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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| c2903b5 | A king, angry at his son, swore that he would crush him with a large stone. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fc92919 | In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected "scientific" establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6372661 | There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us--that we can comprehend easily. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c2a2564 | Let us return to the distinction between Thalesian and Aristotelian for a minute and look at evolution from the following point of view. The frequency, i.e., how often someone is right is largely irrelevant in the real world, but alas, one needs to be a practitioner, not a talker, to figure it out. On paper, the frequency of being right matters, but only on paper--typically, fragile payoffs have little (sometimes no) upside, and antifragile.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a02cda0 | by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7af8ffb | Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author's nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f2bc72b | The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered "good"; I wonder why people don't make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something "bad," say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.)" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1f4094a | And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c9a88c6 | reality does not have the same closed and symmetric laws and regulations as games. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0295033 | There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f08f943 | In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, though perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized, particularly if he lives in Japan). For there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)--likewise, there is no such thing a.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3ec8baa | What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 20171e6 | The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story--to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 345ccaa | Love without sacrifice is like theft. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8191d47 | While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of entertainers called Wall Street "economists" or "strategists," who make pronouncements on the fate of the markets, but do not engage in any form of risk taking, thus having their success dependent on rhetoric rather than actually testable facts." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e856286 | A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 22deedb | My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3c9e335 | Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right--the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flaneur. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 38ace53 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: "It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues.... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0272a43 | The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a81700a | Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1b681ba | You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples--it depends on how the choices are presented to you. The | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cdb075b | 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 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 70b660b | This anchoring to a number is the reason people do not react to their total accumulated wealth, but to differences of wealth from whatever number they are currently anchored to. This is the major conflict with economic theory, as according to economists, someone with $1 million in the bank would be more satisfied than if he had half a million. But | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e4f5ff0 | Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department. The same with artisans: the quality lies in their product, not their conversation--in fact they can easily have false beliefs that, as a side effect (inverse iatrogenics), lead them to make better products, so what? Bureaucrats, on the other hand, because of .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 21bfc28 | The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1214a3d | These traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. I call them crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4c4550a | Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 306d6f5 | More generally, we underestimate the share of randomness in about everything, a point that may not merit a book--except when it is the specialist who is the fool of all fools. Disturbingly, science has only recently been able to handle randomness (the growth in available information has been exceeded only by the expansion of noise). Probability theory is a young arrival in mathematics; probability applied to practice is almost nonexistent a.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3b30003 | When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles--and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7731939 | Basically this category would include those who think that the cure for obesity is to inform people that they should be healthy. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fe8461a | True, the Web produces acute concentration. A large number of users visit just a few sites, such as Google, which, at the time of this writing, has total market dominance. At no time in history has a company grown so dominant so quickly--Google can service people from Nicaragua to southwestern Mongolia to the American West Coast, without having to worry about phone operators, shipping, delivery, and manufacturing. This is the ultimate winne.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e5d26b4 | Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d9b0111 | Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity--particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late. The ideas advanced here are not polit.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 12cfbcb | It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2e6a4f8 | we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d6912a8 | Mine was the only job you could do if you thought of yourself as risk-hating, risk-aware, and highly ignorant. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8da7179 | social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1694f5a | They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 50951d6 | For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead pre.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 316dcab | If both the positive and the negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast. But often an action's positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visible, while the negative consequences, being invisible, apply to others, with a net cost to society. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 15da1cb | So, suspecting that Nero had a contract on her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons that would have been available to her son's underlings. Like Mithridates, Agrippina eventually died by more mechanical methods as her son (supposedly) had assassins slay her, thus providing us with the small but meaningful lesson that one cannot be robust against everything. And, two thousand years later, nobody has found a method for us to get.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dde31fe | Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it. | risk risk-taking | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |