unordered black swan notes incomplete
Posted by Gordon on October 24, 2008
The narrative fallacy.
” the way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favour experimentation over story telling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.” p84
Nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life.
If you are thirsty a bottle of water increases your well-being; two might be better; but a truck-load (without the truck) is not only not proportionally valuable it is inconvenient – it would reduce your welfare.
We value the sensational and the extremely visible…There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results.
We inherited the taste for uncalculated risk taking. Should we encourage such behaviour? p115
I have a weakness for Ralph Nader. He may be the American citizen who saved the highest number of lives by exposing the safety record of car companies. But in his political campaign a few years ago, even he forgot to trumpet the tens of thousands of lives saved by his seat belt laws, It is much easier to sell “look what I dod for you” than “look what I avoided for you”.
A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote, Statistics are invisble; anecdotes are salient. Likewise the risk of a Black Swan [unexpected event, +ve or -ve, contrary to current theories] is invisible,
