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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 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 |