In view of this view, he used a very vivid metaphor-teaching birds to fly. "A group of people as sacred as monks (from Harvard or something like that) taught birds how to fly. Imagine a group of bald men in their sixties wearing black robes, speaking English, full of technical terms and writing down many equations. The bird did fly. Perfect proof! These guardians rushed back to the ornithology department to write a report, which showed that the birds only flew after listening to them. Irrefutable causal inference. The Department of Ornithology at Harvard has become an indispensable element of bird flight, and it will receive research funding from the government for its contribution. " But can't birds fly without teaching? Everyone knows it's definitely not, but birds can't talk. Therefore, Taleb, the author of the book, points out that providing flying lessons to birds and believing that these lessons are the reason why these birds have superb flying skills is actually a causal illusion and is called "inversion phenomenon".
In addition, he also found a very strange phenomenon in real life: in option trading, there is a "Girsanov Theorem", which is mathematically responsible, and only a few people knew it at that time. So a very authoritative expert in this field once asked: "If those traders don't understand Girsanov's theorem, how should they deal with these complicated exotic options?" However, the author found that before hearing this profound theorem, he and other traders, including himself, figured out how to conduct complex transactions through trial and error and listening to the opinions of experienced people.
This discovery made the author Taleb realize that he needed someone to help him confirm his findings. This person needs to be both a practitioner and a researcher. Luckily, he found a qualified person named Espen Haug. It took them seven years to develop their respective strengths and form their own research papers, which fully proved that the theory of "we create theories in practice" is actually after solving problems. Birds can fly, but it is the storyteller who teaches them to fly. So it is not difficult to see that history is actually written by losers, who have plenty of time and their academic status is protected. "