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9897085
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Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.
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Michael Lewis |
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f16ba11
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Shining a light creates shadows,
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Michael Lewis |
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ababca7
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Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
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Michael Lewis |
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eefeda7
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We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.
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Michael Lewis |
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1d88c1d
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When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of." That"
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Michael Lewis |
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6df3eb7
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What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions?
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money
recession
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Michael Lewis |
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2281633
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The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody
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Michael Lewis |
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c79b4e5
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Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don't know," said"
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Michael Lewis |
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0ea2bbb
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If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.
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Michael Lewis |
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3b265dd
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My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.
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Michael Lewis |
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2f470da
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It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.
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Michael Lewis |
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6a8bd88
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good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.
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Michael Lewis |
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f28c817
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The nice thing about things that are urgent," he liked to say, "is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore." "I"
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Michael Lewis |
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0a00316
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A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt,
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Michael Lewis |
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56748e8
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If you've got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.
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individuality
motivation
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Michael Lewis |
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e170bb9
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Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]
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statistics
sports
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Michael Lewis |
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8cc29c0
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A man got to have a code. - Omar Little
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man
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Michael Lewis |
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f262a40
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The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. "Confirmation"
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Michael Lewis |
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e920762
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Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.
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Michael Lewis |
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f5a7cc7
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The Piranha didn't talk like a person. He said things like "If you fuckin' buy this bond in a fuckin' trade, you're fuckin' fucked." And "If you don't pay fuckin' attention to the fuckin' two-year, you get your fuckin' face ripped off." Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off."
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bond-trading
human-piranha
salomon-brothers
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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d446d05
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What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.
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motivation
objectivity
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Michael Lewis |
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71d6e98
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The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.
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Michael Lewis |
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51700ba
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The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.
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Michael Lewis |
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671f4e2
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a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
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travel
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Michael Lewis |
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f9fe15f
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A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General El..
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credit-default-swap
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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3abe7c1
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The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain. That is, when it was like most gambles in life. To get most people to flip a coin for a hundred bucks, you had to offer them far better than even odds. If they were going to lose $100 if the coin landed on heads, they would need to win $200 if it landed on tails. To get them to flip a coin for ten thousand bu..
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Michael Lewis |
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31abcb4
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Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.
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sports
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Michael Lewis |
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267febf
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Every form of strength is also a weakness. Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.
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Michael Lewis |
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ded0ea7
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Amos was not merely an optimist. He himself to be an optimist because he had decided pessimism was stupid. "When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice," Amos liked to say. "Once when you worry about it and the second time when it happens."
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Michael Lewis |
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9489b8d
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Charlie Ledley--curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley--was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.
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Michael Lewis |
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5c0ae9c
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Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.
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Michael Lewis |
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ba84fe6
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Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred.
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Michael Lewis |
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29ea2de
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That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis," said Danny. "No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story." As Danny and Lanir wrote, decades later, after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency asked them to describe their experience in decision analysis, the Israeli Foreign Ministry was "indifferent to the specific probabilities."
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Michael Lewis |
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6d96685
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But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.
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success
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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6678153
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The world's not just a stage. It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity--or (strange new word!) representativeness. You
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Michael Lewis |
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782e070
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In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather's home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service's website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill ..
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Michael Lewis |
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cd0b778
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It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.
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Michael Lewis |
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0ca0e65
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That's all right," says Billy. "We're blending what we see but we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see."
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Michael Lewis |
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d95835d
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What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: "One hand, one million dollars, no tears."
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john-gutfreund
john-meriwether
liars-poker
salomon-brothers
wall-street
game
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Michael Lewis |
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af6b37a
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It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.
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Michael Lewis |
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663e063
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Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.
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Michael Lewis |
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edbdac7
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I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that producing gave them. They usually a..
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Michael Lewis |
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8117cc7
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It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.
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Michael Lewis |
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d714af7
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If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.
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Michael Lewis |