Money and Finance

Nassim Taleb on the importance (and difficulty) of being willing to change your mind if the facts change

Some quotes from Fooled by Randomness (also posted on Twitter):

Carneades was not merely a skeptic; he was a dialectician, someone who never committed himself to any of the premises from which he argued, or to any of the conclusions he drew from them. He stood all his life against arrogant dogma and belief in one sole truth.

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As the skeptics’ main teaching was that nothing could be accepted with certainty, conclusions of various degrees of probability could be formed, and these supplied a guide to conduct.

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Cicero...He preferred to be guided by probability than allege with certainty—very handy, some said, because it allowed him to contradict himself....This may be a reason for us, who have learned from Popper how to remain self-critical, to respect him more, as he did not hew stubbornly to an opinion for the mere fact that he had voiced it in the past. Indeed your average literature professor would fault him for his contradictions and his change of mind.

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The public person most visibly endowed with such a trait is George Soros. One of his strengths is that he revises his opinion rather rapidly, without the slightest embarrassment....What characterizes real speculators like Soros from the rest is that their activities are devoid of path dependence. They are totally free from their past actions. Every day is a clean slate....My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

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Many people get married to their ideas all the way to the grave. Beliefs are said to be path dependent if the sequence of ideas is such that the first one dominates.

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There are reasons to believe that, for evolutionary purposes, we may be programmed to build a loyalty to ideas in which we have invested time....Such trait of absence of marriage to ideas is indeed rare among humans. Just as we do with children, we support those in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propagate our genes, so we do with ideas.

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Certainly, the odds in games where the rules are clearly and explicitly defined are computable and the risks consequently measured. But not in the real world. For mother nature did not endow us with clear rules. The game is not a deck of cards (we do not even know how many colors there are). But somehow people “measure” risks, particularly if they are paid for it.

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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.

- Statistics And Investing...
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- Jeff Bezos On The Value Of Changing One's Mind
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- George Soros On The Coming U.s. Class War
Whenever reading Soros’ market thoughts, it’s good to keep in mind that he maintains the flexibility to change his mind on a dime. And to keep in mind what Hugh Hendry said about him in The Invisible Hands: “Take Soros and the insights he generously...

- Nassim Taleb On Probabilistic Thinking
“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. Outside of textbooks and casinos,...

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