Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Abhishek Chakraborty

Black Swan Bias: Rare Events Don’t Happen Everyday

There’s wisdom in the saying, “Lightning never strikes (the same place) twice.” Black Swan events maybe rare but the distortions caused by them don’t disappear for a long time.

Don’t Seek Too Much Stability

A stable life is one where—in theory—nothing goes wrong. You have an okay job, a happy marriage, good kids, and live in a decent neighbourhood. But soon we’ll learn that longterm stability is only a ticking time bomb and, if we know any better, we should avoid it at all costs.

Optionality: When More is Merrier

When you have options, you don’t have to care about the average outcome—only the favourable outcomes. Because your wins far outweigh your losses. You get a larger payoff when you are right, which also makes it unnecessary to be right too often.

Alternative Histories: How to Judge The Quality of a Decision

In the real world, it’s very hard to know if a [decision is correct] even if the outcome is positive. Due to randomness, the positive outcome might just be a fluke. If you flip a coin to make an investment decision, not matter how much money you make, it’s still a bad decision.

Mediocristan and Extremistan: The Two Categories of Random Events

We misappropriate the correlation between one event for some reason and another event for a different reason. What we need to be concerned is with systemic effects: things that can affect more than one person should they happen.

The Lindy Effect: Things That Age In Reverse

According to the Lindy Effect, while a book that has been a hundred years in print is likely to stay in print another hundred years, a 100 year old human being has only a couple more years to go.

Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions By Eliminating Bad Ones

When we set goals—both personal and professional—we tend to focus on what we should do, rather than focussing on what we should avoid. Humans naturally know more about what is wrong, what is bad, what is harmful, or what won’t work, more than they know about what is right and what would work.

Green Lumber Fallacy: The Disconnect Between Academic Knowledge and Practical Wisdom

What works in real world may not match our stories of why or how it works. Unimportant details and post-hoc narratives can often distract us into thinking we know the reasons for something when we really don’t.