{"id":6656,"date":"2014-03-04T14:51:42","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T22:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/?p=6656"},"modified":"2014-03-04T14:51:42","modified_gmt":"2014-03-04T22:51:42","slug":"people-are-natural-skeptics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/people-are-natural-skeptics\/","title":{"rendered":"People are natural skeptics&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>People are natural skeptics, but speak in shortcuts that seem categorical but are not; when they say &#8220;bureaucrats don&#8217;t have courage&#8221; they mean &#8220;a high percentage of bureaucrats don&#8217;t have courage&#8221;, which is why proverbs and aphorisms are heuristic and economical, held to be imperfect approximations.<br \/>On the other hand, when an academic writes the overly hedged statement &#8220;it appears that under some conditions, there have been historically a high percentage of bureaucrats who did not prove have courage&#8221;, he generally truly believes that &#8220;all bureaucrats don&#8217;t have courage&#8221;.<br \/>&#8212;-<br \/>I am writing this because Aaron Haspel and I noticed that when I write the aphorism &#8220;most bureaucrats don&#8217;t have courage&#8221; it is transmitted and repeated in its shorter version: &#8220;bureaucrats don&#8217;t have courage&#8221;. Many of the nitpickers on the web are after the straw man of &#8220;generalization&#8221; when a heuristic is not categorical.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb\/13012333374\">Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People are natural skeptics, but speak in shortcuts that seem categorical but are not; when they say &#8220;bureaucrats don&#8217;t have courage&#8221; they mean &#8220;a high percentage of bureaucrats don&#8217;t have courage&#8221;, which is why proverbs and aphorisms are heuristic and economical, held to be imperfect approximations.On the other hand, when an academic writes the overly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[242],"class_list":["post-6656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contributors","tag-aphorisms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6656"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6658,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions\/6658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}