Weekly Wisdom #298 - How to stop being misled by randomness

Signal vs. Noise, Black Swans, Life Tips, Longevity & the Productivity Mindset

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Happy Monday!

I've started re-reading Nassim Taleb's books, starting with Fooled by Randomness.

His books have been some of the most eye-opening and impactful for me; when I first read them it was like a light went on in understanding the world around me.

One of the core tenets of Fooled by Randomness is that much of the world around us is...random.

As humans, we tend to construct narratives around these random variations: reasons for the stock market moving, or for events in the news, or reasons for success in a specific job or industry.

We assume there's a story—or signal—when really there's just noise.

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How can we better avoid all the noise?

In short, we can change our sampling rate.

Instead of watching the daily news, we can read The Economist weekly. Or ignore the news altogether.

We can think long-term, paying attention to long-term trends, and ignoring short-term ones.

And of course, we can also remember that much of what we see doesn't have any signal at all; it's just random.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📚 Book Notes: The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Probably the most well-known of Taleb's series (called the Incerto), this book focused on what is now a popular term, the "Black Swan."

One of those things that once you see, you can't unsee, Black Swans are outliers with extreme impact that get explained after the fact (but aren't predicted).

Their presence dominates our modern life, in everything from financial markets, to new businesses, to internet writing—they are everywhere.

📖 100 Tips for a Better Life - Ideopunk - All kinds of excellent advice in this article, from small details to the big things. Some of my favourites:

Make accomplishing things as easy as possible. Find the easiest way to start exercising. Find the easiest way to start writing. People make things harder than they have to be and get frustrated when they can’t succeed. Try not to.

Done is better than perfect.

Keep your desk and workspace bare. Treat every object as an imposition upon your attention, because it is.

📖 Breaking Free From Productivity Addiction - Alex Olshonsky (might require free trial) - I think everyone can empathize with this kind of mindset to some degree; the modern world demands that we are all focused on getting more things done faster/better. It's a tough mindset to step out of, but one that we should all probably be thinking about a little bit more.

Tweet of the Week

​The graphic in this Tweet, originally from a Reddit user, summarizes the biggest takeaways from many of the most recent books on longevity.

Interesting to see some of the patterns:

Anatoly Karlin 🧬⏩-->

@powerfultakes

This looks useful - someone read most of the major longevity books and compiled a list of recs. https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterAttia/comments/16qxnw1/after_outlive_i_read_12_other_longevity_books_so/

10:25 AM • Jan 21, 2024

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