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94209ac
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The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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62eda73
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You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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39c2676
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Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears. I will return to this point in time.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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88fa3f7
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Try the following experiment. Go to the airport and ask travelers en route to some remote destination how much they would pay for an insurance policy paying, say, a million tugrits (the currency of Mongolia) if they died during the trip (for any reason).Then ask another collection of travelers how much they would pay for insurance that pays the same in the event of death from a terrorist act (and only a terrorist act). Guess which one would..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1c847cd
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Because what matters in life isn't how frequently one is "right" about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn't count--in a way that's similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b3c4d27
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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5b8f15d
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Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bc9af73
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I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, no even a spectrum of possible explanations.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e953ca6
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Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a19cbb4
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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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530f2bf
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Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dafee03
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But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f7866d6
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our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)--and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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62c38b9
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Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge-we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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add56a4
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We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8a23944
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In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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48f1ebe
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I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn't convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.
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socialism
politics
libertarianism
republicanism
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dca86e2
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The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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486e0eb
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Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a "scholarly" paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Fu..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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09616cb
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Thirty-nine percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f835386
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Alexander the Magnus was once called to solve the following challenge in the Phrygian city of Gordium (as usual with Greek stories, in modern-day Turkey). When he entered Gordium, he found an old wagon, its yoke tied with a multitude of knots, all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to figure out how they were fastened. An oracle had declared that he who would untie the knot would rule all of what was then called "Asia," that is, As..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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adacae5
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It is much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f6511d5
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In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly--it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7c8fe79
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We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3d46162
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Silver Rule in intellectual debates. You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant. The former is more sensational, hence lends itself more readily to dissemination. The mark of a charlatan--say the writer and pseudo-rationalist Sam Harris--is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on some specific statement ("look at what he said") rather than blasting his exact position ("look at what he means" or, more..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e2b6a86
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But bankers used to be subjected to Hammurabi's rule. The tradition in Catalonia was to behead bankers in front of their own banks
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4026371
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I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9747127
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We practitioners and quants aren't too fazed by remarks on the part of academics--it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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81f7948
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While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no re..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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30cdd93
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English "manners" were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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983d9b5
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Having an assistant (except for the strictly necessary) removes your soul from the game.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f5e4a45
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the cycles of risk taking in the economy as following a pattern: stability and absence of crises encourage risk taking, complacency, and lowered awareness of the possibility of problems. Then
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1ce38f2
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He defaults to thinking that what he doesn't see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d7d30b8
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Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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00eefa4
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One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, "the Procrastinator." He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement." --
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2335d1b
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The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors--as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b38b5f6
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we discussed this dire problem with education and illusions of academic contribution, with Ivy League universities becoming in the eyes of the new Asian and U.S. upper class a status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, p..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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38e142e
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We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7213eda
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I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5fb6d45
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we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy--note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, fr..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d3ea757
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system. Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial--it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone extremely punctual and predictable who comes home at exactly six o'clock every day for fifteen years. You can use his arrival to set your watch. The fellow will cause his family anxiety if he is barely a few minutes late. Someone with a sligh..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9062a1b
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One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5ae55c9
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members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4df4836
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don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |