The Black Swan

Reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

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. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. […] Let us call an antischolar—someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device—a skeptical empiricist.

“Fair-weather friend”, don’t think I knew that word before.

I was less concerned by the events and able to pursue my intellectual interests guilt-free when I was inside Lebanon. Interestingly, people partied quite heavily during the war and developed an even bigger taste for luxuries, making the visits quite attractive in spite of the fighting.”

The author writes that reading a certain journal or diary about historical events was eye-opening to him because by nature, such format describes events as they are happening, without the generous editing carried out by hindsight in the typical books of history.

Indeed, I too relish reading my past journals because today I would offer totally different explanations about my thinking and actions than in those past times. In particular, I’m often surprised how I thought about my creative projects in the past, “surely I should have known better already at that time, it is so obvious”. Experiencing that, I become more open to the idea that things might keep changing in big ways, who knows if I might scrap that big project and start a new one.

I think one of the things Taleb means to say is indeed that we should be more aware that unexpected events will happen, and that fact can even be taken advantage of — even though you will never know the specifics of those events. It reminds me a bit of how Scott Adams wrote that you should be relentlessly experimenting and doing stuff, as to maximize the occurence of some very lucky outcome.

While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context.

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance. So we pull memories along causative lines, revising them involuntarily and unconsciously. We continuously renarrate past events in the light of what appears to make what we think of as logical sense after these events occur.

I was struck that financial distress could be more demoralizing than war.” “Death is often a good career move for an author.

This is a really good book. Some parts remind me of The Curve which indeed makes references to this book (at least the Mediocristan and Extremistan terms were lended).

I can find confirmation for just about anything, the way a skilled London cabbie can find traffic to increase the fare, even on a holiday.

I wonder if this guy has something against the French, he constantly sneaks in parenthesised insults about them :D To be fair, he also jabs at many professions, including businessmen despite being one himself.