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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 836ebca | Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. We are left only with dignity as a solution--dignity defined as the execution of a protocol of behavior that does not depend on the immediate circumstance. It may not be the optimal one, but it certainly is the one that makes us feel best. Grace under p.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a64d499 | Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do-except, of course, when we think about it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f76515a | 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 you can do that makes you grand, nothing. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 49084d9 | From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans-we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the "three meals a day," "eat in m.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c91231a | Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5be1bcc | Makridakis and Hibon reached the sad conclusion that "statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 78c4411 | the iatrogenics is in the patient, not in the treatment. If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged--no holds barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3b539ab | Our aversion to variability and desire for order, and our acting on those feelings, have helped precipitate severe crises. Making something artificially bigger (instead of letting it die early if it cannot survive stressors) makes it more and more vulnerable to a very severe collapse-as I showed with the Black Swan vulnerability associated with an increase in size. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 70d7df1 | Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad--at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5cd3ac3 | I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6232f53 | Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens--usually. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 22ac2ab | Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcomes that counts. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8f685cd | 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 | ||
| bd7e328 | In a natural environment, people die without aging--or after a very short period of aging. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c6fa5e7 | 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 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6ac778c | Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 885c7c0 | Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 26dcda7 | I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don't count. The | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 58a6682 | what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 598c08e | Have you noticed that while corporations sell you junk drinks, artisans sell you cheese and wine? | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 635860c | Nicocles, as early as the fourth century B.C., asserts that doctors claimed responsibility for success and blamed failure on nature, or on some external cause. The | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 157f4f5 | After more than twenty years as a transactional trader and businessman in what I called the "strange profession," I tried what one calls an academic career. And I have something to report--actually that was the driver behind this idea of antifragility in life and the dichotomy between the natural and the alienation of the unnatural. Commerce is fun, thrilling, lively, and natural; academia as currently professionalized is none of these. And.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| eb3f722 | Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ba76687 | As Ennius wrote, "The good is mostly in the absence of bad"; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1ef6098 | We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable--but ultimately harmful--modernity. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 85b2c68 | Frano Barovic reading this chapter wrote to me: "Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone--a point we will visit in our discussion of annealing. But" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 46cfdf4 | 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 wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 487267e | I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components--and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books--my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality,.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9b5a6ae | avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2580d10 | We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes. You may feel a sting, but it will not be as bad as you expect. This kind of misprediction may have a purpose: to motivate us to perform important acts (like buying new cars .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 35f139f | It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied--what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| baff94e | Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dfaa0da | It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them--even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the university campuses and some philosophaster who has never taken real risks in his life, or, worse, never had a life, would inform you that "they are clearly not the same thing." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ac66ada | We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 320f115 | Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy. ...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen. The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 286eaad | The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2b9a78f | incertitude. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3467a84 | And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 352d1de | You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8466a76 | cocksure prophet. Where I beg to differ with the great | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 96be3ad | The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear--the simplification that distorts. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a150700 | If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d661d70 | What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don't have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile--and | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fdc2cbe | why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?" Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |