Links - 7/13/2020
“...the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another…In fact, the people who knew the period best – those alive at the time – were the most clueless of all. For the average Roman in Constantine's time, the future was a fog. It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.” —Yuval Noah Harari (“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”)
Learning from History: Pandemics and Energy Transitions (LINK)
Buffett’s SEC Filing Implies Repurchases (LINK)
A current list of some Q2 2020 Letters & Reports that have been published so far (LINK)
GMO White Paper | Why We Are Not Worried About Elevated Profit Margins (LINK)
TED Talk: What happens when biology becomes technology? | Christina Agapakis (LINK)
How to find a good doctor - by Peter Attia (LINK)
The End of California's Coronavirus Miracle (LINK)
Related to a couple of things above is the notion of silent evidence. As described by Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan:
Another fallacy in the way we understand events is that of silent evidence. History hides both Black Swans and its Black Swan–generating ability from us.
THE STORY OF THE DROWNED WORSHIPPERS
More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, Stoic, manipulator-politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the following story. One Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, “Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?”
The drowned worshippers, being dead, would have a lot of trouble advertising their experiences from the bottom of the sea. This can fool the casual observer into believing in miracles.
We call this the problem of silent evidence. The idea is simple, yet potent and universal. While most thinkers try to put to shame those who came before them, Cicero puts to shame almost all empirical thinkers who came after him, until very recently. Later on, both my hero of heroes, the essayist Michel de Montaigne and the empirical Francis Bacon, mentioned the point in their works, applying it to the formation of false beliefs. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like,” wrote Bacon in his Novum Organum. The problem, of course, is that unless they are drilled into us systematically, or integrated into our way of thinking, these great observations are rapidly forgotten.
Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of history. By history, I don’t just mean those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract buyers). History, I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority.
This bias extends to the ascription of factors in the success of ideas and religions, to the illusion of skill in many professions, to success in artistic occupations, to the nature versus nurture debate, to mistakes in using evidence in the court of law, to illusions about the “logic” of history—and of course, most severely, in our perception of the nature of extreme events.