"We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the concrete, the emotionally laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the officials, the scholarly-sounding verbiage [b*****t], the pompous Guassian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated."
"Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, igorning what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort."
"To be able to focus is a great virtue if you are a watch repairman, a brain surgeon, or a chess player. But the last thing you need to do when you deal with uncertainty is to "focus" (you should tell uncertainty to focus, not us). This "focus" makes you a sucker; it translates into prediction problems, as we will see in the next section. Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb — The Black Swan
Kit Stolz 