An early idea is that skills and hard work get someone a professorship or a BMW, but one needs skills +work+ a lot of luck to get a bestseller or private jet. There is a winner-take-all-effect. Well, the tax system taxes people on skills and work (current income) and gives them a break on luck (capital gains). I am not favoring taxes but, assuming one needs to tax, they got it exactly backwards.

A virtuous success is one that takes nothing away from someone else and, more generally, does not translate into any form of failure in others.
(This is completely incompatible with modernism [Part IV, Ethics])

When a person repeatedly talks about someone else, listen by inverting the meaning.

Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull

He denounces “empirically blind savants,” rejects the Gaussian Belle Curve fixation, and champions a kind of mathematical or empirical skepticism.  He advances the theory of Professor Raimund Popper, who states that predicting historical events is possible if one can predict technological innovations. In a sense, the author is a Contrarian, even an Iconoclast. The Black Swan scores as it rails against the herd mentality—our need to be part of the social pattern. This, the author argues, prevents us from predicting the next Black Swan. But can we be the rugged individuals that the author asks of us? Hardly so.

And next from Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth:

Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite.