My wish is for people in general to remain fools of randomness (so I can trade against them), yet for there to remain a minority intelligent enough to value my methods and hire my services.
Major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door.
Lead
It is not so easy to falsify, i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections
It is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.
If something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it efficient inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking.
Gene plays a role, are quite tractable, but anything entailing higher dimensionality falls apart. Understanding the genetic makeup of a unit will never allow us to understand the behavior of the unit...
For Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don’t count; surviving is what matters.
Domain-specific I mean that our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented, what
Between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail,
Be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be ar...
Awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.
At any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those...
Adumbration
You will never fully convince
You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples—it depends on how the choices are presented to you.
You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or t...
With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them.
When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just