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896e292
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simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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886f5f5
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Stalin could not have existed in a municipality.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dce0c51
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The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d8b0f4d
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We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics--
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6e574c1
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He is often involved in a strange ritual, something commonly called "a meeting." Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn't see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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88afde6
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I suggest this passage from the German "philosopher" (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper): Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore,..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c6038eb
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But I also buy the opposite argument that regulating street signs does not seem to reduce risks; drivers become more placid. Experiments show that alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system (again, lack of overcompensation). Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator--fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than usi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9acbfba
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Some libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work, how it is whetted by a sense of danger and responsibility. As a result, many German and Dutch towns have reduced the number of street signs. We saw a version of the Drachten effect in Chapter 2 in t..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cb0823b
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But one needs to be careful not to overgeneralize the Drachten effect, as it does not imply the effectiveness of removing all rules from society. As I said earlier, speed on the highway responds to a different dynamic and its risks are different.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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89b9347
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A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revolution. The society included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald, and even Bertrand Russell for a moment. In retrospect, it turned out to be a very effective strategy, not so much as a way to achieve th..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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edd1855
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The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that's what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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de05b32
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In his book The Nature of Rationality he gets, as is typical with philosophers, into amateur evolutionary arguments and writes the following: "Since not more than 50 percent of the individuals can be wealthier than average." Of course, more than 50% of individuals can be wealthier than average. Consider that you have a very small number of very poor people and the rest clustering around the middle class. The mean will be lower than the medi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5de0e09
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The very same desire for order, interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits-it is just that, unlike art, the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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686b5cd
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Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur?
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a9bed80
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expositor
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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11a6121
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The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people's greed rather than their benevolence, but there is no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment (the reader can easily see that, aside from very few exceptions like George Soros, I am not impressed by people with money).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1ee4f2c
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Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cdb3c20
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Indeed, our bodies discover probabilities in a very sophisticated manner and assess risks much better than our intellects do. To take one example, risk management professionals look in the past for information on the so-called worst-case scenario and use it to estimate future risks--this method is called "stress testing." They take the worst historical recession, the worst war, the worst historical move in interest rates, or the worst point..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9688588
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While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0ba4eb0
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my wish is for people in general to remain fools of randomness (so I can trade against them), yet for there to remain a minority intelligent enough to value my methods and hire my services.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0e743dd
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what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bce1611
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dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7cb48d2
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A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion.
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leadership
prophecy
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e560ec7
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The Discovery of France,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b37d162
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As to liquid, my rule is drink no liquid that is not at least a thousand years old--so its fitness has been tested. I drink just wine, water, and coffee. No soft drinks. Perhaps the most possibly deceitfully noxious drink is the orange juice we make poor innocent people imbibe at the breakfast table while, thanks to marketing, we convince them it is "healthy."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1b20575
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equable
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3bcb556
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We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn't change. We
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6fc4d80
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In short, the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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11c6a12
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And, what's worse, we didn't get where we are today thanks to policy makers--but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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66e9cbf
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Popper's falsificationism is intimately connected to the notion of an open society. An open society is one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter-ideas to emerge. Karl Popper shared ideas with his friend, the low-key economist von Hayek, who endorsed capitalism as a state in which prices can disseminate information that bureaucratic socialism would choke. Both notions of falsificationism and open society are,..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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54483f5
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never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact--and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings." Likewise, never ask a trader if he is profitable; you can easily see it in his gesture and gait." --
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1d29922
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notion of alternative accounting: $ 10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1df419a
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For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1bc77a6
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Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again;
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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713ba5c
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Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them to "fail early" (so they can start again) and minimize the long-term damage to the system."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a316a9f
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A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.
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theory
necessary
lethal
self-serving
supervision
useless
medicine
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4e48d8
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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.fn3
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8cb9e14
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Significa esto que todos deberiamos convertirnos en jugadores durante una temporada, aprovechar la amabilidad que la dama de la fortuna muestra con los que empiezan, y luego parar? La respuesta es no. Se trata de la misma ilusion optica: quienes empiezan con el juego quiza tengan suerte o quiza no (puesto que el casino juega con ventaja, un numero ligeramente superior no tendra suerte). Los afortunados seguiran jugando, pues creeran que han..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e4c887e
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A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation, and close adult supervision.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c91dd9b
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Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.
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life
laboratory-experiments
open-ended
payoffs
research-papers
variable
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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87d39fb
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On a folded piece of paper, in turn, each one of them would write a predetermined part of a sentence, not knowing the others' choice. The first would pick an adjective, the second a noun, the third a verb, the fourth an adjective, and the fifth a noun. The first publicized exercise of such random (and collective) arrangement produced the following poetic sentence: The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine. (Les cadavres exquis boiront..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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36e13de
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la accion del Cisne Negro se situa en Extremistan, no es mas que una mera aproximacion; les ruego que no la platonifiquen, no la simplifiquemos mas de lo que sea necesario.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9a768d7
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Pero hay otros problemas que surgen de nuestra ceguera ante el Cisne Negro: a) Nos centramos en segmentos preseleccionados de lo visto, y a partir de ahi generalizamos en lo no visto: el error de la confirmacion. b) Nos enganamos con historias que sacian nuestra sed platonica de modelos distintos: la falacia narrativa. c) Nos comportamos como si el Cisne Negro no existiera: la naturaleza humana no esta programada para los Cisnes Negros. d) ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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40b9337
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Los Cisnes Negros que imaginamos, de los que hablamos y nos preocupamos no se parecen a los que previsiblemente son Cisnes Negros. Como veremos a continuacion, nos preocupamos de los sucesos <> equivocados.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |