Reading

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I may put short reading notes and reflections here. We clearly do not read enough — and much of what passed for “reading” before university hardly deserves the name.

Keeping brief notes helps control both reading speed and quality.

Sophie’s World took me a long time. I had not read carefully for a while; it is a solid popular introduction to Western philosophy, though necessarily somewhat rough.

On Human Action and uncertainty: the discussion of behavioral economics here is, in my reading, a warning not to use historical regularities of group behavior to guide your own future choices.

Class probability vs. case probability. A simple example: after the gaokao, people often say they “overperformed” or “underperformed.” That claim does not really hold — what does “normal” even mean?

Is it your average mock-exam score?

How can you guarantee that the real exam and mock exams measure the same thing? You cannot. Only the action that happens at that place and time is valid; before that, class probabilities have little reference value for the individual case.

How could you prove over- or under-performance? Take hundreds of parallel universes, same time and place, sit the exam, average the results — above that average is “over,” below is “under.” That is obviously nonsense.

The chapter’s point is simple: historical regularities lose almost all meaning when applied to a single individual.