Fooled by Randomness: Breed Your Skepticism Tell me the first thing that you did when you decided

to get your passport made? What do you generally do when you want to find the lyrics of a song? Where would you first go if you decide to get yourself inked? I know what I would do, Id Google it (the answer may not be universally true for everyone, but I hope you get the point), every time we come across an unfamiliar task or hitherto uncharted territories, the first thing we do is gather information on it. From there onwards, our subsequent decision making depends upon the information now at our disposal. The keyword in the last sentence was information. Everything we know or do today is based upon what we know, or rather what we think we know. I see one problem with this, what if the information was not completely correct (or immoderately incorrect) to begin with (based upon the common argument that every bit of information available to us has been gathered and catalogued by humans, and we may be a lot of things, but we aint perfect), we can easily accept the fact that any information we have is imperfect, hence actions taken upon that imperfect information would give us results that would further divaricate from the true correct scenario. These results when used as a future reference would cause further divergence, thus setting in motion a series of flawed decision making processes . As Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an eminent philosopher, economist and writer puts it When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate. We, humans, in general have a tendency to over-simplify things, giving unwarranted importance to things we do see while ignoring facts about something that are not very obvious. Suppose we have 536870912(the figure is equal to 2 to the power 25) people making coin tosses , with the looser of each coin toss getting eliminated, at the end wed be left with a guy who would have called 25 consecutive coin tosses correctly. But at the end we would not have a man who ALWAYS gets his coin tosses right, just someone that random chance threw at us (call it luck if u will). We look at the deceased Steve Jobs or Bill Gates (or any other man who has gained popularity or money or both over the past century), they got where they are so they must have done something right, aint that what you feel. The mistake we make over here is that we see what Bill Gates has done and take that as a set of standard steps towards untold riches, this however discounts the fact that there were probably thousands of equally abled, equally skilled individuals who did the exact same things as Gates did and still ended up as abject failures, thousands indulged with dear Mr. Gates in his coin tosses but lost out. This is not meant to imply that Bill Gates was plain lucky (never in all of my insolent ignorance would I say that), as I said, he got where he is so he must have done something right, what he did not do wrong was where he was different from those thousands others, He did not make the mistakes that others did. Everything today has with it a set of associated information, we can refer to these as visible facts (with all of their imperfections), but closely linked with that information are many invisible consequences, it is our inability to see these invisible subtle effects is what blind sides all our decisions. Im not discounting Gates ability to make the right decisions, but it is probably not as important a contributor to his success as his ability to avoid wrong ones. (if he could figure out the invisible countenances than the man is god and hence thoroughly deserves the riches, if not, which

is more likely, then I would retract my statement and say that he has been mightily lucky).Being skilled is suddenly not as important, if you have 10000 equally skilled people (however youd have to be skilled enough to become one of those 10000) We can club all of these invisible countenances or effects or anything else you might want to call it under a broad term such as randomness. To make secure and correct decisions (I know I over play the words a little) we need to incorporate this randomness but how do we consider things we do not know, this is where skepticism comes in. What we know about something is probably not as important as things we dont know. Here is where skepticism comes in. The idea is not to throw away every opportunity that comes your way or to discard every bit of information as inaccurate, but to analyse everything with an impartial view devoid of preconceived notions. Michel de Montaigne (a very influential renaissance writer and considered to be the Father of Modern Skepticism) talks about this at length in his essays.He gives you two simple ways to play with it; 1: Be sceptical about every bit of information that you have. 2: Eliminate in place of selecting. When confronted with a pair of choices, identify the worst case scenarios in each case, and then pick out the one which would lead to the least amount of damage (the best of the worst is what Montaigne advises). Now, we would have to discard the individual probabilities of those worst case scenarios occurring in this case. Something happening might not be very probable, but if and when it does it could potentially destroy you, it would always be better to avoid it. Do not give undue importance to what You know, Taleb Says, while more often than not it is the anti-knowledge about something that calls the shots (the randomness). The talk of the town is not to take anything we know too seriously. The Essay is influenced from the first couple of chapters of Nassim Nicholas Talebs popular book, Fooled by randomness. I Apologize for any discrepancies that might have creeped in, as it may be, Im still learning. I deplore you to read directly from the true source to know more.