p.53 Inability to automatically transfer knowledge and sophistication from one situation to another or from theory to practice is a disturbing att Our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented, what evolutionary psychologists call the domain of the object or the event. We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit but on the basis of which framework surrounds it and how it registers with our social emotional system. Logical problems approached one way in the classroom would be treated differently in daily life.
Knowledge even when
it's exact does not often lead to appropriate actions because we tend to forget
what we know or forget how to process it properly.
Our brain lacks a central
all-purpose computer that starts with logical rules and applies them equally to
all possible situations.
p70. Potential of
narracy. Compare "the king died and the queen died." TO
"the king died, and then the queen died out of grief" Second sentence
has more information but is much more easily reduced in dimension in total for
human brain. The second sentence is much lighter and easier to remember, we now
have single piece of information instead of two. We can sell it to others
better now. That implies with everything, people love stories because it's easy
to remember
Memory is dynamic in
reality, it's not a serial recording device.. Memory is 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.
p76. Which of these
two statements are more likely:
Joe seemed happily
married. He killed his wife.
OR
Joe seemed happily
married. He killed his wife to get her inheritance.
People will choose
second. But the first one is much much more probable since it's much broader.
The second one is just more narrative and justified for us. All these
patologies are leading us to mistakes in our decision making.
EX:
People are more likely
to pay for terrorism insurance than for plain insurance (which covers terrorism
insurance as well)
Black swans we are imagining are not the ones
that will happen. We worry about wrong "improbable" events even if we
tend to consider Black Swans.
You just need to be aware of that, but you must understand you can't predict
that.
"There are more
ppl writing books than ppl reading books. Inequality causes than thousands of
ppl who has for example same talent as Einstein but less luck are put aside and
nobody ever hear about them. " page 102
-> people have VERY
VERY limited time & attention to be able to know at least 1% of the whole
interesting things in the world. No matter how smart we'd be. Our attention
(and time??) will be limited. We forget things also which even worse.
What we can do to
that? Two approaches. Either pull your focus to the more relevant things (which
will make situation a bit better but still has limits), diversify as much as we
can, focusing and exploring very narrow part of reality and trying to summarize
& expose that to others (experts syloses, that's what we do actually) or
just don't care and live you life to be as much happy as you can (doesn't
matter how)
How to become
millionaire in ten steps.
You shouldn't study
skills of millionaires to know how to become one, because there's a lot of not
known ppl who had that set of skills and didn't succeed. It's just a matter of
luck.
-> Increase your
luck -> yes man? give chance to more possibilities to occur, use more of
your chances and say yes to more things, if filter our do it smartely
ONLY FILTERING USEFUL
VS UNUSEFUL GIVES PPL NEEDED SUCCESS
All successful ppl I
know have more strict filters to the time they devote to particular things.
Important points for
not loosing:
* assymetry ->
don't hold your loses, hold your wins, don't spend more effort on not
successful path, but devotes fully if you see it's going in good direction
* everything is purely
random, you must understand that half of the plays will be loses, but but half
will be small wins. You spend your time & money on each of them, so you
must use smart filters to not fail into hell of notimemoney. However more
filters occur more probability of loosing important plays.
There are too many
things that we don't see, causing our very wrong understanding of the world
(very limited)
Money given somewhere
will be taken from somewhere else. But we don't know from where same as we may
not know where to put it better. We see obvious and visible consequences not
the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences may be and
generally are more meaningful.
We can see what people
(goverments, companies) do and therefore we sign their praises. But we DO NOT
SEE THE ALTERNATIVE. But there is always an alternative, it is less obvious and
remains unseen.
EVERYBODY IS TELLING
WHAT THEY DID. But nobody tells what they did not do.
-> always think
what you can do instead of what you do now, always think what you can do that
will cause better future/world/your live/your feelings
-> always think
about possible negative consequences not only positive ones?
RISK UPWARD
OVERESTIMATION
we see all patients
who has cancer and died from it. But maybe there's a lot who has cancer and
survived or had healing?
-> anual full
medical check is needed (gadgets that make it easier to track the things)
-> we're not moving
forward in medicine, where are all those money that can be put in medical
researches & gathering data from patients & giving for free all the
traking systems.
illusion of stability
bias lovers our
perception of the risk we incurred in the past because those who were
experiencing it did not survived. Even if you survived you gonna underestimate
how risky the situation actually was.
P138
We're demonstrably
arrogant about what we think we know.
There is a lot of
implications of such arrogancies
Many professions are
dependent on somebody's prediction/vision/guessing or estimation about the
future (how many sales can be done of that book, how the person will perform,
how customers will behave)
The problem is that
our prediction skills are proved to be not even close to reality, meaning that
trying to guess something in most cases actually causes worse outcome that
without it.(due to the wrong expectations)
when you're employed,
hence dependent on other people's judgement, looking busy can help you claim
responsibility for the results in a random environment (bad results of your
work).
The more information
you give to someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and
worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for relevant
information(filters are quite brocken).
So what you
propose? Having less information? think about that The longer interval allows
information to be filtered a bit?
Our ideas are sticky:
once we produce a theory we're unlikely to change it (tip - what if we will
suggest a theory to sbd, they gonna stick to it as well, we just need to be
faster). Those who delay developing their theories are better off(for
themselves only)
p152
We humans are the
victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our
successes to out skills, and our failures to external events outside our
control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff, but not
for the bad. This causes us to think that we are better than others at whatever
we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving
skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of
Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of
French lovers.
We feel unique unlike,
we underestimate what others did ("it's pure luck") and overestimate
what we did (it's skills).
Buying real estate and
tying ourselves to it makes no sense? Sedentary living is dire. We are very
nomadic, far more than we plan to be, and forcibly so.
We either know one
thing, and blindly believe in it, not accepting anything else (black swan that unlikely to happen,
but can) ex dollar fall. OR we know many things and don't see (accept)
any black swans
We tend to be biased
by numbers and every other reference points we can't fully understand. When
presented with initial number (price, estimation etc) we are tight to it as a
reference point later on. Also we can't understand the logic of large
deviations from the norm as well as exponential growth.
"SOLUTION LOOKING
FOR A PROBLEM" - we build toys, some of those toys change the world.
TODO: look for the new
discoveries and advancements and try to find their new applications in
absolutely unbelievable fields.
In order to predict
historical events you need to predict technological innovations, itself
fundamentally unpredictable.
If I expect to expect
something at some day in the future then I already expect that at present.
If you know the
discovery you gonna make in the future (and you should know it if you want to
predict something) then you already made it (but if you already made it the
future is already today and later something else will happen)
181. Weakness apply to
all knowledge(Hayek). Because of the confirmation problem one can argue that we
know very little about our natural world; we advertise the read books and forget
about he unread ones. Phisics has been successful, but it is a narrow field of
hard science in which we have been successful, and people tend to generalize
that success to all science. It would be preferable if we were better at
undrestanding cancer or the higlhy nonlinear weather than the origin or the
universe.
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