• Likewise, an increase in personal performance (regardless of whether it is caused deterministically or by the agency of Lady Fortuna) induces a rise of serotonin in the subject, itself causing an increase of what is commonly called ‘leadership ability’
• I start with the platitude that one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the cots of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way).
• It is hard to imagine that people who witnessed history did not know at the time how important the moment was. Somehow all respect we may have for history does not translate well into our treatment of the present.
• A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
• It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent ‘studying’ the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.
• One vicious attribute is that the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.
• Brian Arthur, an economist concerned with nonlinearities at the Santa Fe Institute, wrote that chance events coupled with positive feedback rather than technological superiority will determine economic superiority - not some abstrusely defined edge in a given area of expertise. While early economic models excluded randomness, Arthur explained how ‘unexpected orders, chance meetings with lawyers, managerial whims … would help determine which ones achieved early sales and, over time, which firms dominated’.
• Accordingly, bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts.
• There are only two types of theories:
  • Theories that are know to be wrong, as they were tested and adequately rejected (falsified)
  • Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong.
• If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past’s past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
• Whenever I hear work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity
• Newtonian physics is scientific because it allowed us to falsify it, as we know that it is wrong, while astrology is not because it does not offer conditions under which we could reject it.
• The reason I feel that he is important for us traders is because to him the matter of knowledge and discovery is not so much in dealing with what we know as in dealing with what we don’t know:
  • There are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.
• The survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realisation will be most visible. Why? Because the losers don’t show up.
• So we need a shortcut; emotions are there to prevent us from temporizing. Does it remind you of Herbert Simon’s idea? It seems that the emotions are the ones doing the job. Psychologists call them ‘lubricants of reason’.
• Emotions affect one’s thinking. He figured out that much of the connections from the emotional system to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive system to the emotional system. The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As we saw with Claparede’s discovery, much of the opinions and assessments that we have concerning risks may be the simple results of emotions.
• My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
• There is nothing wrong and undignified with emotions - we are cut to have them. What is wrong is not following the heroic or, at least, the dignified path. That is what stoicism truly means. It is the attempt by man to get even with probability.
• The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behaviour.