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781f451
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Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don't be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth--remember that you are a Black Swan.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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df8d118
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Scars signal skin in the game.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cb1b5e1
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No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a3df1dd
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Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7156422
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My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5122105
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Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4d9a741
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We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7c0dcf9
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Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ef50f78
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I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first sou..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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19d7c8c
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Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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db99077
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9fcb0d9
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the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f62d2e0
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Finally, when young people who "want to help mankind" come to me asking, "What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world," and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business." --
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7fce9a8
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be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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38cd160
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never trust the words of a man who is not free.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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40f6e1b
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If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
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past
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9a373eb
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Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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45b25ce
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Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4459483
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The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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08a783c
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Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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184370d
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Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding effect). To take an obvious example, think about how many people divorce. Almost all of them are acquainted with the statistic that between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, something the parties involved did not forecast while tying..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3c118f2
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Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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edd1027
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c305453
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It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations--Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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22aa4a2
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A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.
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life-saved
person-hurt
statistic
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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df91da6
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A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6b1def0
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One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ea84f20
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Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don't count--there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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45643f2
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I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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34a0880
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The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire a man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and to him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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fc4b036
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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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ce44c47
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So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition--given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0ea554b
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Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (one of the doer-Stoic authors), "fire feeds on obstacles."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3508b36
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Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7e51d68
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Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a8db40a
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It hit me right there and then that these antifragile hormetic responses were just a form of redundancy, and all the ideas of Mother Nature converged in my mind. It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cace46c
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Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d2e6ca0
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So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you'll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about you..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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753ce32
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Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3474f42
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People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5ed4c8f
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I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1e6bc2b
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Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is "good for you" while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn't directly affect him."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6e9376f
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Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells , and prevent diabetes.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8683ffc
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Recall that the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |