I’m not sure what “I already know about hindsight bias” is about. Hearing about hindsight bias alone has no use for not getting affected by it. You can express the idea of hinsight bias in a paragraph but that still doesn’t help. What’s important is learning about the idea in a way that actually affects actions. That likely needs hard reflection with the actual content and having multiple examples can be helpful for that.
Survivership and hindsight bias isn’t Talebs central message. To me his central message is about many distributions being fat-tailed. That insight is also resulted in Taleb’s current higher popularity because it lead to him seeing COVID-19 as a serious threat in January.
Christian, thanks for your comment. However, I do not understand what your first paragraph is referring to, as I do not think I claimed not being affected by hindsight bias, or anything similar. Whether additional examples of the hindsight bias (or anything else) are helpful is up to any potential reader to decide; I’d just say that I find the signal-to-noise ratio of the book low, and would probably start reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias (or Kahneman) instead.
The central message of Taleb’s oeuvre in general may be about many distributions being fat-tailed, but just judging from FbR, I think you will not learn very much about the concept. Searching the google books version for the word “fat” seems to indicate that the word “fat-tailed” only appears in the preface.
My point is that signal-to-noise ratio is a metric that rewards mentioning many ideas over exploring the ideas in more detail. For important ideas like specific biases that can be started shortly, I think it’s valuable to explore them in a longer way and signal-to-noise is no good complaint.
I see. Using “signal” and “noise” figuratively here, I ran the risk of being understood that way. But to be clear: I do not regard explanations and illustrations as “noise”, because they help understand the signal. The book has a lot of text that is counterproductive and has, in my opinion, a very loose relation with the concepts Taleb (presumably) aims to explain.
I’m not sure what “I already know about hindsight bias” is about. Hearing about hindsight bias alone has no use for not getting affected by it. You can express the idea of hinsight bias in a paragraph but that still doesn’t help. What’s important is learning about the idea in a way that actually affects actions. That likely needs hard reflection with the actual content and having multiple examples can be helpful for that.
Survivership and hindsight bias isn’t Talebs central message. To me his central message is about many distributions being fat-tailed. That insight is also resulted in Taleb’s current higher popularity because it lead to him seeing COVID-19 as a serious threat in January.
Christian, thanks for your comment. However, I do not understand what your first paragraph is referring to, as I do not think I claimed not being affected by hindsight bias, or anything similar. Whether additional examples of the hindsight bias (or anything else) are helpful is up to any potential reader to decide; I’d just say that I find the signal-to-noise ratio of the book low, and would probably start reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias (or Kahneman) instead.
The central message of Taleb’s oeuvre in general may be about many distributions being fat-tailed, but just judging from FbR, I think you will not learn very much about the concept. Searching the google books version for the word “fat” seems to indicate that the word “fat-tailed” only appears in the preface.
My point is that signal-to-noise ratio is a metric that rewards mentioning many ideas over exploring the ideas in more detail. For important ideas like specific biases that can be started shortly, I think it’s valuable to explore them in a longer way and signal-to-noise is no good complaint.
I see. Using “signal” and “noise” figuratively here, I ran the risk of being understood that way. But to be clear: I do not regard explanations and illustrations as “noise”, because they help understand the signal. The book has a lot of text that is counterproductive and has, in my opinion, a very loose relation with the concepts Taleb (presumably) aims to explain.