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a117c84
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What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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20052e8
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Per il robusto un errore e informazione, per il debole un errore e solo un errore
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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25a1838
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But things are even worse: in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. If you climb mountains and ride a motorcycle and hang around the mob and fly your own small plane and drink absinthe, and smoke cigarettes, and play parkour on Thursday night, your life expectancy is considerably reduced, although no single action will have a meaningful effect. This idea of repetition makes paranoia about some ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bdf9f06
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gene plays a role, are quite tractable, but anything entailing higher dimensionality falls apart. Understanding the genetic makeup of a unit will never allow us to understand the behavior of the unit itself. A reminder that what I am writing here isn't an opinion. It is a straightforward mathematical property. The mean-field approach is when one uses the average interaction between, say, two people, and generalizes to the group--it is only ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9e91070
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I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the "intellectual" profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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31fb4fb
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Economics is not a science and should not be there to advise policy.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f1c2153
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This chapter has two topics. First, we are demonstrably arrogant about what we think we know. We certainly know a lot, but we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we actually do, enough of that little bit to occasionally get into serious trouble. We shall see how you can verify, even measure, such arrogance in your own living room. Second, we will look at the implications of this arrogance for all the activi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ae31c03
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Light control works; close control leads to overreaction,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1e6e33d
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people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9b6719a
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Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7158c78
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Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b997be7
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Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6c09e22
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An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7a433c6
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The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8e3ce10
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A squeeze occurs when people have no choice but to do something, and do it right away, regardless of the costs.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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65296f7
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Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)--yet he gets little or no credit for it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8bd1907
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Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of "skin in the game." Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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87a430d
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It is often with the most noble intentions that we do so, as we are pressured to "fix" things, so we often blow them up with our fear of randomness and love of smoothness."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7d5b8fb
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It is the same kind of deep internal disgust that takes hold of me when I see a rich eighty-two-year-old man surrounded with "babes," twentysomething mistresses (often Russian or Ukrainian). I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components--and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective,..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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65ba917
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My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates--and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d83e81f
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domain-specific I mean that our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented, what
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2908a43
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In addition, there seems to be curious evidence of a link between leadership and a form of psychopathology (the sociopath) that encourages the nonblinking, self-confident, insensitive person to rally followers.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cbabe2c
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To view it in another way, consider the difference between judging on process and judging on results. Lower-ranking persons in the enterprise are judged on both process and results--in fact, owing to the repetitive aspect of their efforts, their process converges rapidly to results. But top management is only paid on result--no matter the process. There seems to be no such thing as a foolish decision if it results in profits. "Money talks,"..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7c9efed
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considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0a11b8e
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I've looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4a0b982
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So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried--but eventually failed--to harm us."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a0859c1
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Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cc283b2
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Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8b4f025
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Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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068c512
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A word on the display of emotions. Almost no one can conceal his emotions. Behavioral scientists believe that one of the main reasons why people become leaders is not from what skills they seem to possess, but rather from what extremely superficial impression they make on others through hardly perceptible physical signals--what we call today "charisma," for example. The biology of the phenomenon is now well studied under the subject heading..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5a5e518
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What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c16abcf
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Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of . By history, I don't mean just those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract buyers). History, I will repeat, is seen with the effect of . This bias extends to the ascription of factors in the success of ideas and religions, to the illusion of skill in many professions, to success in artistic occupations, to the n..
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history
silent-evidence
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9d1b8f5
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We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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acdd22c
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avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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680bf62
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I believe that the principal asset I need to protect and cultivate is my deep-seated intellectual insecurity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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79af77a
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In a system, the sacrifices of some units--fragile units, that is, or people--are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2795707
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illusion of local causal chains--that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e15f68f
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an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2e428a2
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Of course, it is not so easy to "falsify," i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections in your testing method may yield a mistaken "no." The doctor discovering cancer cells might have faulty equipment causing optical illusions; or he could be a bell-curve-using economist disguised as a doctor. An eyewitness to a crime might be drunk. But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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899d3b6
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Locke's definition of a madman: someone "reasoning correctly from erroneous premises."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0fa8700
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You never win an argument until they attack your person.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d00bd99
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I am used to facing, at the end of a conference lecture, the question "So what is the difference between robust and antifragile?" or the more unenlightened and even more irritating "Antifragile is resilient, no?" The reaction to my answer is usually "Ah," with the look "Why didn't you say that before?" (of course I had said that before). Even the initial referee of the scientific article I wrote on defining and detecting antifragility entir..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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12fffa8
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You are a lucky man; you presented in such a comprehensive way the effect of chance on society and the overestimation of cause and effect. You show how stupid we are to systematically try to explain skills.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a9ba1d9
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people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |