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Greenspan's actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3105e49
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we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafes away from information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silen..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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It is hard to resist discussion of artificial history without a comment on the father of all pseudothinkers, Hegel. Hegel writes a jargon that is meaningless outside of a chic Left Bank Parisian cafe or the humanities department of some university extremely well insulated from the real world.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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preponderates,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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epistemology,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues.... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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49a6c65
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A random series will always present some detectable pattern. I
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent--and most conspicuous--and that is the world of markets. By
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b228da8
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I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work--better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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doxastic
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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In a now famous experiment they found that the majority of people, whether predictors or nonpredictors, will judge a deadly flood (causing thousands of deaths) caused by a California earthquake to be more likely than a fatal flood (causing thousands of deaths) occurring somewhere in North America (which happens to include California). As a derivatives trader I noticed that people do not like to insure against something abstract; the risk th..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ac9a2a0
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It turned out that the ancients--again, those ancients!--were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ec83c0a
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One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil's Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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17cf342
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later--unlike gardeners, who understand rather well that pruning trees strengthens them. Likewise peace--some kind of forced, constrained, non-natural peace--may be costly in lives: just
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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Joseph Stiglitz, with two colleagues, the Orszag brothers (Peter and Jonathan), looked at the very same Fannie Mae. They assessed, in a report, that "on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero."* Supposedly, they ran simulations--but didn't see the obvious. They also said that the probability of a default was found to be "so small that it is difficult to detect...
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5873eb7
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The central point: had Stiglitz been a businessman with his own money on the line, he would have blown up, terminated. Or had he been in nature, his genes would have been made extinct--so people with such misunderstanding of probability would eventually disappear from our DNA. What I found nauseating was the government hiring one of his coauthors.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7477866
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To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course soc..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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87d33a0
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Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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Education has benefits aside from stabilizing family incomes. Education makes individuals more polished dinner partners, for instance, something non-negligible. But the idea of educating people to improve the economy is rather novel. 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 suc..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8f63be3
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Or, if I have to work, I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the rest of the time (assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition, rather than being subjected to the tedium of Japanese style low-intensity interminable office hours with sleep deprivation. Main course and dessert are separate.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9068a02
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I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth--there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation "theory" is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs "chimeras" rather than theories."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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28f02a4
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Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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78eb51e
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Before the "enlightenment" and the age of rationality, there was in the culture a collection of tricks to deal with our fallibility and reversals of fortunes. The elders can still help us with some of their ruses."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5a10e07
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For instance, it has been argued since the 1970s that limiting speed on the highway (and enforcing it) leads to an extremely effective increase in safety. This can be plausible because risks of accidents increase disproportionally (that is, nonlinearly) with speed, and humans are not ancestrally equipped with such intuition. Someone recklessly driving a huge vehicle on the highway is endangering your safety and needs to be stopped before he..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and antifragility within the current U.S. political discourse--that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism--both are the same to me here.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4fc148a
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And the key phrase reverberating in Seneca's oeuvre is nihil perditi, "I lost nothing," after an adverse event. Stoicism"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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986465f
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If you can't put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.
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soul
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e0bf30b
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Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden government trying to "reinstill confidence" you know they are fragile, hence doomed."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions) very long sample paths would end up resembling each other. The properties of a very, very long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f777054
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Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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Je prefererais etre bete et antifragile qu'extremement intelligent et fragile, a n'importe quel moment.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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The brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human. The converse should be true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human. Can o..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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217c94e
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Le processus de la decouverte (ou de l'innovation, ou du progres technologique) depend lui-meme d'un bricolage antifragile, d'une brusque prise de risques plutot que d'une culture formelle.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d4252ec
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Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c4ae492
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I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what's done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |