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7929eda
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after the event you start predicting the possibility of other outliers happening locally, that is, in the process you were just surprised by, but not elsewhere. After
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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78a1557
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we are effectively not skilled at intuitively gauging the impact of the improbable, such
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1e9398e
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Further, in countries where wealth comes from rent-seeking, political patronage, or regulatory capture (which, I remind the reader, is how the powerful and the insiders use regulation to scam the public, or red tape to slow down competition), wealth is seen as zero-sum.*2
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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32b8c8e
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The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8f6f93d
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There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7736e5a
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Transportation didn't get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3270a96
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Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6511a5e
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The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8877284
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Conduct yourself toward your parents as you would have your children conduct themselves toward you.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c74b087
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The Federal Reserve bank protected them at our expense: when "conservative" bankers make profits, they get the benefits; when they are hurt, we pay the costs."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2a57281
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Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ceebdac
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Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters--those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8d4fb99
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The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ebab762
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Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f539a1b
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This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say, some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed,"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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42b2824
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The difference between a trader and an investor lies in the duration of the bet, and the corresponding size. There
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3a57b6a
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scholars--scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c1a1ffa
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The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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31175d3
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Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5a10afa
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Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fc02824
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our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1633958
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Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b2fd83a
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The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c6ad643
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The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?+
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7da435a
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the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4d7d11e
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His idea is that if we were to optimize at every step in life, then it would cost us an infinite amount of time and energy. Accordingly,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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80edc66
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perception of causation has a biological foundation.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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173e0d8
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In that sense the description coming from journalism is certainly not just an unrealistic representation of the world but rather the one that can fool you the most by grabbing your attention via your emotional apparatus--the cheapest to deliver sensation. Take
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4ba4e42
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the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bfdf715
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How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6210ef1
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Our tendency to perceive--to impose--narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease--dimension reduction.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4af2ac1
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This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was--or is.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8cc5eaf
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One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e34ee26
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Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution--so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b28cab0
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We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d228ee6
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it is not so easy to "falsify," i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections" --
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9ce84a9
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Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself--and no doubt his peers.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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db6cee9
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second fallacy lies in failing to take into account forecast degradation as the projected period lengthens. We
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2b5e6f3
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but at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a2326b4
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Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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65fbf39
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The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the watercooler.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2b688c7
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it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8b7a401
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reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency. Many
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ac49100
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often an action's positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visible, while the negative consequences, being invisible, apply to others, with a net cost to society. Consider
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |