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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d4e5a33 | People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3c4dfed | 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.. | corroborating-evidence naive-empiricism | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| b2479c8 | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9fed08f | 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." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 383cd41 | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 599c58e | 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). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bef4044 | You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 72a0c1e | I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 065c6e9 | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6d54240 | I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about--and the reader is no fool. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f4c7c51 | 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." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9527d96 | 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 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cd245b8 | 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.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3c739cd | Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dc9acab | 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.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ab89bac | 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.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e590122 | You don't become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 94209ac | The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 62eda73 | You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 39c2676 | Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears. I will return to this point in time. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 88fa3f7 | Try the following experiment. Go to the airport and ask travelers en route to some remote destination how much they would pay for an insurance policy paying, say, a million tugrits (the currency of Mongolia) if they died during the trip (for any reason).Then ask another collection of travelers how much they would pay for insurance that pays the same in the event of death from a terrorist act (and only a terrorist act). Guess which one would.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1c847cd | Because what matters in life isn't how frequently one is "right" about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn't count--in a way that's similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b3c4d27 | Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5b8f15d | Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bc9af73 | I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, no even a spectrum of possible explanations. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e953ca6 | Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a19cbb4 | The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 530f2bf | Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dafee03 | But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f7866d6 | our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)--and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 62c38b9 | Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge-we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| add56a4 | We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8a23944 | In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 48f1ebe | I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn't convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will. | libertarianism politics republicanism socialism | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| dca86e2 | The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 486e0eb | Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a "scholarly" paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Fu.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 09616cb | Thirty-nine percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f835386 | Alexander the Magnus was once called to solve the following challenge in the Phrygian city of Gordium (as usual with Greek stories, in modern-day Turkey). When he entered Gordium, he found an old wagon, its yoke tied with a multitude of knots, all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to figure out how they were fastened. An oracle had declared that he who would untie the knot would rule all of what was then called "Asia," that is, As.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| adacae5 | It is much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f6511d5 | In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly--it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7c8fe79 | We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6d3e472 | I glance at Mom. She looks pained. I know she doesn't care what I wear to lunch, but she doesn't want to contradict her mother. Actually, that's not quite true. Mom will go against Nana's wisheds where big enormous things are concerned, like who she marries and what kind of house she lives in. But when it comes to these smaller things- my appearance at lunch when Nana comes over- Mom often gives in. I do not understand this. I think these l.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 2240c16 | There's no use asking Mom and Dad to talk to Nana about her punishment. They won't stand up to her. They never do. This is why I decide I am not going to speak to Nana or Papa or my parents. What Leila and I did was wrong. But now I have been put in the middle of something else entirely. Something about Adam and the adults and things that happened before I was born, maybe even before Adam and Uncle Hayden and Mom were born. ~pgs 144-145; Ha.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| b9f6028 | when you take fright and add to it ignorance, you get hatred. That's a very unattractive equation. | bigotry fear fright hatred here-today ignorance prejudice xenophobia | Ann M. Martin |