|
1c9e654
|
I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed. We consider the biggest object of any kind that we have seen in our lives or hear about as the largest item that can possibly exist. And we have been doing this for millenia. In Pharaonic Egypt, which happens to be the first comple..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
edb2479
|
Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel--just as fire does.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
e99d267
|
It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues. ... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
da68d7f
|
Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse,..
|
|
confidence
instrospection
humility
hubris
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
a2c5ea4
|
for Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don't count; surviving is what matters.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c2e6090
|
Beyond our perceptional distortions, there is a problem with logic itself. How can someone have no clue yet be able to hold a set of perfectly sound and coherent viewpoints that match the observations and abide by every single possible rule of logic? Consider that two people can hold incompatible beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfec..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
25a2721
|
A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
e5298a4
|
What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
507b3f1
|
common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
a22d851
|
Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo, we do not know what we will know.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
cbf8c69
|
The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition--or a bonus--for it. I will be taking the concept deeper in Book VII, on ethics, about the unfairness of a bonus system and how such unfairness is magnified by complexity.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
0052c0e
|
Nature likes to overinsure itself. Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We humans have two kidneys (this may even include accountants), extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say, lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus), while human design tends to be spare and inversely redundant, so to speak--we have a historical track record of engaging in debt, which is the opposite of ..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
e8a655f
|
Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic--even then--your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
22a92b5
|
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c8fd782
|
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7500e07
|
This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3e12cb5
|
So I disagree with the followers of Marx and and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
b24ff31
|
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
170a76c
|
This high-yield market resembles a nap on a railway track.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
4f13391
|
Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
02724e1
|
The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings--as opposed to the invigorating "good stress" of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the i..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
dc84514
|
Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7de3a79
|
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
9d80283
|
If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don't attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity...or get another job.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
784a93b
|
Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of biograph..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
d3463a4
|
George Santayana: A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
41556c7
|
companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that's sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a sunset with a cowboy smoking and forcing an association between great romantic moments and some given product that, logically, has no possible connection to it. You seek a romantic moment and what you get is cancer.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c09116e
|
There are designations, like "economist," "prostitute," or "consultant," for which additional characterization doesn't add information."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
6799986
|
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7f82054
|
Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her. The first-order information is the intensity: what matt..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
c2332d2
|
in Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent),
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
ac2b6a0
|
The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
df16168
|
If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
5b9cb0f
|
In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning "economies of scale," size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
258482a
|
They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7feba4a
|
randomness in the end is just unknowledge. the world is opaque and appearances fool us
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
be44747
|
There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
7ded8ab
|
Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
cffee58
|
J)ust as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to it in games of chance.
|
|
overestimate
underestimate
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
2f9ff43
|
an ad hominen attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
cf79bdb
|
The formation of our beliefs is fraught with superstitions--even today (I might say, especially today). Just as one day some primitive tribesman scratched his nose, saw rain falling, and developed an elaborate method of scratching his nose to bring on the much-needed rain, we link economic prosperity to some rate cut by the Federal Reserve Board, or the success of a company with the appointment of the new president "at the helm."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
b31a2b0
|
The fact that people in countries with cold weather tend to be harder working, richer, less relaxed, less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over) organized and more harried than those in hotter climates should make us wonder whether wealth is mere indemnification, and motivation is just overcompensation for not having a real life.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
74166a8
|
You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or twenty would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the school (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the difference between top ten and top two thousand scho..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f69d19d
|
One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist. This is even more apparent when the literary intellectual starts using scientific buzzwords, like "un..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |