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adumbration
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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db21179
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it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8a68ca5
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As the skeptics' main teaching was that nothing could be accepted with certainty, conclusions of various degrees of probability could be formed, and these supplied a guide to conduct.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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676af6b
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Bob Rubin Trade: payoff in a skewed domain where the benefits are visible (and rewarded with some compensation) and the detriment is rare (and unpunished owing to absence of skin in the game). Can be generalized to politics, anything where the penalty is weak and the victims are abstract and distributed (say taxpayers or shareholders).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1cf59aa
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c2ee4e0
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Such trait of absence of marriage to ideas is indeed rare among humans. Just as we do with children, we support those in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propagate our genes, so we do with ideas. An academic who became famous for espousing an opinion is not going to voice anything that can possibly devalue his own past work and kill years of investment. People who switch parties become traitors, renega..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c521e44
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In that sense harboring superstitions is not irrational by any metric: nobody has managed to build a criterion for rationality based on actions that bear no cost. But actions that harm you are detectable, if not observable.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0c386fc
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teleological
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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aa18870
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Hire the successful trader, conditional on a solid track record, whose details you can understand the least.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7d56cf5
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If you want to become antifragile, put yourself in the situation "loves mistakes"--to the right of "hates mistakes"--by making these numerous and small in harm. We will call this process and approach the "barbell" strategy."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e7e2ff5
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There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
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marriage
trading
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7a4a5a3
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Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d4a86e8
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We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6e2b207
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a system that doesn't have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b88ab9e
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Most of the debate between creationists and evolutionary theorists (of which I do not partake) lies in the following: creationists believe that the world comes from some form of design while evolutionary theorists see the world as a result of random changes by an aimless process. But it is hard to look at a computer or a car and consider them the result of aimless process. Yet they are.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0458d28
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Montaigne was neither one of the academics of the Sorbonne nor a professional man of letters, and he was not these things on two planes. First, he was a doer; he had been a magistrate, a businessman, and the mayor of Bordeaux before he retired to mull over his life and, mostly, his own knowledge. Second, he was an antidogmatist: he was a skeptic with charm, a fallible, noncommittal, personal, introspective writer, and, primarily, someone wh..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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57321db
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Something has worked in the past, until--well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bdf1ba5
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Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a710e0c
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stability is not good for the economy: firms become very weak during long periods of steady prosperity devoid of setbacks, and hidden vulnerabilities accumulate silently under the surface--so delaying crises is not a very good idea.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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762ab81
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Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5f18269
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absence of fluctuations in the market causes hidden risks to accumulate with impunity. The longer one goes without a market trauma, the worse the damage when commotion occurs.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9e59856
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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,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e440db0
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Randomness can be of considerable help with the matter. For there is another, far more entertaining way to make the distinction between the babbler and the thinker. You can sometimes replicate something that can be mistaken for a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo generator but it is not possible randomly to construct a scientific one. Rhetoric can be constructed randomly, but not genuine scientific knowledge. This
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0e081e8
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central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing--and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0c2137f
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disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2bc33d2
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This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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36af226
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narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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abd60c0
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We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cbf5006
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that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a20e3dc
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The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one
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philosophy
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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eb3e121
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law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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be8fc94
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follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6d261ec
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On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7912ece
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What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1e039cf
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it did not so much judge the quality of a trader's performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups--like
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1b8105b
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The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9bb2ce7
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By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the "cause"--actually,"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ae30766
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At the limit, you can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e0d35eb
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gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d1060e0
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The bias lowers our perception of the risks we incurred in the past, particularly for those of us who were lucky to have survived them. Your
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e6e38ea
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The major problem with inference in general is that those whose profession is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently than others. The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7626153
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A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived "chaos of human experience."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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48debab
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Knowledge, even when it is exact, does not often lead to appropriate actions because we tend to forget what we know, or forget how to process it properly if we do not pay attention, even when we are experts. Statisticians,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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433b01d
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Contrary to conventional wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations, like
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |