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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9e4c154 | Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 02c760d | This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8562345 | In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success--but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 31334e8 | Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion. | objectivity | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| 5a2cfb5 | You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 20ce4a9 | Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 32d5be4 | central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists--Combining | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7f30478 | Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 686de88 | A civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking--and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. (Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.) | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 414c894 | A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a1daf31 | The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength. | regeneration renewal resilience | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| 08962ba | There is something nonphilosophical about investing one's pride and ego into a "my house/ library/ car is bigger than that of others in my category"--it is downright foolish to claim to be first in one's category all the while sitting on a time bomb." -- | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a630ec3 | The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin. People | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0a61fff | The best way to prove the arbitrary character of these categories, and the contagion effect they produce, is to remember how frequently these clusters reverse in history. Today's alliance between Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby would certainly seem puzzling to a nineteenth-century intellectual--Christians used to be anti-Semites and Moslems were the protectors of the Jews, whom they preferred to Christians. Libertarians used.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 370b016 | If you want to understand how vapid are the current modernistic arguments (and understand your existential priorities), consider the difference between lions in the wild and those in captivity. Lions in captivity live longer; they are technically richer, and they are guaranteed job security for life, if these are the criteria you are focusing on ... | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f83f65f | A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars). This would get priestly people into office. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7fa4c86 | what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fb779ef | An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e44715f | It is always convenient to invoke universalism when you are in the majority. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0731376 | If you think that you can control your emotions, think that some people also believe that they can control their heartbeat or hair growth.) | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f16c56a | To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bb498ca | Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 463a3dd | The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8938f21 | When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 96b2e45 | Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure. | harm life risk risk-taking sacrifice | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| afa02b7 | The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome. | result | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| f39b2d5 | Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop's fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e4b6a25 | numeraire | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 517aeae | Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bullshit vendor. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ffb07ef | One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.* | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ff62a45 | We live to produce information, or improve on it. Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri--either children or books, both information that caries through the centuries...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 anti-fragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a117c84 | What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 20052e8 | Per il robusto un errore e informazione, per il debole un errore e solo un errore | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 25a1838 | But things are even worse: in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. If you climb mountains and ride a motorcycle and hang around the mob and fly your own small plane and drink absinthe, and smoke cigarettes, and play parkour on Thursday night, your life expectancy is considerably reduced, although no single action will have a meaningful effect. This idea of repetition makes paranoia about some .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bdf9f06 | gene plays a role, are quite tractable, but anything entailing higher dimensionality falls apart. Understanding the genetic makeup of a unit will never allow us to understand the behavior of the unit itself. A reminder that what I am writing here isn't an opinion. It is a straightforward mathematical property. The mean-field approach is when one uses the average interaction between, say, two people, and generalizes to the group--it is only .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9e91070 | I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the "intellectual" profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 31fb4fb | Economics is not a science and should not be there to advise policy. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f1c2153 | This chapter has two topics. First, we are demonstrably arrogant about what we think we know. We certainly know a lot, but we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we actually do, enough of that little bit to occasionally get into serious trouble. We shall see how you can verify, even measure, such arrogance in your own living room. Second, we will look at the implications of this arrogance for all the activi.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ae31c03 | Light control works; close control leads to overreaction, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1e6e33d | people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9b6719a | Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7158c78 | Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b997be7 | Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6c09e22 | An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |