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1ef5dd6
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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 no answer;..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6d01684
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Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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87abac0
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More data--such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street--can make you miss the big truck.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ce71a79
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8ce3e97
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You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d2780a2
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Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ab..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8d1fa69
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much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5626d6e
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You need a story to displace a story.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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47c0afa
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You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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86330a2
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You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3436daf
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This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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94279fc
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Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fab1930
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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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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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879052a
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You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ab01fb2
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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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749f940
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the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f81fdb9
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Primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c31f563
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Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6452874
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We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d726580
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The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1755114
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Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing--rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read--tend to be frustrated when they can't rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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01b139f
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Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1b4e3ec
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Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators
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artists
arts
criticism
academics
critics
art-history
art
creativity
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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afb5b85
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A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says "f*** you" to fate."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dcaf85e
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Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.
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virtue
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2e954ba
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The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
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wisdom
rationalism
rationalists
reddit
white-male-privilege
wisdom-vs-nerds
nerdiness
pitfalls-of-bad-thinking
empiricism
white-privilege
atheism
nerds
nerd
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3cf5b57
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When things go our way we reject the lack of certainty.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8673c75
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If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3612ee7
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Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b0ff2e3
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The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get 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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03090df
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Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call "the caviar left," la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance--not realizing the contradi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cc7b70c
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More data means more information, but it also means more false information.
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statistics
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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aab6504
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For studying courage in textbooks doesn't make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor--and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not class..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ba398d9
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my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.
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internet-addiction
modern-values
modernity-is-a-sickness
robustness
wisdom-vs-nerdiness
nerdiness
nerds
fragility
nerd
modernity
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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06a6b20
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It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life-- with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bb507ab
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he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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443c7d7
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THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life. It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do par..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6c54d58
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Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration.
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wisdom
reality-check
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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160571e
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Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4b7d913
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They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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12d1beb
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English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).
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racism
bill-o-reilly
blue-collar-snobbery
egalitarianism
proud-ignorance
tea-party-movement
pride-and-prejudice
narcissism
elitism
pride
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7815a1d
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The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f273b8b
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I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1d95c6c
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An idea stats to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |