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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 |
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7d605ae
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had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it--we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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04a5708
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Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by "reason." Polybius in his Histories compares the Greek legislator Lycurgus, who constructed his political system while "untaught by adversity," to the more experiential Romans, who, a few centuries later, "have not reached it by any process of reasoning [emphasis mine],..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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99c568c
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And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7674d91
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The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0174d34
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For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1fda4f1
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Now for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the role of Black Swans in increasing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ef6d71a
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For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c0dcd88
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We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it--particularly in intellectual life. The
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3949073
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probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4b722f
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One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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45cca98
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Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b9761c0
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The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ebd22c4
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American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America's specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country's disproportionate share in innovations.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c04b5ca
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I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness--very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right. I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be w..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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836ebca
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Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. We are left only with dignity as a solution--dignity defined as the execution of a protocol of behavior that does not depend on the immediate circumstance. It may not be the optimal one, but it certainly is the one that makes us feel best. Grace under p..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a64d499
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Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do-except, of course, when we think about it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f76515a
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If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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49084d9
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From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans-we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the "three meals a day," "eat in m..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c91231a
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Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |