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a4ab5bd
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Adam Smith himself made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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5da8fce
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So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f470b7e
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Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2411ee2
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If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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af461e6
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Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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4d2e7fe
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I know that history will 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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b3a20f5
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The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6df42c6
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Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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778f0dc
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Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what's going on. Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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1399856
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Marketing is bad manners--and I rely on my naturalistic and ecological instincts. Say you run into a person during a boat cruise. What would you do if he started boasting of his accomplishments, telling you how great, rich, tall, impressive, skilled, famous, muscular, well educated, efficient, and good in bed he is, plus other attributes? You would certainly run away (or put him in contact with another talkative bore to get rid of both of t..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f7163b6
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we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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57afc62
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The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2f8792e
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In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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54f3a86
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Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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435e5ee
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Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9a780e0
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So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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420ddf0
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Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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69807ea
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My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d4a6d6b
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good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small "affects" across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3bca6dd
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Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f99aca6
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Mother Nature does not develop Alzheimer's--actually there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain function with age if they followed a regimen of stochastic exercise and stochastic fasting, took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice, and stock market investments, and refrained from taking economics classes or reading such things as The New York Times.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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594dba8
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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2f6be21
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There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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a986f9a
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Beware the confusion between correctness and intelligibility. Part of conventional wisdom favors things that can be explained rather instantly and "in a nutshell"--in many circles it is considered law. Having attended a French elementary school, a lycee primaire, I was trained to rehash Boileau's adage: Ce qui se concoit bien s'enonce clairement Et les mots pour le dire viennent aisement What is easy to conceive is clear to express / Words ..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e64bfc5
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A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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561aef5
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Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar). Psychologists give it a fancier name, but my friend Marty has no training in behavioral sciences.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cfbc076
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The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost. The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between g..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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d4e5a33
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People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3c4dfed
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Note that I am not relying in this book on the beastly method of collecting selective "corroborating evidence." ...I call this overload of examples naive empiricism--successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself--and no doubt his peers.* The Black Swan idea is based on the structure of randomness in empirical reality. *It is also naive e..
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corroborating-evidence
naive-empiricism
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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b2479c8
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History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9fed08f
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I discovered that it is much more effective to act like a nice guy and be "reasonable" if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage. You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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383cd41
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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, or the equivalent of losing points in a soccer game, and this absence of negative domain for book sales provides the author with a measure of optionality.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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599c58e
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Robust is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who dislike it (artists); fragile when you care more about the few who dislike your work than the multitude who like it (politicians).
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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bef4044
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You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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72a0c1e
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I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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065c6e9
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I once procrastinated and kept delaying a spinal cord operation as a response to a back injury--and was completely cured of the back problem after a hiking vacation in the Alps, followed by weight-lifting sessions. These psychologists and economists want me to kill my naturalistic instinct (the inner b****t detector) that allowed me to delay the elective operation and minimize the risks--an insult to the antifragility of our bodies.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6d54240
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I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about--and the reader is no fool.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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f4c7c51
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A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence."
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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9527d96
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This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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cd245b8
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The scientist's behavior while facing the refutation of his ideas has been studied in depth as part of the so-called attribution bias. You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness. This explains why these scientists attributed their failures to the "ten sigma" rare event, indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them. Why? It is a human heuristic that makes us actually believe so..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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3c739cd
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Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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dc9acab
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I discovered that I had been intuitively using the less-is-more idea as an aid in decision making (contrary to the method of putting a series of pros and cons side by side on a computer screen). For instance, if you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don't do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invok..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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ab89bac
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A lesson I learned from this ancient culture is the notion of megalopsychon (a term expressed in Aristotle's ethics), a sense of grandeur that was superseded by the Christian value of "humility." There is no word for it in Romance languages; in Arabic it is called Shhm--best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing y..
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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e590122
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You don't become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |