Mediocristan and Extremistan

In the utopian province of Mediocristan, particular events don't contribute much individually --- only collectively. I can state the supreme law of Mediocristan as follows: When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total." - Travels Inside Mediocristan, pp.32

"In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total" - The Strange Country of Extremistan pp.33

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

THE BLACK SWAN

Chapter Three

The Speculator and The Prostitute

Platonicity and The Platonic Fold

"What I call Platonicity,  after the ideas (and personality) of the philosopher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined "forms", whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what "makes sense"0, even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures .........

"Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.

"The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced".

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

THE BLACK SWAN

Prologue

PLATO and the Nerd

PP XXV

The Black Swan

A BLACK SWAN is a highly improbable event with three principal
characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact;
and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear
less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing
success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11.

- excerpt from the inside flap of

THE BLACK SWAN
The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2007 Random House
ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2

Umberto Eco's Antilibrary or How We Seek Validation

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others---a very small minority---who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research took. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco's library sensibility by focusing on the know is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. people don't walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (its the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Let us call an antischolar---someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device---a skeptical empiricist.

-  The Black Swan, pp1-2, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

© Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007