Fooled by Randomness

First annotation on Mar 13th, 2023. Last on Sep 1st, 2023.

12 quotes

It is a mistake to use, as journalists and some economists do, statistics without logic, but the reverse does not hold: It is not a mistake to use logic without statistics).Mar 13 2023 12:10AM
Homo sum, good and bad. I am fallible and see no reason to hide my minor flaws if they are part of my personality no more than I feel the need to wear a wig when I have my picture taken or borrow someone else’s nose when I show my faceMar 13 2023 12:11AM

As a practitioner of uncertainty I have seen more than my share of snake-oil salesmen dressed in the garb of scientists, particularly those operating in economics.Mar 13 2023 12:13AM

Many people were capable of the most complex calculations with utmost rigor when it came to equations, but were totally incapable of solving a problem with the smallest connection to reality; it was as if they understood the letter but not the spirit of the mathMar 25 2023 10:39PM
But on occasion a fast-thinking scientific-minded person with street smarts would emergeMar 25 2023 10:40PM
He greatly contributed to my formation as a risk taker; he is one of the very rare people who have the guts to care only about the generator, entirely oblivious of the results. He presented the wisdom of Solon, but, while one would expect someone with such personal wisdom and such understanding of randomness to lead a dull life, he lived a colorful one.Mar 25 2023 10:42PM
He taught me to look for the invisible risks of blowup in any portfolioMar 25 2023 10:43PM
Realism can be punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse. It is difficult to go about life wearing probabilistic glasses, as one starts seeing fools of randomness all around, in a variety of situations—obdurate in their perceptional illusionMar 25 2023 10:44PM
Beware the confusion between correctness and intelligibility. Part of conventional wisdom favors things that can be explained rather instantly and “in a nutshell”—in many circles it is considered lawMar 25 2023 10:47PM

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise. The modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy wrote a piece in 1915 after Philostratus’ adage “For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen.”Sep 1 2023 2:01AM
The same methodology can explain why the news (the high scale) is full of noise and why history (the low scale) is largely stripped of it (though fraught with interpretation problems). This explains why I prefer not to read the newspaper (outside of the obituary), why I never chitchat about markets, and, when in a trading room, I frequent the mathematicians and the secretaries, not the traders. It explains why it is better to read The New Yorker on Mondays than The Wall Street Journal every morning (from the standpoint of frequency, aside from the massive gap in intellectual class between the two publications).Sep 1 2023 2:02AM
is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.Sep 1 2023 2:02AM

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