all academic papers are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students.

p. 312 First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives) - and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances. So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness. The exact opposite of redundancy is naïve optimization.

p. 313 Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have several years of income in cash before taking any personal risk - exactly my barbell idea of Chapter 11, in which one keeps high cash reserves while taking more aggressive risks but with a small portion of the portfolio.

p. 316 To those who say "We have no proof we are harming nature," a sound response is "We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either,"; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.

p. 319 This makes me reflect on the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files. Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive…

p. 319 …people like to go to a precise destination, rather than face some degree of uncertainty, even if beneficial.

p. 323 One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.

p. 326

p. 328 I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress - another barbell, for no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time.

p. 330 So The Black Swan is about human error in some domains, swelled by a long tradition of scientism and a plethora of information that fuels confidence without increasing knowledge. It covers the expert problem - harm caused by reliance on scientific-looking charlatans, with or without equations, or regular noncharlatanic scientists with a bit more confidence about their methods than the evidence warrants. The focus is on not being the turkey in places where it matters, though there is nothing wrong in being a fool where that has no effect.

p. 333 Indeed, the intelligent, curious, and open-minded amateur is my friend. A pleasant surprise for me was to discover that the sophisticated amateur who uses books for his own edification, and the journalist, could understand my ideas much better than professionals. Professional readers, less genuine, either read too quickly or have an agenda.

p. 334 …many readers (say, those who work in forecasting or banking) do not understand that the "actionable step" for them is simply to quit their profession and do something more ethical.

p. 334 …as almost all business books can be reduced to a few pages without any loss of their message and essence; novels and philosophical treatments cannot be compressed.

p. 334 …evolution does not work by teaching, but destroying.

p. 336 For I had undergone a difficult psychological moment, after the publication of The Black Swan, what the French call traversée du désert, when you go through the demoralizing desiccation and disorientation of crossing a desert in search of an unknown destination, or a more or less promised land. I had a rough time, shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" about the hidden risks in the system, and hearing people ignoring the content and instead just criticizing the presentation, as if they were saying "your diction in shouting 'Fire!' is bad." For example, the curator of a conference known as TED (a monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers) complained that my presentation style did not conform to his taste in slickness…

p. 338 When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.

p. 361 It is much more sound to take risks you can measure than to measure the risks you are taking.

p. 362 David's comments also inspired me to focus more on iatrogenics, harm caused by the need to use quantitative models.

p. 368 How do you live long? By avoiding death. Yet people do not realize that success consists mainly in avoiding losses, not in trying to derive profits.

p. 368 Science, particularly its academic version, has never liked negative results, let alone the statement and advertising of its own limits. The reward system is not set up for it. You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports - following the right steps to become "the Einstein of Economics" or "the next Darwin" rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.

p. 371 Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.

p. 371 Redundancy (in terms of having savings and cash under the mattress) is the opposite of debt. Psychologists tell us that getting rich does not bring happiness - if you spend your savings. But if you hide it under the mattress, you are less vulnerable to a Black Swan.

p. 371 Overspecialization is not a great idea. Consider what can happen to you if your job disappears completely. Someone who is a Wall Street analyst moonlighting as a bellydancer will do a lot better in a financial crisis than someone who is just an analyst.

p. 377 This is my Plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination. I felt robust.

p. 378