hello！
两周不见，甚是想念！
自24年高考结束后，我迅速陷入了惫懒状态，每天除了上课，散步，就是聊天，阅读。感觉就好像是电池没电了，需要重新“充电”。
在这期间，我用的最多的阅读工具是上次推荐过的 微信读书。
同时也欢迎狂热的微信阅读爱好者，加入一个读书小群，大家可以在里面交流原版书资源，通过给彼此点赞/加入阅读小组/组队 等方式，收集体验卡。
我现在的微信读书策略是：1. 先加入了365挑战；2. 然后收集免费体验卡每月兑换付费会员卡；3. 等一年挑战结束后，领取奖励，无缝衔接下一年365挑战。
回归正题。
最近在读的一本书是 Nassim Nicholas Taleb 写的 Black Swan.
我读的原版，如果读者们感兴趣，可以自己搜，也可以加入上面的群聊，我会把pdf文件发在群里。
如封面的副标题所言，这本书是在探讨 The Impact of the Highly Improbable. 亦即书名所指的 “黑天鹅事件”。
捡起这本书大概也是从高考完开始，然后断续地利用自习时间看，现在是看到了133页，第一部分的结尾。
总体评价是 mind-blowing 脑洞大开。
就像作者开篇举过的一个例子—— 书架上没有读过的书的价值，比读过的书价值更高。因为它们提醒了我们的知识边界和局限性（原文如下）。
“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.”
这本书真诚的笔法（特别像读《退步集》的感觉），对现代生活悖论的敏锐观察，和反常识的逻辑推理，让思维局限性不断受到挑战，也让大脑有一种被刷新的快感。
读这本书的过程，会让人对知识和生活的看法发生转变，使人更审慎地选择自己的生活习惯，敬畏未知的未知，且更警惕已知和已知的未知，进而过一种更富深意的人生。
下面我分享一些我阅读过程中截取下来的5个段落，供大家参考。
enjoy your read!
One: Prologue
The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events.
But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, evenworse, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer--our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming.
What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance like a child playing with achemistry kit.
Two: Page 27 - Scalable VS. Non-scalable work
The most important piece of advice was, in retrospect, bad, but it was also, paradoxically, the most consequential, as it pushed me deeper intothe dynamics of the Black Swan.
It came when I was twenty-two, one February afternoon, in the corridor of a building at 3400 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, where l lived. A second-year Wharton student told me to get a profession that is “scalable,” that is, one in which you are not paid bythe hour and thus subiect to the limitations of the amount of your labor.
...
Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients orclients you can see in a given period of time. ... This kind of work islargely predictable: it will vary, but not to the point of making the income of a single day more signifcant than that of the rest of your life. In otherwords, it will not be Black Swan driven. ... Other professions allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income), if you do well, at little or no extra effort.
Three: Page 40 -- The turkey problem
Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firmup the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday beforeThanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.
... The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck.
Four: Page 112 -- The Silent Evidence
Our neglect of silent evidence kills people daily. Assume that a drug saves many people from a potentially dangerous ailment, but runs the risk of killing a few, with a net benefit to society. Would a doctor prescribe it? He has no incentive to do so. The lawyers of the person hurt by the side effects will go after the doctor like attack dogs, while the lives saved by the drug might not be accounted for anywhere.
A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Likewise, the risk of a Black Swan is invisible.
This brings us to gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The bias lowers our perception of the risks we incurred in the past, particularly for those of us who were lucky to have survived them. Your life came under a serious threat but, having survived it, you retrospectively underestimate how risky the situation actually was.
Five: Page 133 -- What a life to choose?
I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions, nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid "tunneling".
今天的分享就到这里啦！
have a great day!
