|
0c7d00e
|
the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7773411
|
Also consider that lobbyists--this annoying race of lobbyists--cannot exist in a municipality or small region.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
b0b9db9
|
you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
aa27b9a
|
is often a good career move for an author.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
167cdd6
|
my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c8a9ea9
|
Paris itself was barely controlled by France--no more than the Rio slums called favelas are currently ruled by the Brazilian central state.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
dd7052b
|
The defender of the dogmas of modern finance and efficient markets started a fund that took advantage of market inefficiencies! It is as if the Pope converted to Islam.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
2aa0b66
|
Yet in spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that "necessity really is the mother of invention."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
8422aa4
|
It turns out, as shown by Karsenty and others who have since embarked on the line of research, that the reverse is also largely true: loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
bf7eff1
|
In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c9c69fb
|
Luck favors the prepared," Pasteur"
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
84ffb5b
|
There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
212a46d
|
whenever I hear work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity).
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f8fd48a
|
Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
d6a55ad
|
On the one hand, I try to define myself and behave officially as a no-nonsense hyperrealist ferreting out the role of chance; on the other, I have no qualms indulging in all manner of personal superstitions. Where do I draw the line? The answer is aesthetics.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
cd45445
|
from increasing the number of people in the "tails," that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with"
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
b33a4bb
|
that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
b1e5f03
|
The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
27415ee
|
Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7929eda
|
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
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
78a1557
|
we are effectively not skilled at intuitively gauging the impact of the improbable, such
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
1e9398e
|
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
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
32b8c8e
|
The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
8f6f93d
|
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7736e5a
|
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.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3270a96
|
Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
6511a5e
|
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
8877284
|
Conduct yourself toward your parents as you would have your children conduct themselves toward you.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c74b087
|
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."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
2a57281
|
Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
ceebdac
|
Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters--those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
8d4fb99
|
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.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
ebab762
|
Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f539a1b
|
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,"
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
42b2824
|
The difference between a trader and an investor lies in the duration of the bet, and the corresponding size. There
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3a57b6a
|
scholars--scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c1a1ffa
|
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
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
31175d3
|
Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
5a10afa
|
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
fc02824
|
our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives,
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
1633958
|
Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
b2fd83a
|
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
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c6ad643
|
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?+
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7da435a
|
the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |