|
fd031e1
|
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
0560427
|
Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f20b764
|
For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let us see what kind of surprise.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
abff417
|
My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like "recognition" and "credit" warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
eb47fa7
|
It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
2059fe5
|
We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
48d243e
|
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
9d546a4
|
Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event, and without realizing it, .
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
47bfb7e
|
It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
abb4abd
|
it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
b45c836
|
You view the world from a model.
|
|
world
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
6052502
|
Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so? We will discuss the point in Chapter 11 but here is a possible explanation: Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it th..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
e1ec521
|
Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f24e455
|
We do not need to be rational and scientific when it comes to the details of our daily life--only in those that can harm us and threaten our survival. Modern life seems to invite us to do the exact opposite; become extremely realistic and intellectual when it comes to such matters as religion and personal behavior, yet as irrational as possible when it comes to matters ruled by randomness (say, portfolio or real estate investments). I have ..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
97b9a06
|
People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
145d4b9
|
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he preferred to die than see Achilles sulking into inaction. Clearly, the epic poets understood invisible histories. Also later thinkers and poets had more elaborate methods for dealing with randomness, as we will see with stoicism.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
46682cd
|
making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical "discoveries"are accidental to something else. An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy...almost no drugs, and most probably no humans. This is why I have been against the state dictating to us what we "should"be doing: only evolution knows if the "wrong"thing is reall..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
2830586
|
But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.
|
|
principle
importance
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
f4552b9
|
You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative. Ideas come and go, stories stay.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
6c92681
|
One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.*
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
13c6285
|
what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you've learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
74fb777
|
Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as "uncultured," "unintellectual," and "poor in math" because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows call "high culture"--like knowledge of Goethe's inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting. Yet the perso..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
ae76b35
|
Religion isn't so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
5d9de00
|
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3fbd962
|
This confirmation problem pervades our modern life, since most conflicts have at their root the following mental bias: when Arabs and Israelis watch news reports they see different stories in the same succession of events. Likewise, Democrats and Republicans look at different parts of the same data and never converge to the same opinions. Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances ..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
d8e61e6
|
It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
3605ae7
|
Assume that you live in a town with two hospitals--one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be?
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
62b5165
|
Recall the confirmation fallacy: governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact, they engage in what could be labeled as phony "philanthropy," the activity of helping people in a visible and sensational way without taking into account the unseen cemetery of invisible consequences. Bastiat inspired libertarians by attacking the usual arguments that showed the benefits of governments. But his ideas c..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
2d31d33
|
We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
04ddf3c
|
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
9eb407e
|
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
99e9485
|
And, talking about radiation, few wonder why, after hundreds of million of years of having our skins exposed to sun rays, we suddenly need so much protection from them--is it that our exposure is more harmful than before because of changes in the atmosphere, or populations living in an environment mismatching the pigmentation of their skin--or rather, that makers of sun protection products need to make some profits?
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
000306e
|
We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences.., generally are more meaningful.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
fc3118c
|
Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
68d7671
|
In the old days, privilege came with obligations--except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state. You want to be a feudal lord--you will be first to die. You want war? First in battle. Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield--the last, according to Livy, was first-in, last-out of c..
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
496bd8b
|
we are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
41ae5c1
|
n ltSnyf Hj@ Drwry@ blnsb@ llbshr , lknh ySbH Hl@ mraDy@ `ndm yjry lnZr l~ lfy'@ lmSnf@ nZr@ tqryry@ qT`@ , l'mr ldhy ymn` lns mn ltfkyr fy Dbby@ lHdwd lmwDw`@ byn lns wlmjtm`t , khl `n `d@ lnZr fy tqsym lns l~ fy't
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
0d7aec4
|
There is a Yiddish saying: "If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind."
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
efb6348
|
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors--though never the same error more than once--is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
5612744
|
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
34c37f8
|
Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works--we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning--it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
151312b
|
Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
65b6aaf
|
True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
|
2ad9a64
|
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
|
|
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |