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88aba49
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The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and "learning," not economic growth (they were not suckers at the time)--a point also made by Alison Wolf."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4029557
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The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8b7fa30
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People can't predict how ong they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as "limits of prediction." They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1071b43
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Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cd4c365
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If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad'. Upon examination, this may be less interesting a concept than it appears at first: Such probability is ridiculously low. But let us carry the reasoning one step beyond. Now that we have found that hero among monkeys, would any reader invest his ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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becd893
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But the technology is only trivial retrospectively--not prospectively.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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95845e7
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between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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103f55e
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They had all the means to develop a spinning machine, but "nobody tried"--another example of knowledge hampering optionality. They probably needed someone like Steve Jobs--blessed with an absence of college education and the right aggressiveness of temperament--to take the elements to their natural conclusion. As we will see in the next section, it is precisely this type of uninhibited doer who made the Industrial Revolution happen."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f66abff
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There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situations.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8baa997
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Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upsid..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9501725
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An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid cancers (eradication of white blood cells). But
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0ed1add
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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11180e7
|
certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating--or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0daa5f3
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It is often said that "is wise he who can see things coming." Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b9aaf73
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We build toys. Some of those toys change the world.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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75bf2f1
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scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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016af52
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The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c0c997b
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My idea is that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans. These
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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34ea140
|
This book is the synthesis of, on one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated with probabilistic outcomes and, on the other, the aesthetically obsessed, literature-loving human being willing to be fooled by any form of nonsense that is polished, refined, original, and tasteful. I am not capable of avoiding being the fool o..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d603c7f
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Charlatan" was held to be a synonym for empirick. The word "empiric" designated someone who relied on experiment and experience to ascertain what was correct. In other words, trial and error and tinkering. That was held to be inferior--professionally, socially, and intellectually. It is still not considered to be very "intelligent."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a67b019
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Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability. For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0aa6e7a
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As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning--actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flaneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library. Provided
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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37402b3
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Actually my father kept hinting to me the problem of getting good grades himself: the person who was at the exact bottom of his class (and ironically, the father of a classmate at Wharton) turned out to be a self-made merchant, by far the most successful person in his class (he had a huge yacht with his initials prominently displayed on it); another one made a killing buying wood in Africa, retired before forty, then became an amateur histo..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3d2c192
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Monsieur de Norpois is made to be ashamed of the fact that he expressed a different opinion. Proust did not consider that the diplomat might have changed his mind. We
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3bb06a1
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People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the real world can't afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane. Unlike
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8c09343
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In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the bored..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5149e35
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An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a49633b
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People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are hard-headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them, like spending eighteen hours a day perfecting their doctoral thesis.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3bcdf36
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to avoid dullness may help to filter out the nonessential.)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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58e6213
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the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fd4782d
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A Solution Waiting for a Problem Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets. It so happens that some of these tools bring us more knowledge; because of the silent evidence effect, we forget to consider tools that accomplished nothing but keeping engineers off the streets. Tools lead to unexpected discoveries, which themselves lead to other unexpected discoveries. But rarel..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0c877eb
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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 became encyclopedias of who had met with whom and which politician said what to which other politician (and ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6f8fb18
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Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves "risk experts"). This provides a solution to what I've called the Black Swan problem--the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm. So we propose to stand our c..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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adcc9f8
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By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b68daa1
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A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0ce1c30
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The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect--our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b4d6f8e
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Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e9b1f61
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By throwing enough words together, some unusual and magical-sounding metaphor is bound to emerge according to the laws of combinatorics.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5fd35b4
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Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio (only when the words outperform silence). These
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4751d73
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Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools--by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e15b1b6
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The mechanism is a probabilistic method called conditional information: Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2720214
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Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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12689f0
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It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions.
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past-actions
thinking
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6204dc8
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Know how to rank your beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
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plausibility
harm
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |