The primitive fool scratched his nose, then went down

For the consequences of thinking fucked by chance.

Your chance is presented as a happy fool as a man who succeeded in the unexplained generosity of luck, but who attributes his success to some other, more serious and more definite cause.

Such confusion appears in the most unexpected places, even in science, albeit not in such a frightening way as in business.

In politics, this is a common illness and can be seen in the statement of the president of a country who talks about the jobs he has "created", "his" revival of the economy, the inflation created by "his predecessor" is it?

We are still quite close to our ancestors who have wandered around the savannah. Everything we believe in boils down to superstition even today ( I would emphasize, especially today ).

Just as the primitive savage had scratched his nose and suddenly poured heavy rain, and then he began to scratch his nose even more and more prolonged to bring the rain clouds, so we associate economic prosperity with the percentage given from the Central Bank, or the success of a company with the appointment of a new governor.

The bookstores are full of biographies of successful men and women in which they outline their version of why they did it or as we say - how they got to the right place at the right moment, which we are belittling every possible conclusion on how to achieve it and we.

Such confusion can come to anyone!

The teacher of literature may put too deep a sense in the very random repetition of several syllables, and the economist proudly points out the "regularities" and "anomalies" he has found in quite arbitrary facts.

At the risk of being biased, we must say that the people of literature are willing to consciously mix the noise with the meaning. In other words, to confuse the haphazardly created improvisation with the deliberately invoked message.

But, thank God, it does not cause headaches.

For most people, art is by no means a method of exploring the truth, but rather a way to escape from it or at least to make it more obtrusive.

Symbolism is the result of our inability and unwillingness to accept chance. We give meaning to every form, we see human figures in the drops of ink on the leaves.

I saw mosques in the clouds, reported to the world Arthur Rembo, a 19th century French poet symbol. And to find them, he goes to "poetic" Abyssinia, East Africa, where he is abused by a Lebanese slave trader, incidentally a Christian, grabs syphilis and cuts his legs for gangrene. Disgusted, he drops poetry at nineteen and dies, forgotten by the world, in a Marsala hospital of about thirty. But it's too late.

European intellectuals have developed an irreversible taste of the symbolism we still pay for psychoanalysis and other similar passions.

Unfortunately, some people take the game too seriously. They are paid to see an endless profound meaning in everything.

The French thinker and poet Paul Valerie was just stunned when he heard an analysis of his work, in which he spoke of messages he had never thought of.

Naturally, they told him that they were nevertheless present in his subconscious. And the kids are breaking up to ask what the author wants to say .... Remember, do not you?

We underestimate the role of chance in almost everything.

It is rather worrying that it is only recently that science finds strength to tackle the problem of chance. The growth of literature on this topic is only surpassed by the increase in noise. Probability theory is a new addition to the field of mathematics, and its application in practice is almost absent.

There is evidence that what we are accustomed to saying "courage" actually derives from the fact that we underestimate the role of chance in events rather than the noble ability to fight for our principles. People at risk are more often victims of self-deception, which leads to excessive optimism and excessive self-confidence, and the consequent underestimation of the possible negative outcome, rather than vice versa.

In many cases, their risky endeavors are brutally overcome by chance.

But no matter how interesting these topics are, the discussion is a rather difficult task.

There is a world in which the habit of confusing chance and ability is the most widespread and the most obvious - it is the world of financial markets. Moreover, the world of the economy is the most appropriate (and most fun) laboratory for randomness research.

The reason for this lies in the fact that it is precisely in this area of ​​human activity that the confusion is greatest and the consequences - the most detrimental.

Often, we have the wrong impression that a strategy is brilliant and the entrepreneur is a man who is endowed with an extraordinary flair, the trader is a born trader, whereas in fact 99.9% of what they have achieved is due to chance and nothing else.

Ask someone who makes a lot of money, how he succeeded.

It will offer you an in-depth and convincing interpretation of the final results. In many cases, these scams are quite conscious and deserve only one name - quackery.

The reason for this is our inability to think critically and the fact that we like to accept some contraption for truth.

But what to do - our nature is such.

Our mind does not have the necessary equipment to handle the probabilities. This weakness even manages to impress the experts, sometimes only them.

We humans are irreparably defective, at least in this area, but this is bad news only for the Utopians who believe in the existence of the ideal man.

Nowadays, thinkers support two opposing images of man, with mixed variants being possible here and there.

On one side, your aunt Penka, who is not married and stops giving you life guidance. She would happily write the "20 Happiness Act" or "How to Become Better in a Week". This is the utopia of Rousseau, Godwin, Condorse and Thomas Payne, these are the traditional economists ( of the type that will make you make a sensible choice because it's good for you ), and so on. They believe in reason and rational in that we have to overcome all the cultural obstacles on the path to a better human race, and think that we can control our nature when and as we decide and that we will be transformed with just one clicking on the fingers to achieve, among other things, happiness and wisdom.

Here we can include those who think the overweight drug is simply to inform people that they should be healthy.

On the other hand is the tragic vision of the fate of mankind, according to which there are insurmountable limitations and shortcomings in our way of thinking and reacting, and the recognition of this fact is necessary as the basis of any individual or collective action.

Here are the people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Adam Smith (human intentions), Herbert Simon (limited rationality), Amos Tverski and Daniel Kaneman (heuristics and bias), speculator George Soros, etc.

The most neglected of them is the incomprehensible philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, born a hundred years before his time ( he invented the notion of scientific "fallibilism" as opposed to papal infallibility ). We are so imperfect and inappropriate for the world in which we live, that the only thing left to us is to fight our shortcomings.

Maybe the plan does not go to get rid of our shortcomings, maybe we need cunning and clever numbers, not a good moralizing didactics .

As an empiricist, most hate the moralizers. I do not stop wondering why they continue to believe in dirty methods. Giving advice suggests that our cognitive apparatus, not emotions, has some meaningful control over our actions - modern behavioral science proves that it has nothing to do with the truth.