The Information To That Point

I’ve been having an anxious week this week, which is not exactly a surprise given I had a big weekend of socialising and navigating responsibilities around devoting time to GoPlay, but it’s interesting to look at what boundaries have been crossed recently and where I’ve been letting myself make choices out of a place of worry.

It’s also useful to be reading Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness, brought to mind after writing the recent post about Black Swan thinking, which contains some rather useful reminders if you’re inclined to anxious thought patterns:

Things are always obvious after the fact…It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information. When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. Our mind will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones. Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so?

…here is a possible explanation: Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating. Psychologists call this over-estimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information the hindsight bias, the “I knew it all along” effect.

Now the…trades that ended up as losers “gross mistakes,” just like journalists call decisions that end up costing a candidate his election a “mistake.” I will repeat this point until I get hoarse: A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb