The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(48)
page 40
HOW TO LEARN FROM THE TURKEY
(*** Bertrand Russell 은 chicken 을 예로, 여기선 turkey )
Consider a turky that is fed every day.
Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life
to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race
"looking out for its ( 칠면조의) best interest,"
as a politician would say.
On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen
to the turkey.
It will incur a revision of belief.
생략
The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where
the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wring your neck.
생략
Let us go one step further and consider induction's most worrisome aspect :
learning backward. Consider that the turkey's experience may have,
rather than no value, a negative value.
It learned from observation,
as we are all advised to do. Its confidence increased as the
number of friendly feedings grew,
and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more
imminent.
Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum
when the risk was at the highest !
But the problem is even more general than that;
it strikes at the nature of empirical knowledge itself.
Something has worked in the past, until-
well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned
from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false,
at worst viciously misleading.
( 원서북클럽 : novels.cyworld.com- 에도 같은 내용을 포스트 했습니다.)
책에서 다루는 주제와
내용이 많아 몇가지만 간추려 이야기하고 다른 theme 들은 아예 손도 못 대는 방식으로 리뷰를 써야겠습니다.
artist 의 입장에서 이 책을 읽으며 많이 웃었더랬죠.
책을 읽으며 허! 하고 피식 웃을 때가 한 두번 도 아니었죠.
저처럼 예술인의 ( or 무언가 자기만의 작업을 통해 삶을 이루어야 하는 사람들 : 즉 화가, 작가, 배우, 가수, 학자,
과학자, 음악가 등등 Nassim 씨가 말하는 Black Swan hunters , " scalable "profession, Extremistan")
그 길을 이미 선택하고 그길을 걷고 계신 분들이나
앞으로 그 길을 가고저 하는 분들은 꼬옥 이 책을 읽어보시길 바랍니다.
웃음의 이유는 이 책을 비웃어서 웃은게 아니라
...저한테 부족했던 무언가를 그러니까 양과음의 극과 극...나의 반대 방향에서 생각해주는 그의 이야기가 마치
바이타민처럼 _쓴 한약 처럼_ 느껴졌기 때문이죠.
(우리를 위험에 빠트릴 수 있는 수렁과 함정들을 지목해주고 있기 때문에
생존에 도움이 될 것입니다.)
page 90
" Most people engaged in the pursuits that I call 'concentrated' spend
most of their time waiting for the big day that -usually- never comes.
True, this takes your mind away from the pettiness of life- the cappuccino that is too warm
or too cold, the waiter too slow or too intrusive, the food too spicy or not enough,
the overpriced hotel room that does not quite resemble the advertised picture-
all these considertations disappear because you have your mind on much bigger
and better things.
But this does not mean that the person insulated from materialistic pursuits becomes
impervious to other pains, those issuing from disrespect.
Often these Black Swan hunters feel shame, or are made to feel shame, at not contributing.
" You betrayed those who had high hopes for you," they are told,
increasing their feeling of guilt. The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much
in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle
humiliations near the watercooler.
생략
when you look at the empirical record, you not only see that venture capitalist do better than
entrepreneurs, but publishers do better than writers, dealers do better than artists, and
science does better than scientists ( about 50 percent of scientific and scholarly papers, costing months
sometimes years, of effort, are never truly read). The person involved in such gambles
is paid in a currency other than material success: hope.
from page 90
The Black Swan Theory or "Theory of Black Swan Events" was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain 1) the disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology, 2) the non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to their very nature of small probabilities) and 3) the psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs. Unlike the earlier philosophical "black swan problem", the "Black Swan Theory" (capitalized) refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.