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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 |
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7f472df
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from the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by luck. Note
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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727da8d
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My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dc49945
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do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the "because" and handle it with care--particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ac03ccc
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Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4b0229
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Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fef40d6
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One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7efe5ae
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for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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58557b4
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naive empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world--these instances are always easy to find. Alas,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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72a2038
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I can find confirmation for just about anything, the
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ad3d159
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a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. Seeing
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e25c69d
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Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent--he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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78458e3
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Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1aa1355
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Technothinkers tend to have an "engineering mind"--to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don't usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness--mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e7fa30a
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Further, we are victims to a new disease, called in this book neomania, that makes us build Black Swan-vulnerable systems--"progress."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e9a1a54
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Elsa Triolet ("time burns but leaves no ashes")."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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00ba861
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If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b0093d1
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Two weekends in Philadelphia are not twice as pleasant as a single one--I've tried.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8e2bf64
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Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b70e272
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loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c2c6875
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It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best. In Baudelaire's poem, "The albatross's giant wings prevent him from walking"--many do better in Calculus 103 than Calculus 101."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bbffeae
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The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom....Soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error from children's lives and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. They are good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are totally untrained ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8a930f9
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science is about how not to be a sucker.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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266416c
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e5411b8
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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. ...
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b49f6c7
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matters are far worse: we may have no less of a problem with phony skepticism.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |