Jetaime’s Reviews > Fooled By Randomness & The Black Swan: Two Books In One > Status Update

“A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say you always have the same threshold of reactions. You take a set level of abuse, say seventeen insulting remarks per week, before getting into a rage and punching the eighteenth offender in the nose. Such predictability will allow people to take advantage of you up to that well known trigger point.”

“We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.”

Ask your local mathematician to define probability; he would most probably show you how to compute it. As we saw in Chapter 3 on probabilistic introspection, probably is not about odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive. Recall that mathematics is a tool to meditate, not compute.

“Unless you have confidence in the rulers reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the rulers reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and less about the table.

“Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.”

Throughout this book I find myself wondering if the author wrote it to take petty shots at frenemies or to shift the paradigm on everything we assume about probability.