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a1ac1ce
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First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2b82a43
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Who gets rewarded, the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to "correct" his predecessors' faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery? Who is more valuable, the politician who avoids a war or the one who starts a new one (and is lucky enough to win)?"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2c3161b
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I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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742003c
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You will never fully convince
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ae703f3
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You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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558b5cf
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The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation--even Charles Darwin, who uncultured scientists claim "invented" the survival of the fittest, was not the first to mention it."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e9f1f01
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Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6d10d8f
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Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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06cdc33
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If The Black Swan is about epistemic limitations, then, from this definition, we can see that it is not about some objectively defined phenomenon, like rain or a car crash--it is simply something that was not expected by a particular observer. So I was wondering why so many otherwise intelligent people have casually questioned whether certain events, say the Great War, or the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, were Black ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2051aba
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The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1ae76db
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She received enough attention to get the courtesy of rejection letters and occasional insulting comments instead of the far more insulting and demeaning silence.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8d6bf3a
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you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant
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wittgenstein
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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372883b
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At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fc965e7
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Whenever your survival is in play, don't immediately look for causes and effects.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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288373a
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Further, as we discovered during the financial crisis that started in 2008, these blowup risks-to-others are easily concealed owing to the growing complexity of modern institutions and political affairs. While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7d8b15c
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I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people--really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatical..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8d53058
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An essay is an impulsive meditation, not science reporting.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1a88d80
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It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others--that is, other imitators. It fights solitude.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f807c11
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If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably--they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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af2cb45
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Our tendency to perceive--to impose--narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease--dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity. But memory and the arrow of time can get mixed up. Narrativity can viciously affect the remembrance of past events as follows: we will ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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330858d
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The "persecution" of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d01120f
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The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything
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success
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a828e71
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that there is no evidence of the possibility of large events, i.e., Black Swans. You are likely to confuse that statement, however, particularly if you do not pay close attention, with the statement that there is evidence of no possible Black
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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979f4e5
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Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2e958cc
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Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dc15ab2
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Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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994813d
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Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. "The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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968af97
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via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by additionfn1).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8cb33b2
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lead
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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20ac84c
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The strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups--those based on asking people what they want--and following his own imagination. His modus was that people don't know what they want until you provide them with it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cc5c856
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We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling--very compelling--evidence to show that this is an illusion, the illusion I call lecturing birds how to fly.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9d3a892
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true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive (elimination of iatrogenics).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7eba138
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Recall that the Platonic fold is where our representation of reality ceases to apply--but we do not know it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ab71756
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Beyond books, consider this simple heuristic: your work and ideas, whether in politics, the arts, or other domains, are antifragile if, instead of having one hundred percent of the people finding your mission acceptable or mildly commendable, you are better off having a high percentage of people disliking you and your message (even intensely), combined with a low percentage of extremely loyal and enthusiastic supporters. Options like disper..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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eb1b92e
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7d4b981
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FAT TONY: "My dear Socrates ... you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they've been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people's illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don't understand. And you have..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e7cdd4a
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Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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83717cd
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Consider that all the wealth of the world can't buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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43fb174
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The strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups-- those based on asking people what they want--and following his own imagination. His modus was that people don't know what they want until you provide them with it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ab66db5
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Aside from the non-narrative view of things, another lesson. 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 researchers, they were selected for survival, not complications. So I saw the less is more in action: the more studies, the less obvious elementary but fun..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ede32ec
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War could cause a rise in oil prices, but not scheduled war--since prices adjust to expectations. It has to be "in the price," as he said. Indeed, on the news of war, oil collapsed from around $39 a barrel to almost half that value, and Tony turned his investment of three hundred thousand into eighteen million dollars. "There are so few occasions in one's life, you can't miss them," he later told Nero during one of their lunches as he was c..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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61245cc
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One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: "much of what other people know isn't worth knowing."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1d0374f
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As Yogi Berra said, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cd99ec7
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Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality--your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine--the more uncertainty, the better.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |