large as the world. He had to settle for an exhaustive account of what happened on the Place Saint-Sulpice between October 18 and October 20, 1974. Even so, his account was not so exhaustive, and he ended up with a narrative.
24
Such tests avoid both the narrative fallacy and much of the confirmation bias, since testers are obliged to take into account the failures as well as the successes of their experiments.
25
The best noncharlatanic finance book I know is called What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, by D. Paul and B. Moynihan. The authors had to self-publish the book.
26
Doctors are rightfully and vigorously skeptical of anecdotal results, and require that studies of drug efficacy probe into the cemetery of silent evidence. However, the same doctors fall for the bias elsewhere! Where? In their personal lives, or in their investment activities. At the cost of being repetitive, I have to once again state my amazement at the aspect of human nature that allows us to mix the most rigorous skepticism and the most acute gullibility.
27
My colleague Mark Spitznagel found a martial version of the ludic fallacy: organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life. Likewise, you see people with huge muscles (in black T-shirts) who can impress you in the artificial environment of the gym but are unable to lift a stone.
28
What Nietzsche means by this term are the dogma-prone newspaper readers and opera lovers who have cosmetic exposure to culture and shallow depth. I extend the term here to the philistine hiding in academia who lacks in erudition out of lack of curiosity and is closely centered on his ideas.
29
Note that these sayings attributed to Yogi Berra might be apocryphal – it was the physicist Niels Bohr who came up with the first one, and plenty of others came up with the second. These sayings remain, however, quintessential Berraisms.
30
The book you have in your hands is approximately and “unexpectedly” fifteen months late.
31
While forecast errors have always been entertaining, commodity prices have been a great trap for suckers. Consider this 1970 forecast by U.S. officials (signed by the U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury, State, Interior, and Defense): “the standard price of foreign crude oil by 1980 may well decline and will in any event not experience a substantial increase”. Oil prices went up tenfold by 1980. I just wonder if current forecasters lack in intellectual curiosity or if they are intentionally ignoring forecast errors.
32
I owe the reader an answer concerning Catherine’s lover count. She had only twelve.
33
Most of the debate between creationists and evolutionary theorists (of which I do not partake) lies in the following: creationists believe that the world comes from some form of design while evolutionary theorists see the world as a result of random changes by an aimless process. But it is hard to look at a computer or a car and consider them the result of aimless process. Yet they are.
34
Recall from Chapter 4 how Algazel and Averroes traded insults through book titles. Perhaps one day I will be lucky enough to read an attack on this book in a diatribe called The White Swan.
35
Such claims are not uncommon. For instance the physicist Albert Michelson imagined, toward the end of the nineteenth century, that what was left for us to discover in the sciences of nature was no more than fine-tuning our
