17 February 2025 
3 mins Taleb in his idiosyntratic blunt manner prefaces the book saying that these are his personal wisdom gained over years of experience and research and not a piece of "scientific reporting" nor has he taken considerable effort in writing the book - written for fun and aimed to be read the same. A quote that caught my eye - Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio (Be as silent as you can, or say something better than silence.)
It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations - scientists are seeming more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.
The book is about luck disguised and perceived as non-luck (skills) and more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness and the intellectualization process that often comes in between. In the "Table of CConfusion", Taleb lists out the terms that we mistake for each other - list and skills, belief/conjecture and knowledge, anecdote and causality/law, forecast and prophecy. These often translate into specific domains such as in stock markets, survivorship bias and market out-performance, and in the philosophy of science, induction with deduction, Epistemic probability with physical probability.
The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious) .
We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to the environment that we can just work around these flaws. I am convinced that after spending almost all my adult and professional years in a fierce fight between my brain and my emotions (fooled by randomness) in which the only success I've had is in going around my emotions rather than rationalizing them.
skewness fallacy - The success and its frequency matter less if the cost of failure is too high.
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
