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aa57ae2
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We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible--for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don't care about the possible disp..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4599fe
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The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards and punishment, or transfer of fragility between individuals. Ralph Nader has a simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one descendant (child or grandchild) exposed to combat. For the Romans, engineers needed to spend some time under the bridge they built--something that should be required of financial engineers today. The English went further and had the families of th..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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22cb73f
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In the complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined--another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4c1b307
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Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ef940c5
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If you need to listen to music while walking, don't walk; and please don't listen to music.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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55e6cdb
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We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5b3cb72
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Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-deceit machines.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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73a9b52
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Mathematics is not just a "numbers game", it is a way of thinking."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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706046b
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I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.
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autism
nerdiness
nerds
nerd
modernity
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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044146a
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Now, in addition to these traits, 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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9af7a18
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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion--in
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e40d24c
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Imagine going to Mexico with a notebook and trying to figure out the average wealth of the population from talking to people you randomly encounter. Odds are that, without Carlos Slim in your sample, you have little information. For out of the hundred or so million Mexicans, Slim would (I estimate) be richer than the bottom seventy to ninety million all taken together. So you may sample fifty million persons and unless you include that "rar..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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34f1cd2
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While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so?
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6ddeebf
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I had a strong bias in favor of Russian scientists; many can be put to active use as chess coaches (I also got a piano teacher out of the process). In addition, they are extremely helpful in the interview process. When MBAs apply for trading positions, they frequently boast "advanced" chess skills on their resumes. I recall the MBA career counselor at Wharton recommending our advertising chess skills "because it sounds intelligent and strat..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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605ef95
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If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word equilibrium, or normal distribution, do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f2e6492
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It was confidently believed that the scientific successes of the industrial revolution could be carried through into the social sciences, particularly with such movements as Marxism. Pseudoscience came with a collection of idealistic nerds who tried to create a tailor-made society, the epitome of which is the central planner. Economics was the most likely candidate for such use of science; you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of e..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1514b9f
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wealth does not count so much into one's well-being as the route one uses to get to it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cfa30d9
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To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3fa0ba7
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Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeye..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cf95612
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one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2a1301c
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Don't talk about "progress" in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ba3037c
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People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6386599
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Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager. Why do they do so? Because they accept that this is what people should do with their savings, because "experts" tell them so. The doubt their own sense, but not for a second do they doubt their automatic purchases in the stock market."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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743f840
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Bir treni kacirmak ancak pesinden kosarsaniz aci verici olur.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5aed839
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We flipped a coin to see who was going to pay for the meal. I lost and paid. He was about to thank me when he abruptly stopped and said that he paid for half of it probabilistically.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cda2abd
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The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means--crucially--a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them--and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any t..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8441355
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The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f24477c
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It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d900f9e
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Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker's life while convincing him that it is becoming more "efficient." - The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free. - You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. - With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cde8eea
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Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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674d12d
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Things are always obvious after the fact. The civil servant was a very intelligent person, and this mistake is much more prevalent than one would think. It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d72a34b
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Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c366957
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In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4461529
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For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shoc..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3e0c6dd
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The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8fd3651
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It is generally accepted that harm from doctors--not including risks from hospital germs--accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2940910
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The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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10c4008
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The story of the "exquisite cadavers" is as follows. In the aftermath of the First World War, a collection of surrealist poets--which included Andre Breton, their pope, Paul Eluard, and others--got together in cafes and tried the following exercise (modern literary critics attribute the exercise to the depressed mood after the war and the need to escape reality). On a folded piece of paper, in turn, each one of them would write a predetermi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a7f3ca3
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Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustificat..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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75424f8
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But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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59b285d
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I've had a hard time conveying to intellectuals the intellectual superiority of practice.)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fae496d
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As I got her to explain to other people her evidence about the lack of effectiveness of funding formal education, one person got frustrated with our skepticism. Wolf's answer to him was "real education is this," pointing at the room full of people chatting. Accordingly, I am not saying that knowledge is not important; the skepticism in this discussion applies to the brand of commoditized, prepackaged, and pink-coated knowledge, stuff one ca..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a7a4ab3
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the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2bb3360
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Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |