Нассим Талеб - The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Epilogism: We know very little about Menodotus except for attacks on his beliefs by his detractor Galen in the extant Latin version of the Outline of Empiricism (Subfiguratio empírica) , hard to translate:

Memoriam et sensum et vocans epilogismum hoc tertium, multotiens autem et preter memoriam nihil aliud ponens quam epilogismum. (In addition to perception and recollection, the third method is epilogism sensum , as the practitioner has, besides memory, nothing other than epilogism senses; Perilli’s correction.

But there is hope. Perilli (2004) reports that, according to a letter by the translator Is-haq Bin Hunain, there may be a “transcription” of Menodotus’s work in Arabic somewhere for a scholar to find.

Pascal: Pascal too had an idea of the confirmation problem and the asymmetry of inference. In his preface to the Traité du vide , Pascal writes (and I translate):

In the judgment they made that nature did not tolerate a vacuum, they only meant nature in the state in which they knew it, since, so claim so in general, it would not be sufficient to witness it in a hundred different encounters, nor in a thousand, not in any other number no matter how large, since it would be a single case that would deny the general definition, and if one was contrary, a single one …

Hume’s biographer: Mossner (1970). For a history of skepticism, Victor Cousin’s lectures Leçons d’histoire de la philosophie à la Sorbonne (1828) and Hippolyte Taine’s Les philosophes classiques , 9th edition (1868, 1905). Popkin (2003) is a modern account. Also see Heckman (2003) and Bevan (1913). I have seen nothing in the modern philosophy of probability linking it to skeptical inquiry.

Sextus: See Popkin (2003), Sextus, House (1980), Bayle, Huet, Annas and Barnes (1985), and Julia Anna and Barnes’s introduction in Sextus Empiricus (2000). Favier (1906) is hard to find; the only copy I located, thanks to Gur Huberman’s efforts, was rotten—it seems that it has not been consulted in the past hundred years.

Menodotus of Nicomedia and the marriage between empiricism and skepticism: According to Brochard (1887), Menodotus is responsible for the mixing of empiricism and Pyrrhonism. See also Favier (1906). See skepticism about this idea in Dye (2004), and Perilli (2004).

Function not structure; empirical tripod: There are three sources, and three only, for experience to rely upon: observation, history (i.e., recorded observation), and judgment by analogy.

Algazel: See his Tahafut al falasifah , which is rebutted by Averroës, a.k.a. Ibn-Rushd, in Tahafut Attahafut .

Religious skeptics: There is also a medieval Jewish tradition, with the Arabic-speaking poet Yehuda Halevi. See Floridi (2002).

Algazel and the ultimate/proximate causation: “… their determining, from the sole observation, of the nature of the necessary relationship between the cause and the effect, as if one could not witness the effect without the attributed cause of the cause without the same effect.” (Tahafut )

At the core of Algazel’s idea is the notion that if you drink because you are thirsty, thirst should not be seen as a direct cause. There may be a greater scheme being played out; in fact, there is , but it can only be understood by those familiar with evolutionary thinking. See Tinbergen (1963, 1968) for a modern account of the proximate. In a way, Algazel builds on Aristotle to attack him. In his Physics , Aristotle had already seen the distinction between the different layers of cause (formal, efficient, final, and material).

Modern discussions on causality: See Reichenbach (1938), Granger (1999), and Pearl (2000).

Children and natural induction: SeeGelman and Coley (1990), Gelman and Hirschfeld (1999), and Sloman (1993).

Natural induction: See Hespos (2006), Clark and Boyer (2006), Inagaki and Hatano (2006), Reboul (2006). See summary of earlier works in Plotkin (1998).

CHAPTERS 5–7

“Economists”: What I mean by “economists” are most members of the mainstream, neoclassical economics and finance establishment in universities—not fringe groups such as the Austrian or the Post-Keynesian schools.

Small numbers: Tversky and Kahneman (1971), Rabin (2000).

Domain specificity: Williams and Connolly (2006). We can see it in the usually overinterpreted Wason Selection Test: Wason (1960, 1968). See also Shaklee and Fischhoff (1982), Barron Beaty, and Hearshly (1988). Kahneman’s “They knew better” in Gilovich et al. (2002).

Updike: The blurb is from Jaynes (1976).

Brain hemispheric specialization: Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978), Gazzaniga et al. (2005). Furthermore, Wolford, Miller, and Gazzaniga (2000) show probability matching by the left brain. When you supply the right brain with, say, a lever that produces desirable goods 60% of the time, and another lever 40%, the right brain will correctly push the first lever as the optimal policy. If, on the other hand, you supply the left brain with the same options, it will push the first lever 60 percent of the time and the other one 40—it will refuse to accept randomness. Goldberg (2005) argues that the specialty is along different lines: left-brain damage does not bear severe effects in children, unlike right-brain lesions, while this is the reverse for the elderly. I thank Elkhonon Goldberg for referring me to Snyder’s work; Snyder (2001). The experiment is from Snyder et al. (2003).

Sock selection and retrofit explanation: The experiment of the socks is presented in Carter (1999); the original paper appears to be Nisbett and Wilson (1977). See also Montier (2007).

Astebro: Astebro (2003). See “Searching for the Invisible Man,” The Economist , March 9, 2006. To see how the overconfidence of entrepreneurs can explain the high failure rate, see Camerer (1995).

Dopamine: Brugger and Graves (1997), among many other papers. See also Mohr et al. (2003) on dopamine asymmetry.

Entropy and information: I am purposely avoiding the notion of entropy because the way it is conventionally phrased makes it ill-adapted to the type of randomness we experience in real life. Tsallis entropy works better with fat tails.

Notes on George Perec: Eco (1994).

Narrativity and illusion of understanding: Wilson, Gilbert, and Centerbar (2003): “Helplessness theory has demonstrated that if people feel that they cannot control or predict their environments, they are at risk for severe motivational and cognitive deficits, such as depression.” For the writing down of a diary, see Wilson (2002) or Wegner (2002).

E. M. Forster’s example: reference in Margalit (2002).

National character: Terracciano et al. (2005) and Robins (2005) for the extent of individual variations. The illusion of nationality trait, which I usually call the “nationality heuristic,” does connect to the halo effect: see Rosenzweig (2006) and Cialdini (2001). See Anderson (1983) for the ontology of nationality.

Consistency bias: What psychologists call the consistency bias is the effect of revising memories in such a way to make sense with respect to subsequent information. See Schacter (2001).

Memory not like storage on a computer: Rose (2003), Nader and LeDoux (1999).

The myth of repressed memory: Loftus and Ketcham (2004).