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d55c796
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Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7ff6f81
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We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a0d61e2
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Most people fear being without audiovisual stimulation because they are too repetitive when they think and imagine things on their own.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d17d5b1
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This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c72626b
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There is a Yiddish saying: "If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind." If I am going to be fooled by randomness, it better be of the beautiful (and harmless) kind."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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81a0eed
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Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bae4afc
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Being self-owned is a state of mind.
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distraction
discipleship
materialism
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ba0c9d0
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If you want to accelerate someone's death, give him a personal doctor. I don't mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cb9b633
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higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection; an
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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10f07f1
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respect for the weak being, after intellectual courage, the second most attractive quality to this author),
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a522377
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They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status--but rarely for your wisdom.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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45e9d3d
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When the person is highly intelligent, he can astonish you with the most far-fetched, yet completely plausible interpretations of the most innocuous remark. If
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bc7a421
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One of the most irritating conversations I've had is with people who lecture me on how I should behave. Most of us know pretty much how we should behave. It is the execution that is the problem, not the absence of knowledge. I am tired of the moralizing slow-thinkers who pound me with platitudes like I should floss daily, eat my regular apple, and visit the gym outside of the New Year's resolution. In the markets the recommendation would be..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cb188ee
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And, as expected, via negativa is part of classical wisdom. For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4f7ae1c
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The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6561d66
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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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eeb9f4e
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Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use "American values" or "Western principles" in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples' right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suici..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7caa178
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We can discuss this point from different angles. Experts call one manifestation of such denigration of history historical determinism. In a nutshell we think that we would know when history is made; we believe that people who, say, witnessed the stock market crash of 1929 knew then that they lived an acute historical event and that, should these events repeat themselves, they too would know about such facts. Life for us is made to resemble ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dae05b8
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A theory is like medicine or government: often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving and, on occasion, lethal. It needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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67b9af9
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We are social animals; hell is other people.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4bb66a4
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The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be prudent and careful in daily life, forcing us to add an extra layer of protection, but
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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19f99cf
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If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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64be207
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Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e96b49e
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This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today--as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e59e91d
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Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists, as we saw with GMOs, the Syrian wars, etc. You say something unpopular in that profession about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, and you become history. This is the opposite of business where me-tooism is penalized.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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be36e12
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But fragility and antifragility are part of the current property of an object, a coffee table, a company, an industry, a country, a political system. We can detect fragility, see it, even in many cases measure it, or at least measure comparative fragility with a small error while comparisons of risk have been (so far) unreliable.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f958465
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For The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f7b7123
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bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce a precise, unbiased understanding of ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5b5fbfe
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Further, skin in the game creates diversity, not monoculture. Economic insecurity worsens the condition. Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists, as we saw with GMOs, the Syrian wars, etc. You say something unpopular in that profession about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, and ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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de57b7f
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Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung" goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terror), and a few others."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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31ba6e8
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Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: "It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8cabeaf
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Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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db6e3e6
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A BS DETECTION HEURISTIC The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the person had to succeed in spite of the credentialization of his competitors and overcome more serious hurdles. In addition, people who didn't go to Harvard are easier to deal with in real life.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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47df5a2
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The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality--without exploiting them for fun and profit.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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519be31
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Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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70d2703
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understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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12c8bf5
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Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c559b9b
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It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are "wrong," by betting against his representation of the world."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9dc149a
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I AM NOT SO INTELLIGENT The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. Besides, I believe that I need my emotions to formulate my ideas and get the energy to execute them. I am just intelligent enough to understand that I have a predisposition to be fooled by randomness--and to accept the fact that I am rather emotional. I am domina..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7018313
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As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance--the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beats rationalizations and lectures. Like antifragile tinkering, mistakes are small and rapidly forgotten. I want to be happy to be human and be in an environment in which other people are in love with their fate--and never, until my brush with ac..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b0b9db9
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you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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aa27b9a
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is often a good career move for an author.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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84ffb5b
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There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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212a46d
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whenever I hear work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |