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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f4c481f | That of all the 'oracies (aristocracy and democracy included) hypocrisy is the most flourishing. | satire | James Fenimore Cooper | |
| 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 | ||
| a4ab5bd | Adam Smith himself made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5da8fce | So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f470b7e | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2411ee2 | If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| af461e6 | Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4d2e7fe | I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b3a20f5 | The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6df42c6 | Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 778f0dc | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1399856 | 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.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f7163b6 | we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 57afc62 | The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2f8792e | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c947a77 | Friends, remember that you are as honorable as the risk you take for your opinions. --Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Vox Day | ||
| 54f3a86 | Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 435e5ee | 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." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9a780e0 | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 420ddf0 | Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 69807ea | My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d4a6d6b | 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." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3bca6dd | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f99aca6 | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 594dba8 | A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2f6be21 | 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 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a986f9a | 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 .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e64bfc5 | A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 561aef5 | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cfbc076 | 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.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |