An excellent follow-on book to Fooled by Randomness, again a mixture of statistics and philosophy (but don't let that put you off).
Many people confuse the statement that "almost all terrorists are Moslems" with "allmost all Moslems are terrorists". Assume that the first statement is true, that 99% of terrorists are Moslems. This would mean that only 0.001% of Moslems are terrorists since there are around 1 billion Moslems and only say 10,000 terrorists overall in the world.
Your personal happiness depends far more on the number of happy events than their size so far better to have lots of mildly good things than one great thing in your life.
On the futility of budgets (p163)
Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would allow us to start developing them. Ergo, we do not know what we will know.
And his recepie for success: work hard in chasing opportunities and maximising exposure to them. (p209)
Monday, 1 December 2008
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I lent the book to Nigel and he was equally enthusiastic about it. Hopefully he will post his comments here soon.
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