Nassim Taleb - Black Swan VIII

Iatrogenics and Therapeutic Nihilism

• Practitioners who were conservative and doubted the effectiveness of medical interventions were labeled as "therapeutic nihilists" until the 1960s.
• The term "iatrogenics," which refers to the harm caused by medical treatment, is not widely discussed, even within the medical field.
• The concept of "Do no harm" was not widely adopted in modern medicine until the 1950s.
• The idea of iatrogenics is not new, as ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs acknowledged the limitations of knowledge and potential harms of medical intervention.
• The Middle Eastern philosopher and doctor Al-Ruhawi wrote a treatise about iatrogenics, highlighting the awareness of this concept in Mediterranean cultures.
• Religion might have served as a protective measure against potential medical harm by offering a way to cope with suffering without seeking medical intervention.

Stoicism and the Limits of Knowledge

• Stoicism emphasized the importance of accepting the limits of knowledge and the potential for adverse events.
• Stoics believed in attaining a state of "apatheia," meaning indifference towards external events, including one's own life.
• Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, remained calm and prepared for death when ordered to commit suicide by Emperor Nero.
• The word "vale," used by Seneca at the end of his essays, has roots in "value" and "valor" and signifies strength and worthiness.

Key Concepts and Their Origins

• The term "bell curve" refers to the Gaussian bell curve, a statistical term for normal distribution.
• The term "platonicity" refers to the risk of assuming a predetermined form or essentialism, rather than recognizing the limitations of our understanding.
• Empiricism is often used to refer to an approach that is skeptical of generalizations and hasty theorizing.
• Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, writing in 1690, presented a clear explanation of the problem of induction, later known as "Hume's problem."
• Victor Brochard, a French philosopher, understood the problem of falsification in skepticism, which is similar to Karl Popper's philosophy, several decades before Popper's birth.
• The term "epilogism" refers to a specific type of reasoning or judgment based on experience.
• Hyman Minsky's work explores the concept of financial instability and the potential for economic crises.

Asymmetry and Evolutionary Considerations

• Prospect theory explains the asymmetry between the perception of losses and gains, where losses are perceived as more impactful than gains.
• Research on the neural correlates of asymmetry demonstrates brain activity associated with processing positive and negative experiences.
• Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's theory of "flow" explains the attractiveness of consistent rewards and its relationship to brain activity.
• The neurology of deferred rewards highlights the brain regions associated with impulsivity and delayed gratification.
• The term "bleed or blowup" describes the potential for gradual decay or sudden collapse in complex systems.
• The theory of evolution often assumes optimality in natural selection, but E.O. Wilson argues that evolutionary processes are not always optimized for rare events.

Other Notable Concepts

• The grue paradox illustrates the challenge of inductive reasoning and the problem of projecting past observations into the future.
• Constructionism emphasizes the social and cultural constructions of knowledge and reality.
• The dominance of mathematics in economics can act as a barrier to entry and a way to maintain control over the field.