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9b6680a
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Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5b9d772
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There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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04dcf2b
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My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a4f68cc
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In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8d283ad
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People don't walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0691b31
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us c..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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734d9ff
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Recall that someone with only casual knowledge about the problems of randomness would believe that an animal is at the maximum fitness for the conditions of its time. This is not what evolution means; on average, animals will be fit, but not every single one of them, and not at all times. Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky, the "best" operators in a given business can come from a subset of operators who ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9ceecb9
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7d68763
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We are not naive enough to believe that someone will be immortal because we have never seen him die, or that someone is innocent of murder because we have never seen him kill. The problem of naive generalization does not plague us everywhere. But such smart pockets of inductive skepticism tend to involve events that we have encountered in our natural environment, matters from which we have learned to avoid foolish generalization.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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889fee1
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We" are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit."
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karl-popper
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7d62e4c
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I have two further points to make on this subject. First, justification of overoptimism on grounds that "it brought us here" arises from a far more serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we are built to understand nature and our own nature and that our decisions are, and have been, the result of our own choices. I beg to disagree. So many instincts drive us." --
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c4f10c8
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My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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41e17b4
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randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ec44eba
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Economics Schmeconomics. It is all market dynamics
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1fbe242
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Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters--we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial--and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; be..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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54c29f1
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I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3d5e774
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But have the integrity to deliver your "because" very sparingly; try to limit it to situations where the "because" is derived from experiments, not backward-looking history."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1d47b81
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No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism w..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c663e64
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Indeed, Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent "doing nothing." He published more than two hundred novels."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fa46e98
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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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53d461c
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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2efa893
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Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness-foolishness...
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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440a066
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N]ews... is full of noise and... history is largely stripped of it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1e507e2
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W]e like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not enjoy this execution.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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49cdbfa
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At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1856fc4
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E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f488f55
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cc2605b
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Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3156713
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e05c481
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Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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36088c0
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It's harder to say no when you really mean it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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034e8c3
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The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e9951b3
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1ccac4d
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A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9b358a3
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3b8ecb5
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ed16376
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You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dce8417
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What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3668eeb
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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432faa3
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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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75ce2a2
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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478c228
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9c0078c
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For the robust, an error is information.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b2487d7
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Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |