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d52cb03
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It was a few years after the beginning of the Lebanese war, as I was attending the Wharton School, at the age of twenty-two, that I was hit with the idea of efficient markets--an idea that holds that there is no way to derive profits from traded securities since these instruments have automatically incorporated all the available information. Public information can therefore be useless, particularly to a businessman, since prices can already..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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17499c8
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Pero las ventas de un libro o la magnitud de los sucesos sociales no siguen este tipo de restricciones. Cuesta mucho mas de mil dias aceptar que un escritor carece de talento, que no se producira un crac en la Bolsa, que no estallara una guerra, que un proyecto no tiene futuro, que un pais es <>, que una empresa no entrara en bancarrota, que el analista de seguridad de una agencia de Bolsa no es un charlatan, o que un vecino..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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88ed267
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The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e105792
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Independence is person-specific: I have always been taken aback at the high number of people in whom an astonishingly high income led to additional sycophancy as they became more dependent on their clients and employers and more addicted to making even more money.)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8022a80
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So I stayed in the quant and trading businesses (I'm still there), but organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend business "meetings," avoid the company of "achievers" and people in suits who don't read books, and take a sabbatical year for every three on average to fill up gaps in my scientific and philosophical culture. To slowly distill my single idea, I want..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ce29535
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We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer--our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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af65f5f
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La mente humana padece tres trastornos cuando entra en contacto con la historia, lo que yo llamo el terceto de la opacidad. Son los siguientes: a) la ilusion de comprender, o como todos pensamos que sabemos lo que pasa en un mundo que es mas complicado (o aleatorio) de lo que creemos; b) la distorsion retrospectiva, o como podemos evaluar las cosas solo despues del hecho, como si se reflejaran en un retrovisor (la historia parece mas clara ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9eff8b0
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Todo lo que se necesita es una sola (y, por lo que me dicen, fea) ave negra.** Doy un paso adelante, dejando atras esta cuestion logico-filosofica, para entrar en la realidad empirica, la cual me obsesiona desde nino.*** Lo que aqui llamamos un Cisne Negro (asi, en mayusculas) es un suceso con los tres atributos que siguen. Primero, es una rareza, pues habita fuera del reino de las expectativas normales, porque nada del pasado puede apuntar..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c460f29
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Lo que no sabemos La logica del Cisne Negro hace que lo que no sabemos sea mas importante que lo que sabemos.* Tengamos en cuenta que muchos Cisnes Negros pueden estar causados y exacerbados por el hecho de ser inesperados.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7192f7f
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No es extrano ver que un suceso se produce precisamente porque no se esperaba que fuera a ocurrir? ?Que tipo de defensa tenemos contra ello? Cualquier cosa que se nos ocurra (que Nueva York es un blanco facil para los terroristas, por ejemplo) puede resultar ineficaz si el enemigo sabe que lo sabemos. Quiza parezca raro que, en un juego estrategico de este tipo, lo que sabemos pueda ser por completo intrascendente.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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de8a3f9
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La estrategia de los descubridores y emprendedores es confiar menos en la planificacion de arriba abajo y centrarse al maximo en reconocer las oportunidades cuando se presentan, y juguetear con ellas. De modo que no estoy de acuerdo con los seguidores de Marx y los de Adam Smith: si los mercados libres funcionan es porque dejan que la gente tenga suerte, gracias al agresivo metodo del ensayo y error, y no dan a las personas recompensas ni <..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2eed5de
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the following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more compl..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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86d0f58
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The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden--just as Germans still pay for war crimes--would immediately add consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a true disincentive, without imparting any sense..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fc64390
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It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8f82fd7
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you have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ee07c02
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Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity--yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fb9cf18
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What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work; the harder they try, the more captive they are."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a4cecb9
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I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obtained by multiplying the probabilities by the corresponding outcomes).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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97f052b
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An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5286a5a
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The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as" --
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f0d42b6
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Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. 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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07855ba
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A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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474a98e
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The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider once again the example of the gambler. If you look at the population of beginning gamblers taken as a whole, you can be close to certain that one of them (but you do not know in ad..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5f9937b
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Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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96bf7c1
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He is susceptible to conference room boredom and is incapable of talking to businessmen, particularly the run-of-the-mill variety. Nero is allergic to the vocabulary of business talk, not just on plain aesthetic grounds. Phrases like "game plan," "bottom line," "how to get there from here," "we provide our clients with solutions," "our mission," and other hackneyed expressions that dominate meetings lack both the precision and the coloratio..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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aa0c473
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Yo observaba que personas muy inteligentes e informadas no tenian ventaja alguna sobre los taxistas en sus predicciones, pero habia una diferencia crucial. Los taxistas no pensaban que comprendieran las cosas mejor que las personas con estudios; ellos no eran los especialistas, y lo sabian. Nadie sabia nada, pero los pensadores de elite estaban convencidos de que sabian mas que los demas porque eran pensadores reputados, y cuando se es miem..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8ae4311
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La mejor forma de demostrar el caracter arbitrario de estas categorias, y el efecto de contagio que producen, es recordar con que frecuencia esos grupos cambian por completo a lo largo de la historia. No hay duda de que la actual alianza entre los fundamentalistas cristianos y el lobby israeli seria incomprensible para un intelectual del siglo XIX: los cristianos eran antisemitas, y los musulmanes protegian a los judios, a quienes preferian..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b999b0e
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it took me a lifetime to figure out the second point: implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8e2a885
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taking the half-invented into the invented is often the real breakthrough
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9b0ac6c
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the simpler and more obvious the discovery, the less equipped we are to figure it out by complicated methods.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e583624
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We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those "risk experts" in the economic domain who fight the previous war)--these are the scientists now trying to impose the solutions on us. But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6734f02
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the Swiss doctor Claparede had an amnesic patient completely crippled with her ailment. Her condition was so bad that he would have to reintroduce himself to her at a frequency of once per fifteen minutes for her to remember who he was. One day he secreted a pin in his hand before shaking hers. The next day she quickly withdrew her hand as he tried to greet her, but still did not recognize him. Since then plenty of discussions of amnesic pa..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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298e17f
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both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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77aec4d
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Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9ac67f9
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You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet we tend to not be aware of this property.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9de1697
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I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the "intellectual" profession who bothers me."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9d077f7
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examined the cures from cancer that resulted from a visit to Lourdes in France, where people were healed by simple contact with the holy waters, and found out the interesting fact that, of the total cancer patients who visited the place, the cure rate was, if anything, lower than the statistical one for spontaneous remissions. It was lower than the average for those who did not go to Lourdes! Should a statistician infer here that cancer pat..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9e25255
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Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3a265d2
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Take a population of 10 people, 9 having a net worth of $ 30,000 and 1 having a net worth of $ 1,000. The average net worth is $ 27,100 and 9 out of 10 people will have above average wealth.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c69835e
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He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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53cd974
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What do the popular expressions "a swimmer's body" and "beginner's luck" have in common? What do they seem to share with the concept of history? There is a belief among gamblers that beginners are almost always lucky. "It gets worse later, but gamblers are always lucky when they start out," you hear. This statement is actually empirically true: researchers confirm that gamblers have lucky beginnings (the same applies to stock market specula..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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222d39d
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More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, Stoic, manipulator-politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the following story. One Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, "Where were the ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f3780b8
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la muerte a menudo es un buen paso profesional para el escritor).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e9cf890
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newspapers do not have to have a screaming headline saying that nothing new is taking place (though the Bible was smart enough to declare ein chadash tachat hashemesh--" nothing new under the sun," providing the information that things just do recur)."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |