The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Dopamine: Brugger and Graves (1997), among many other papers. See also Mohr et al. (2003) on dopamine asymmetry.

Entropy and information: I amm purposely avoiding the notion of entropy because the way it is conventionally phrased makes it ill-adapted to the type of randomness we experience in real life. Tsallis entropy works better with fat tails.

Notes on George Perec: Eco (1994).

Narrativity and illusion of understanding: Wilson, Gilbert, and Centerbar (2003): “helplessness theory has demonstrated that if people feel that they cannot control or predict their environments, they are at risk for severe motivational and cognitive deficits, such as depression.” For the writing down of a diary, see Wilson (2002) or Wegner (2002).

E.M. Forster’s example: reference in Margalit (2002).

National character: Terracciano et al. (2005) and robins (2005) for the extent of individual variations. The illusion of nationality trait, which I usually call the “nationality heuristic,” does connect to the halo effect: see Rosenzweig (2006) and Cialdini (2001). See Anderson (1983) for the ontology of nationality.

Consistency bias: what psychologists call the consistency bias is the effect of revising memories in such a way to make sense with respect to subsequent information. See Schacter(2001).

Memory not like storage on a computer: Rose (2003), nader and LeDoux (1999).

The myth of repressed memory: Loftus and ketcham (2004).

Chess players anddisconfirmation: Cowley and byrne (2004).

Quine’s problem: Davidson (1983) argues in favor of local, but against total, skepticism.

Narrativity: note that my discussion is not existential here, but merely practical, so my idea is to look at narrativity as an informational compression, nothing more involved philosophically (like whether a self is sequential or not). There is a literature on the “narrative self”—Bruner (2002) or whether it is necessary—see Strawson (1994) and his attack in Strawson (2004). The debate: Schechtman (1997), Taylor (1999), Phe-lan (2005). Synthesis in Turner (1996).

“Postmodernists” and the desirability of narratives: see mccloskey (1990) and Frankfurter and McGoun (1996).

Narrativity of sayings and proverbs: psychologists have long examined the gullibility of people in social settings when faced with well-sounding proverbs. For instance, experiments have been made since the 1960s where people are asked whether they believe that a proverb is right, while another cohort is presented with the opposite meaning. For a presentation of the hilarious results, see Myers (2002).

Science as a narrative: indeed scientific papers can succeed by the same narrativity bias that “makes a story.” You need to get attention. Bushman and Wells (2001).

Discovering probabilities: Barron and erev (2003) show how probabilities are underestimated when they are not explicitly presented. Also personal communication with Barron.

Risk and probability: see slovic, fischhoff, and lichtenstein (1976), slovic et al. (1977), and Slovic (1987). For risk as analysis and risk as feeling theory, see Slovic et al. (2002, 2003), and Taleb (2004c). See Bar-Hillel and Wagenaar (1991).

Link between narrative fallacy and clinical knowledge: Dawes (1999) has a message for economists: see here his work on interviews and the concoction of a narrative. See also Dawes (2001) on the retrospective effect.

Two systems of reasoning: see Sloman (1996, 2002), and the summary in Kahneman and Frederick (2002). Kahneman’s Nobel lecture sums it all up; it can be found at www.nobel.se. See also Stanovich and West (2000).

Risk and emotions: given the growing recent interest in the emotional role in behavior, there has been a growing literature on the role of emotions in both risk bearing and risk avoidance: the “risk as feeling” theory. See Loewenstein et al. (2001) and Slovic et al. (2003a). For a survey see Slovic et al. (2003b) and see also Slovic (1987). For a discussion of the “affect heuristic,” see Finucane et al. (2000). For modularity, see Bates (1994).

Emotions and cognition: for the effect of emotions on cognition, see ledoux (2002). for risk, see Bechara et al. (1994).

Availability heuristic (how easily things come to mind): see Tversky and Kahneman (1973).

Real incidence of catastrophes: for an insightful discussion, see Albouy (2002), zajden-weber (2000), or Sunstein (2002).