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9dfb122
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be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3566560
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What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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31c13ad
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You are rich if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3d62e51
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The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....
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problem
theory
sticky
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d682761
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To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with "killer apps," these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of "heuristics," these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have b..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9f1038e
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keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c3341b0
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those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c24a203
|
T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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982096e
|
How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold--it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction--that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity (from the unintended side effects of, say, an initial invention or attempt at invention).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d264fa2
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Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e5b85cc
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There is a simple test to define path dependence of beliefs (economists have a manifestation of it called the endowment effect). Say you own a painting you bought for $20,000, and owing to rosy conditions in the art market, it is now worth $40,000. If you owned no painting, would you still acquire it at the current price? If you would not, then you are said to be married to your position. There is no rational reason to keep a painting you w..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0bf8191
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The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2ad4d0f
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Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced*.... If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so--for profit, of course. *This does not mean that Sylvia Plath should not have been medicated at all. The point is that pathologies should ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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7bd4c8c
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If you want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don't necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible. Or read commentators on the classics who were doers themselves, such as Montaigne--people who at some point had some skin in the game, then retired to write books. Avoid the intermediary, when possi..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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26fc7b6
|
anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b8dd451
|
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b9b48f6
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To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4533369
|
Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5d05011
|
It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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eca0018
|
Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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56654be
|
Contra the prevailing belief, "success" isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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71e9077
|
Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just "more robust."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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68500d1
|
It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b07793d
|
The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0e16da4
|
Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes (a very, very old profession), carpenters, plumbers, tailors, and dentists, have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan, one that would bring their income to a complete halt. Their risks are visible. Not so with employees, who have no volatility, but can be surprised to see their income going to zero after a phone call from the personnel departme..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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c326576
|
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e16f0a5
|
Don't complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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69af652
|
At the end, what matters is the strength of the string--not the wealth and power of the dining party.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8446f75
|
Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8224e48
|
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3f42c36
|
The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1462482
|
It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied--what
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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494f1c1
|
Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4e560ef
|
It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f6206fa
|
Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the s..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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0096ddb
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there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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26f86ae
|
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing--and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f9cb8dc
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Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6a9b590
|
Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bffa474
|
In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f9d31c0
|
Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the "normal," particularly with "bell curve" methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud...
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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8f24e5f
|
Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical "evidence" (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence)."
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science
statistics
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2f82481
|
It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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61c1095
|
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |