buriedinquotes

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She had always loved the smell of books, especially when she bought them secondhand. New books had different smells, too, depending on the paper and glue used, but they said nothing of the hands that had held them, the houses that had been their home; they had no story of their own yet, separate from the one they told—a parallel story, hazy, secret.

Some smelled musty, others exuded the clinging aroma of curry, tea, or dried flowers; sometimes the pages had grease stains, or a long blade of grass that had served as a bookmark on a summer afternoon, turned to dust; phrases underlined or notes in the margin constituting a fragmented diary, a sketchy biography, sometimes bearing witness to indignation, or a separation.

—Christine Féret-Fleury's The Girl Who Reads on the Métro.

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The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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. . . [W]e are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Likewise, the risk of a Black Swan is invisibe.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity. The problem with business people . . . is that if you act like a loser they will treat you as a loser—you set the yardstick yourself. There is no absolute measure of good or bad. It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.

However, those who claim that they value process over result are not telling the whole truth, assuming of course that they are members of the human species.

—Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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It was data—the data showing that suspected cases were doubling every three weeks—that made me realize how big the Ebola crisis was. It was also data—the data showing that confirmed cases were now falling—that showed me that what was being done to fight it was working. Data was absolutely key. And because it will be key in the future too, when there is another outbreak somewhere, it is crucial to protect its credibility and the credibility of those who produce it. Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to action, no matter how noble the intentions.

— Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

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The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed by an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.

— Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

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Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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. . . Resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you (mostly they are not) or for giving you a skewed worldview (which mostly they are, but often not deliberately). Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong (which sometimes they do, but often with good intentions). In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.

— Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

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Matters should be seen on some relative, not absolute, timescale: earthquakes last minutes, 9/11 lasted hours, but historical changes and technological implementations are Black Swans that can take decades. In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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The blame instinct makes us exaggerate the importance of individuals or of particular groups. This instinct to find a guilty party derails our ability to develop a true, fact-based understanding of the world: it steals our focus as we obsess about someone to blame, then blocks our learning because once we have decided who to punch in the face we stop looking for explanations elsewhere. This undermines our ability to solve the problem, or prevent it from happening again, because we are stuck with oversimplistic finger pointing, which distracts us from the more complex truth and prevents us from focusing our energy in the right places.

— Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

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Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

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Anyone who claims that democracy is a necessity for economic growth and health improvements will risk getting contradicted by reality. It’s better to argue for democracy as a goal in itself instead of as a superior means to other goals we like.

There is no single measure—not GDP per capita, not child mortality (as in Cuba), not individual freedom (as in the United States), not even democracy—whose improvement will guarantee improvements in all the others. There is no single indicator through which we can measure the progress of a nation. Reality is just more complicated than that.

The world cannot be understood without numbers, nor through numbers alone. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It’s not either/or. It’s both and it’s case-by-case.

— Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.

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Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.

—Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.