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27415ee
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fe8461a
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True, the Web produces acute concentration. A large number of users visit just a few sites, such as Google, which, at the time of this writing, has total market dominance. At no time in history has a company grown so dominant so quickly--Google can service people from Nicaragua to southwestern Mongolia to the American West Coast, without having to worry about phone operators, shipping, delivery, and manufacturing. This is the ultimate winne..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e5d26b4
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Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d9b0111
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Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity--particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late. The ideas advanced here are not polit..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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12cfbcb
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It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2e6a4f8
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we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d6912a8
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Mine was the only job you could do if you thought of yourself as risk-hating, risk-aware, and highly ignorant.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8da7179
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social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1694f5a
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They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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50951d6
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For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead pre..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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316dcab
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If both the positive and the negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast. But 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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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15da1cb
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So, suspecting that Nero had a contract on her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons that would have been available to her son's underlings. Like Mithridates, Agrippina eventually died by more mechanical methods as her son (supposedly) had assassins slay her, thus providing us with the small but meaningful lesson that one cannot be robust against everything. And, two thousand years later, nobody has found a method for us to get..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dde31fe
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Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.
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risk
risk-taking
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9e4c154
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Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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02c760d
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This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8562345
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In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success--but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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31334e8
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Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion.
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objectivity
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5a2cfb5
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You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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20ce4a9
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Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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32d5be4
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central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists--Combining
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7f30478
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Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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686de88
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A civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking--and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. (Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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414c894
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A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a1daf31
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The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.
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renewal
regeneration
resilience
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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08962ba
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There is something nonphilosophical about investing one's pride and ego into a "my house/ library/ car is bigger than that of others in my category"--it is downright foolish to claim to be first in one's category all the while sitting on a time bomb." --
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a630ec3
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The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin. People
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0a61fff
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The best way to prove the arbitrary character of these categories, and the contagion effect they produce, is to remember how frequently these clusters reverse in history. Today's alliance between Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby would certainly seem puzzling to a nineteenth-century intellectual--Christians used to be anti-Semites and Moslems were the protectors of the Jews, whom they preferred to Christians. Libertarians used..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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370b016
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If you want to understand how vapid are the current modernistic arguments (and understand your existential priorities), consider the difference between lions in the wild and those in captivity. Lions in captivity live longer; they are technically richer, and they are guaranteed job security for life, if these are the criteria you are focusing on ...
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f83f65f
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A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars). This would get priestly people into office.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7fa4c86
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what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fb779ef
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An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e44715f
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It is always convenient to invoke universalism when you are in the majority.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0731376
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If you think that you can control your emotions, think that some people also believe that they can control their heartbeat or hair growth.)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f16c56a
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To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bb498ca
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Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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463a3dd
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The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8938f21
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When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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96b2e45
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Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.
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risk
sacrifice
life
risk-taking
harm
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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afa02b7
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The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.
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result
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f39b2d5
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Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop's fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4b6a25
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numeraire
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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517aeae
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Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bullshit vendor.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ffb07ef
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One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ff62a45
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We live to produce information, or improve on it. Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri--either children or books, both information that caries through the centuries...I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books, --my information, that is, my genes, the anti-fragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |