Marko’s Reviews > The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable > Status Update

the entire knowledge-seeking enterprise is based on taking conventional wisdom and accepted scientific beliefs and shattering them into pieces with new counterintuitive evidence,
whether at a micro scale (every scientific discovery is an attempt to produce a micro-Black Swan)

In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can
disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.

In the Utopian province of Mediocristan, particular events don't contribute much individually—only collectively. I can state the supreme law
of Mediocristan as follows: When your sample is large, no single instance
will significantly change the aggregate or the total. The largest observation
will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum.

American economy has leveraged itself heavily on the idea generation, which explains why losing manufacturing jobs can be coupled with a rising standard of living.

Other professions allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income), if you do well, at little or no extra effort.

Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time. Your revenue depends on your continuous efforts more
than on the quality of your decisions. Moreover, this kind of work is
largely predictable.

It was initially a great excuse to
avoid keeping up with the minutiae of business, a perfect alibi since I found
nothing interesting about the details of the business world—inelegant, dull,
pompous, greedy, unintellectual, selfish, and boring.

What is interesting to me as a probabilist is
that some random event makes one group that initially supports an issue itself with another group that supports another issue, thus causing the two items to fuse and unify . . . until the surprise of the separation.
Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity.

What is interesting to me as a probabilist is
that some random event makes one group that initially supports an issue itself with another group that supports another issue, thus causing the two items to fuse and unify . . . until the surprise of the separation.
Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity.

What is interesting to me as a probabilist is
that some random event makes one group that initially supports an issue itself with another group that supports another issue, thus causing the two items to fuse and unify . . . until the surprise of the separation.
Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity.