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9faf8cf
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Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness--for the attainment of a state of immunity from one's external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won't affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a8d6142
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Luck favors the prepared," Pasteur said,"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0004e66
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Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8079d0d
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formation of moral values in society doesn't come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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74b90c4
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somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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63a3854
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The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4c84a8
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at any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists--because these professions are more immune to randomness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f02a293
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You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8effc19
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What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0cfc457
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The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy. ... Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay. ... [emphasis mine] These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who "study" philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by th..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f932151
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If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.
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randomness
rationality
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d156c4f
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Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bfa7d70
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Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica, on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality: he abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2ae8d7d
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A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the "unforeseen" aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an e..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ac93b97
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we have evidence that collectively society doesn't advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of (formal) education in a country is the result of wealth.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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94a6a60
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Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0b6c7d2
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The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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842e005
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It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent "studying" the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world."
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knowledge
life
news
prediction
time
work
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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91bbac0
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I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9aadc54
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First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f058f3f
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For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs--it worked like magic. The place resembled major cities of the eastern Mediterranean (called the Levant) more than it did the other parts in the interior of the Near East (it was easier to move by ship than by land through the mountainous terrain). Th..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ddce6b6
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awareness of a problem does not mean much--particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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aaa6bee
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But promoting philosophical skepticism is not quite the mission of this book. If awareness of the Black Swan problem can lead us into withdrawal and extreme skepticism, I take here the exact opposite direction. I am interested in deeds and true empiricism. So, this book was not written by a Sufi mystic, or even by a skeptic in the ancient or medieval sense, or even (we will see) in a philosophical sense, but by a practitioner whose principa..
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skepticism
sufi
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4b63754
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The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4a027f
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No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5080d10
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Another way to view it: the iatrogenics is in the patient, not in the treatment. If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged--no holds barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bfc47b2
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Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event. Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1acb0a4
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When you are employed, hence dependent on other people's judgment, looking busy can help you claim responsibility for the results in a random environment. The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results and one's role in them.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fd60bf1
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Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f28aa49
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ignoramus et ignorabimus--we are ignorant and will remain so. Somehow
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1f770ec
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complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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66b5984
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Consider the tourist brochures used by countries to advertise their wares: you can expect that the pictures presented to you will look much, much better than anything you will encounter in the place. And the bias, the difference (for which humans correct, thanks to common sense), can be measured as the country shown in the tourist brochure minus the country seen with your naked eyes. That difference can be small, or large. We also make such..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d98b531
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But we don't correct for the difference in science, medicine, and mathematics, for the same reasons we didn't pay attention to iatrogenics. We are suckers for the sophisticated. In institutional research, one can selectively report facts that confirm one's story, without revealing facts that disprove it or don't apply to it--so the public perception of science is biased into believing in the necessity of the highly conceptualized, crisp, an..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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06dcaa7
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Of course chance favors the prepared! Hard work, showing up on time, wearing a clean (preferably white) shirt, using deodorant, and some such conventional things contribute to success--they are certainly necessary but may be insufficient as they do not cause success.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4f14f12
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Montaigne also detected the agency problem, or why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy: "No doctor derives pleasure from the health of his friends, wrote the ancient Greek satirist, no soldier from the peace of his city, etc." (Nul medecin ne prent plaisir a la sante de ses amis mesmes, dit l'ancien Comique Grec, ny soldat a la paix de sa ville: ainsi du reste.)"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2d11ceb
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our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4d59bd6
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A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator.
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openness
questioning
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bd1a2d1
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Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced. ..."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1073721
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We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws. I
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f602ba3
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Metric-lowering drugs are particularly vicious because of a legal complexity. The doctor has the incentive to prescribe it because should the patient have a heart attack, he would be sued for negligence; but the error in the opposite direction is not penalized at all, as side effects do not appear at all as being caused by the medicine.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5ec729a
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If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5db8f75
|
Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a "disagreement."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7320fbd
|
Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much -- but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.
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p199
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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85a4473
|
Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed--but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |