24:28
is you know okay so there is a severe
error in reasoning and that that you
often hear by people giving you
empirical data and telling you for
example that were idiots to worry about
Ebola that killed two Americans when
more people slept with Kim Kardashian
that year okay so for example and that
was effectively the number they said
that more people slept with Kim
Kardashian in 2014 or worried about
Ebola then died of Ebola for example
right so now and then sometimes you see
numbers like these and this is the kind
of thing that that if you read something
called the New York Times and you still
read that nonsense this kind of stuff
you read in it which is factually right
but bogus okay well and the kind of
thing that teaches and psychology
department that so many Americans die
from eating too many hamburgers smoking
too much alcohol now let’s think about
it in terms of tails if I tell you or
let’s say Steven Pinker give the number
that 3,000 Americans died and their
bathtub every year
okay 3,000 people whereas three or two
have died of Ebola now let’s play
thought experiment if you read in the
papers if you go you know to Mars and
come back
and then read on you know on Google News
that two billion people have died what’s
more likely to have killed them diabetes
obesity is falling the rest stop
sleeping with Kim Kardashian or Ebola
Ebola there we go so you cannot compare
rule number one
thou shalt not compare a multiplicative
fat-tailed process in extremists and in
the sub-exponential class to a thin tail
process that has what we call Chernoff
bounds okay and that is in totally for
mediocre stuff simply because of the
catastrophe principle okay and then we
know for example that is very cheap to
protect yourself from Ebola you see the
probability that people dying from
smoking okay it’s multiplied by 10 next
year is 1 to the 10 – into 10 – 30 the
probability that that the the rate of
people who died from Ebola through
triples is not vastly higher you see so
you cannot compare processes thin tail
to fat tails are not comparable so this
is not empiricism this is called naive
ampere system it’s actually worse okay
so you cannot compare two processes like
these by saying we worry too much about
Ebola in fact we were too much about
diabetes and too little valley bola so
that’s one error of reasoning that comes
from not understanding fat tails now let
me show you the law of large numbers
everything you’ve learned in statistics
is based on a well functioning of a law
of large numbers no all right so in
other words you that as you add
observation this mean that you observe
would be very stable no and the rate is
square root of 2 square root of n number
of observations you agree all right
this is what you have on the left now on
the right for fat tail process the mean
exists but it takes much longer to
observe it
28:10
much longer my only my anymore
28:13
observations okay
The “70% Solution” : Making Major Decisions with 70% of the Information
“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow”
At what point is the information you have available for a key decision enough? You always want more.
This exactly mirrors a MAJOR decision-making framework taught in the Marine Corps–we actually call it the “70% solution.”
All of our warfighting doctrine is built around the principle of rapid and decisive action, but the problem is you’re in an uncertain, rapidly changing world where there are opposing actors operating around you and you never have all the answers. They emphasize in officer training that a key limiter is being paralyzed with uncertainty and wanting to wait until more information is available, and that you must actively counter this feeling. Indecision is a decision (and often the worst one).