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7473b40
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called the lending rate, the interest rate in the economy (and has proved to be good at it). The libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul was called a crank for suggesting the abolition of the Federal Reserve, or even restricting its role. But he would also have been called a crank for suggesting the creation of an agency to control other prices.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5fb7e41
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I wanted to become a flaneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafes, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to anybody. I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e445dee
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What does "fitness" mean? Being exactly tuned to a given past history of a specific environment, or extrapolating to an environment with stressors of higher intensity? Many seem to point to the first kind of adaptation, missing the notion of antifragility. But if one were to write down mathematically a standard model of selection, one would get overcompensation rather than mere "fitness."*"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2eaf273
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Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all ... just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches." For revolutions feed on repression, growing heads faster and faster as one literally cuts a few off by killing demonstrators. There is an Irish revolutionary song that encapsulates the effect: The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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06d7f50
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Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression "rich as Croesus" to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to be visited by Solon, the Greek legislator known for his dignity, reserve, upright morals, humility, frugality, wisdom, intelligence, and courage. Solon did not display the smallest surprise at the wealth and splendor surrounding his host, nor the tinie..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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beb9f0b
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In any type of activity or business divorced from the direct filter of skin in the game, the great majority of people know the jargon, play the part, and are intimate with the cosmetic details, but are clueless about the subject.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0a2f42a
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Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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076280f
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First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3efeaad
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It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4a52f2b
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Likewise, an increase in personal performance (regardless of whether it is caused deterministically or by the agency of Lady Fortuna) induces a rise of serotonin in the subject, itself causing an increase of what is commonly called "leadership" ability. One is "on a roll." Some imperceptible changes in deportment, like an ability to express oneself with serenity and confidence, make the subject look credible--as if he truly deserved the she..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e9e2501
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How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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53fdaa6
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studying courage in textbooks doesn't make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f3d367b
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When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles--and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b0958e8
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Ex cura theoria nascitur.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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376ccb4
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you'd even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between a human and a ghost.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fc97b6b
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detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans individually irrelevant.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b7cfa7f
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Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy. It is also necessarily collective on epistemological grounds--to facilitate the development of expertise.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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05a2102
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Life is long gamma.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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01e48de
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veritas odium parit--truth brings hatred.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ab33141
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Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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43c7dc0
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Psychologists and economists who study "irrationality" do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion entering my bedroom or fire in my neighbor's library. I do not procrastinate after a severe injury. I do so with unnatural duties and procedures."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9774665
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A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught at an equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of hunger or thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge one way or the other. This metaphor is named Buridan's Donkey, after the medieval philosopher Jean de Buridan, who--among other, very complicated things--introduced the thought experiment. When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only random..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9d22b2c
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There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd. You can also feel a different variety of crowd experience during your next street riot, when fear of authorities vanishes completely under group fever.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c93b340
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I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6b8aa8a
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It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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642cce0
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The beast in this book is not just the bell curve and the self-deceiving statistician, nor the Platonified scholar who needs theories to fool himself with. It is the drive to "focus" on what makes sense to us. Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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01866b5
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It is also naive empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view--and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. Almost all of my non-Yogi Berra quotes are from people I disagree with.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bf22da9
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What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5eb2f48
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I realized that if I were to start writing about the events later they would seem more ... historical. There was a difference between the before and the after.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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53805e4
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While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f2b98ef
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We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c7d530c
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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 automatically know more than the nonelite.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a4a086c
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The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. Laws come and go; ethics stay.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fdf317d
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Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e17eb0e
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The good is not as good as the absence of bad.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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288223e
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Never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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72e310a
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Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fc83313
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There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b6f3f5c
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Mother Nature is not perfect, but has so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists. So my approach is to combine evidence-based research (stripped of biological theory), with an a priori that Mother Nature has more authority than anyone.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ddde59d
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I don't mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all "social scientists" who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fe071ca
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cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e3dc027
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In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly--it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6632083
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research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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306beaf
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However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |