Hey Friend!
Today I bring you a super insightful and complete chapter from Nassim’s book Fooled by Randomness. It has an idea rooted in the Socratic way of thinking, and if you apply it to your life it will guarantee you 2 benefits:
Help you to reduce the “noise” (nonsense information) in your life so you can actually focus on the “signals” (valuable information).
Help you stabilize your emotional state—become more Stoic.
👤 Author
💡Nugget
🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Excerpt from his book → Fooled by Randomness
WITTGENSTEIN’S RULER
What is the mechanism that should convince authors to avoid reading comments on their work, except for those they solicit from specified persons for whom they have intellectual respect? The mechanism is a probabilistic method called conditional information: Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him.
This applies, of course, to matters of judgment. A book review, good or bad, can be far more descriptive of the reviewer than informational about the book itself.
This mechanism I also call Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler‘s reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.
The point extends way beyond information and probability. This conditionality of information is central in epistemology, probability, even in studies of consciousness.
The point carries practical implications: 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. This plays equally in court: Take the O. J. Simpson trial once again. One of the jurors said, “There was not enough blood,” meaning to assess the statistical evidence of what was offered: Such statement reveals very little about the statistical evidence as compared with what it shows about the author of the statement’s ability to make a valid inference. Had the juror been a forensic expert, the ratio of information would have tilted the other way.
The problem is that while such reasoning is central to my thinking, my brain knows it though not my heart: My emotional system does not understand Wittgenstein’s ruler. I can offer the following evidence: A compliment is always pleasant, regardless of its authorship—something manipulators know rather well. Likewise with book reviews or comments on my risk-management strategy.
This idea of only caring about arguments that come from a qualified / experienced person aligns with Socrate's view that one should not care about what the majority thinks, instead one should only care about statements from people with a thorough reasoning.
And of course, in a complex and highly specialized world, only qualified and experienced people (in whatever the domain) will have that thorough reasoning which is worth paying attention.
By the way, I recently wrote an essay (with the editing help of Brian David Crane) where I discussed this same idea under the more broadly topic of contrasting "true opinions" with knowledge. You can read the full essay clicking here.
💥 Stuff I Loved
First person that came to mind when I read this tweet → Warren Buffet. A truly sophisticated mind who adopted a simplified lifestyle.
(Highlight resurfaced on my Readwise)
Some of my favorite highlights from this interview:
[Noah Kagan]: This is something that's counterintuitive in businesses: If there's not fighting, you're not really getting the best ideas. I want more people saying “no”. The best people at Facebook when I was there were always saying no to Mark. I was always like, "Yeah, Mark, that was a pretty good idea." That's maybe why I got fired... But over time I've realized that challenging respectfully is very healthy.
This emphasize the importance of seeking truth, rather than conformity. In Startups that become successful this is usually the case — there is a truth seeking culture. Because to survive, you need the truth and to see the unfiltered feedback from the market. But in bureaucratic firms, and especially in organizations that do not have direct feedback from the market (e.g./ Most NGOs, The International Monetary Fund, Departments of Social Sciences...), their survival do not depend on truth. So they rely on conformity since its the most comfortable and "human" thing to do. I actually made a video about this idea, featuring Nassim Taleb and Naval Ravikant - Click here to watch the video.
[Tim Ferriss]: I really want to step back and see if I am in a position where I'm uniquely differentiated, or have some type of competitive advantage.
Not because I care about competition per se, but it's like: “Am I in a red ocean that used to be a blue ocean? Or am I developing practices that are going to lead me to a point of not just uniformity with others but… are we all running towards a cliff, like a bunch of lemmings?”
The term "Red Ocean" refers to intense competition. Whereas the term "Blue Ocean" refers to a market with no competition.
This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!
Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book.
Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms). But of course, for books that I’m deeply interested in reading I still read the entire book! And then use Shortform to quickly re-visit the main ideas.
I also made a short video exploring the platform and showing you how I’m personally using it. Here’s the Link!
The cost is equivalent to the price of one book a month and you can use my affiliate link to get a 5-Day FREE trial and a 20% Discount on the annual subscription (besides, you will be supporting my work 😉) - shortform.com/pickingnuggets
The mark of a great (non-fiction) author:
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Wishing you a great weekend :)
Valuable nuggets in this post Julio!
"If I would have ask people for better transportation they would have replied faster horses not cars" -Henry Ford (ig)
Taking feedback from consumers involves the signal of demand.
Not of the product or innovation. If consumers were smart then they'd be creators.
And I think the graph would be better if you would show it in 2 different 1st quadrants, i got boggled wondering where the negative points came from until I realised that its a quadrant of different graph itself.