toto je tu mozno trochu aj offtopic, ale nie uplne; usporne na malom priestore zachytava zopar nesamozrejmych myslienok

Some Musings on The Black Swan

...Mandelbrot cut the information every which way and found that its distribution did not at all correspond with the assumptions underpinning the new and growing school of financial economics (pohyby na trhu nezodpovedaju (gaussovmu) normalnemu rozdeleniu). He also found that market have memory, that their price movements do not comport with the "random walk" theory (I have assumed this pattern somehow relates to the cognitive bias of anchoring, but do not know if anyone has been able to connect the dots).

His findings were initially rejected, and continued to be resisted even when they were replicated in other markets (and then proved out in the real world: a daily price move like that of the 1987 crash was so extreme as to verge on being statistically impossible).

Put simply, computational convenience trumped empirical findings.

Of course, one reason is that the implications are pretty uncomfortable for a lot of professions (although Taleb would dispute their clams of professionalism). He contends that predictions are a fraught-to-useless exercise, and cites research that shows that lay forecasts are frequently no worse than those of experts. His book would appeal most to people who are well educated and interested in finance and economics. A fairly large subset of that group has invested in expensive educations and/or developed a lot of career experience to try to anticipate the future better than your average slob. Do you think a book, even a very persuasive book, is going to change how people operate on a day-to-day basis? Unlikely.

But second, and perhaps as important, people do not want to see the world as subject to chance to the degree that Taleb says it is. This is hugely unsettling if you really do come to terms with the implications of his argument. We like to believe we have some measure of control over our lives. ... Most people (ironically those deemed psychologically healthy) have an optimistic bias and generally assign too high odds of things working out well (the mildly depressed make more accurate assessments. I have often wondered which way the causality runs: do they make better assessments BECAUSE their unhappy state strips away the rose-colored filter, or are they mildly depressed because they keep giving more realistic assessments, which makes them a drag to be around, and they are depressed because they encounter social rejection?).

Third, if our mental construct of how the world works is off in some fundamental respects, it also calls into question our ability to make good decisions. And apart from Taleb, there are reasons to question our abilities here. It has been pretty well documented in brain research that humans can only hold so many variables in their consciousness at once. Our decision-making capabilities are more limited than we'd like to believe. And confronting every situation as if it were new would be simply exhausting, That is why we rely heavily on rules of thumb (more fancily called heuristics). Now we also have certain types of analytic processes, what I like to think of as pattern recognition, that can serve us well (this was the topic of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink). The problem is that this quick pattern recognition can work very well, or be absolutely wrong, and we have no easy way of telling which.

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