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35f139f
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It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied--what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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baff94e
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Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dfaa0da
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It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them--even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the university campuses and some philosophaster who has never taken real risks in his life, or, worse, never had a life, would inform you that "they are clearly not the same thing."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ac66ada
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We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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320f115
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Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy. ...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen. The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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286eaad
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The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2b9a78f
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incertitude.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3467a84
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And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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352d1de
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You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8466a76
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cocksure prophet. Where I beg to differ with the great
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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96be3ad
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The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear--the simplification that distorts.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a150700
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If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d661d70
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What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don't have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile--and
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fdc2cbe
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why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?" Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c2903b5
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A king, angry at his son, swore that he would crush him with a large stone.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fc92919
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In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected "scientific" establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6372661
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There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us--that we can comprehend easily.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c2a2564
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Let us return to the distinction between Thalesian and Aristotelian for a minute and look at evolution from the following point of view. The frequency, i.e., how often someone is right is largely irrelevant in the real world, but alas, one needs to be a practitioner, not a talker, to figure it out. On paper, the frequency of being right matters, but only on paper--typically, fragile payoffs have little (sometimes no) upside, and antifragile..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a02cda0
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by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7af8ffb
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f2bc72b
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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.)"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1f4094a
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And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c9a88c6
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reality does not have the same closed and symmetric laws and regulations as games.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0295033
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f08f943
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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..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3ec8baa
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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 ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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20171e6
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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345ccaa
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Love without sacrifice is like theft.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8191d47
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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."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e856286
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A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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22deedb
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My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3c9e335
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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38ace53
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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."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0272a43
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a81700a
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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
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1b681ba
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You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples--it depends on how the choices are presented to you. The
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cdb075b
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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
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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70b660b
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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
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4f5ff0
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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 ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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21bfc28
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The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1214a3d
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4c4550a
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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306d6f5
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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..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3b30003
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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
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |