|
7af8ffb
|
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author's nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f2bc72b
|
The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered "good"; I wonder why people don't make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something "bad," say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.)"
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
1f4094a
|
And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c9a88c6
|
reality does not have the same closed and symmetric laws and regulations as games.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
0295033
|
There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f08f943
|
In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, though perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized, particularly if he lives in Japan). For there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)--likewise, there is no such thing a..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3ec8baa
|
What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the ..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
20171e6
|
The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story--to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
345ccaa
|
Love without sacrifice is like theft.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
8191d47
|
While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of entertainers called Wall Street "economists" or "strategists," who make pronouncements on the fate of the markets, but do not engage in any form of risk taking, thus having their success dependent on rhetoric rather than actually testable facts."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
e856286
|
A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
22deedb
|
My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3c9e335
|
Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right--the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flaneur.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
38ace53
|
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: "It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues.... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
0272a43
|
The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
a81700a
|
Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
1b681ba
|
You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples--it depends on how the choices are presented to you. The
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
cdb075b
|
Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
70b660b
|
This anchoring to a number is the reason people do not react to their total accumulated wealth, but to differences of wealth from whatever number they are currently anchored to. This is the major conflict with economic theory, as according to economists, someone with $1 million in the bank would be more satisfied than if he had half a million. But
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
e4f5ff0
|
Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department. The same with artisans: the quality lies in their product, not their conversation--in fact they can easily have false beliefs that, as a side effect (inverse iatrogenics), lead them to make better products, so what? Bureaucrats, on the other hand, because of ..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
21bfc28
|
The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
1214a3d
|
These traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. I call them crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
4c4550a
|
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 |
|
306d6f5
|
More generally, we underestimate the share of randomness in about everything, a point that may not merit a book--except when it is the specialist who is the fool of all fools. Disturbingly, science has only recently been able to handle randomness (the growth in available information has been exceeded only by the expansion of noise). Probability theory is a young arrival in mathematics; probability applied to practice is almost nonexistent a..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3b30003
|
When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles--and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7731939
|
Basically this category would include those who think that the cure for obesity is to inform people that they should be healthy.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7a34209
|
Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
cea2f87
|
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion--in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking--little else.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
81f6883
|
Verba volent, words fly. Never have people who talk and don't do been more visible, and played a larger role, than in modern times. This is the product of modernism and division of tasks. Recall that I said that America's
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
008b68f
|
We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |