from Fooled by Randomness

• Say you own a painting you bought for $20K, and due to rosy conditions in the art market, it is now worth $40K. If you owned no painting, would you still acquire it at the current price?

• If you would not, then you are said to be married to your position. There is no rational reason to keep a painting you would not buy at its current market rate.
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• -The information from an anonymous reader on Amazon.com is all about the person, while that of a qualified person is going to be all about the book.
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• -After collapse of the Soviet Union, many discovered an annoying part of its legal system. It had conflicting and contradictory laws.There is no central system that is consulted every time to ensure compatibility of all the parts together
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• Our minds are far more complicated than just a system of laws, and the requirement for efficiency is much higher. The absence of a central processing makes us engage in decisions which can be in conflict with each other.
• The fact that your mind cannot retain and use everything you know is the cause of such biases. This makes it blind to reasoning.

Black Swan :

-Iam skeptical about confirmation, not about disconfirmation. A single instance can disconfirm even though plenty of data can confirm.
-I worry less about small failures, more about large, potential ones.
-I worry less about advertised and senstaional risks, more about vicious hidden ones. I worry less about terrorism than diabetes.
-I do not worry a lot, I try to worry about matters I can do something about.

-I try to stay light on my feet, reduce my surprises, I want to be broadly right than precisely wrong.

-Every morning the world appears more random than it did the day before.
-Someone who is marginally better can easily win the entire pot, leaving the others with nothing.
-A person can get slightly ahead for entirely random reasons, and everyone flocks to him. The world of contagion is so underestimated.
-In academia, cliques of people who quote one another are formed. Those who got a good push in the beginning of their scholarly careers will keep getting persistent cumulative advantages throughout life.

-Of the 500 largest US companies in 1957, only 74 were still part of S&P500, forty years later. Most shrank or went bust.

Chapter 13
What you should avoid is unnecessary dependence on large-scale harmful predictions-those and only those.
-Maximize the serendipity around you.
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