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As Stalin, who knew something about the business of mortality, supposedly said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Statistics stay silent in us. Terrorism kills, but the biggest killer remains the environment, responsible for close to 13 million deaths annually. But terrorism causes outrage, which makes us overestimate the likelihood of a potential terrorist attack—and react more violently to one when it happens. We feel the sting of man-made damage far more than that caused by nature.
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
pioneers such as Galen of Pergamon (second century AD) propagated treatments like bloodletting and the use of mercury as an elixir. These treatments were devised with the best of intentions, and in line with the best knowledge available at the time. But many were ineffective, and some highly damaging. Bloodletting, in particular, weakened patients when they were at their most vulnerable. The doctors didn’t know this for a simple but profound reason: they never subjected the treatment to a proper test – and so they never detected failure. If a patient recovered, the doctor would say: ‘Bloodletting cured him!’ And if a patient died, the doctor would say: ‘He must have been very ill indeed because not even the wonder cure of bloodletting was able to save him!’
Black Box Thinking
Matthew Syed
Quand Yahoo! a proposé de racheter Facebook pour 1 milliard de dollars en juillet 2006, j’ai considéré que nous devions au moins étudier leur offre. Mais Mark Zuckerberg est entré en pleine réunion du conseil d’administration pour annoncer : « Bon, les gars, ce n’est qu’une formalité, cela ne devrait pas prendre plus de dix minutes. Nous ne sommes pas vendeurs, c’est évident. » Mark savait où il était capable de mener son entreprise, et Yahoo! n’en savait rien. Dans un monde où les gens ont une vision aléatoire de l’avenir, une entreprise dotée d’un plan bien défini sera toujours sous-évaluée.
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