At first glance it may be surmised that the contestants of evolutionary games are the individuals present in each generation who directly participate in the game. On reflection however we see that individuals live only through one game cycle, and instead it is the strategies that really contest with one another over the duration of these recursive games.

At no time in the history of humankind have more positions of power been assigned to people who don’t take personal risks. But the idea of incentive in capitalism demands some comparable form of disincentive. In the business world, the solution is simple: Bonuses that go to managers whose firms subsequently fail should be clawed back, and there should be additional financial penalties for those who hide risks under the rug. This has an excellent precedent in the practices of the ancients. The Romans forced engineers to sleep under a bridge once it was completed.

A rigid business plan gets one locked into a preset invariant policy, like a highway without exits —hence devoid of optionality. One needs the ability to change opportunistically and “reset” the option for a new option, by ratcheting up, and getting locked up in a higher state. To translate into practical terms, plans need to 1) stay flexible with frequent ways out, and, counter to intuition 2) be very short term, in order to properly capture the long term. Mathematically, five sequential one-year options are vastly more valuable than a single five-year option.

This explains why matters such as strategic planning have never born fruit in empirical reality: planning has a side effect to restrict optionality. It also explains why top-down centralized decisions tend to fail.

Taleb’s writings discuss the error of comparing real-world randomness with the “structured randomness” in quantum physics where probabilities are remarkably computable and games of chance like casinos where probabilities are artificially built. Taleb calls this the “Ludic fallacy”. His argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on Plato’s Theory of Forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take some key ideas into account, such as: the impossibility of possessing all relevant information, that small unknown variations in the data can have a huge impact, and flawed theories/models that are based on empirical data and that fail to consider events that have not taken place but could have taken place. Discussing the Ludic fallacy in The Black Swan, he writes, “The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort.

The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

If someone were to ask me what the secret of my writing is, I would say, first I write sentences, then I write paragraphs. I view nonfiction as an art form, which too many U.S. authors treat carelessly. My books take a very long time to write precisely because of my concern with the clarity and flow of my prose. I do an enormous amount of preparation for each chapter in any of my books — voluminous notes, followed by notes upon those notes and so on. Construction of the argument takes forever, but once it is in place, that’s it. In my entire career, I have probably changed a paragraph position not more than three or four times. Once a chapter is written, I go over and over it again innumerable times, tweaking the wording and adding color and momentum.

You’ve probably seen TV journalists asking soft questions to politicians with whom they - or the boss of their network - are sympathetic. You know, like ‘Have you always been motivated by a desire to serve your country?’ or ‘Can you explain how your spending cuts will help our economy?’

Quantum mechanics doesn’t involve questions like that. It teaches you to ask questions that might actually produce a useful answer, and over time it will enable you to organise your thoughts about the natural world. It shows you how to prove things through experiment, and how to take nothing for granted, no hypothesis, until it has been exposed to every test of cause and effect.

…I wanted to try and pierce the fabric of reality, and, when it came to social action, take the skin off all our assumptions and see what was underneath. Advanced mathematics and quantum mechanics allowed for that.

To get to the truth, you have to look at your behaviour in how you set up the experiment and see how much the outcome has been affected by what you did and how you did it.

You have to find a true measure.

You have to look at how things are constructed - and how you yourself have constructed your way of looking - so as to get some insight.

Now, the more I looked at this feature of quantum mechanics, the more I saw that it might constitute the thing I had long been looking for: a theory of change, a theory of human-initiated change in the world.