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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 899d3b6 | Locke's definition of a madman: someone "reasoning correctly from erroneous premises." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0fa8700 | You never win an argument until they attack your person. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d00bd99 | I am used to facing, at the end of a conference lecture, the question "So what is the difference between robust and antifragile?" or the more unenlightened and even more irritating "Antifragile is resilient, no?" The reaction to my answer is usually "Ah," with the look "Why didn't you say that before?" (of course I had said that before). Even the initial referee of the scientific article I wrote on defining and detecting antifragility entir.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 12fffa8 | You are a lucky man; you presented in such a comprehensive way the effect of chance on society and the overestimation of cause and effect. You show how stupid we are to systematically try to explain skills. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a9ba1d9 | people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6065596 | I found out that telling researchers "This is where your methods work very well" is vastly better than telling them "This is what you guys don't know." So when I presented to what was until then the most hostile crowd in the world, members of the American Statistical Association, a map of the four quadrants, and told them: your knowledge works beautifully in these three quadrants, but beware the fourth one, as this is where the Black Swans .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7e90b7f | To summarize: in this (personal) essay, I stick my neck out and make a claim, against many of our habits of thought, that 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 implies the need to use the extreme event as a starting point and not treat it as an exception .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f34f25a | This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f333d12 | 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. And when you take risks, insults by half-men, small men, those who don't risk anything, are similar to barks by non-human animals. You can't feel insulted by a dog. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 42123f4 | We end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating moderniest slogans stripped of all depth...The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do not harm; even more we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in decision making (p.10). Their three flaws 1).. | interventionists slightly-disagree decision-making prologue | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| ac87ccd | Half of life--the interesting half of life--we don't have a name for. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 353db64 | The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 39eb14c | minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness. But when we see it, we fear it and overreact. Because of this fear and thirst for order, some human systems, by disrupting the invisible or not so visible logic of things, tend to be exposed to harm from Black Swans and almost never get any benefit. You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 698fc73 | My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 25deea9 | The number of cultured people dropped below some critical level. Suddenly the place became a vacuum. Brain drain is hard to reverse, and some of the old refinement may be lost forever. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dc35793 | Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once. | reading learning | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| dd2a598 | How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us to figure out their other properties? There | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 692371c | I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f198a7e | A system with skin-in-the-game requirements holds together through the notion of a sacrifice in order to protect the collective or entities higher in the hierarchy that are required to survive. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 40109c1 | These were the days before I decided to climb up the mountain, speak slowly and in a priestly tone, and try shaming people rather than insulting them. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 846fae6 | From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant." -- | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8927060 | The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c49e38e | The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models--those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0495c4a | today we depend on the press for such essentially human things as gossip and anecdotes and we care about the private lives of people in very remote places. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e2c1684 | Assume that someone tells you that the probability of an event is exactly zero. You ask him where he got this from. "Baal told me" is the answer. In such case, the person is coherent, but would be deemed unrealistic by non-Baalists. But if on the other hand, the person tells you "I estimated it to be zero," we have a problem. The person is both unrealistic and inconsistent. Something estimated needs to have an estimation error. So probabili.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cfb0fbd | Self-contradiction is made culturally to be shameful, a matter that can prove disastrous in science. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cfd1400 | There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0612085 | The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in making decisions. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b82af83 | Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bad2652 | I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work--better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3043ddf | A cluster of municipalities with charming provincial enmities, their own internal fights, and people out to get one another aggregates to a quite benign and stable state. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c3561bb | we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors--which found its way into our biology. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 197d006 | It would be preferable if we were better at understanding cancer or the (highly nonlinear) weather than the origin of the universe. How | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a4ca5f2 | interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7def1ab | the more lethal the risks, the less visible they will be, since the severely victimized are likely to be eliminated from the evidence. The | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c6ed89f | Characteristically, Samuelson intimidated those who questioned his techniques with the statement "Those who can, do science, others do methodology." If you knew math, you could "do science." This is reminiscent of psychoanalysts who silence their critics by accusing them of having trouble with their fathers." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8c3c242 | As an empiricist (actually a skeptical empiricist) I despise the moralizers beyond anything on this planet: I still wonder why they blindly believe in ineffectual methods. Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions. We will see how modern behavioral science shows this to be completely untrue. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ef70243 | During a radio interview, when I tried explaining to the journalist the nuance and the difference between the two statements I was told that I was "too complicated"; so I simply walked out of the studio, leaving them in the lurch. The depressing part is that those people who were committing such mistakes were educated journalists entrusted to represent the world to us lay persons." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b356568 | 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 you can do that makes you grand, nothing. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 007a246 | Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more "efficiency" out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it. Artisans have their soul in the game. Primo, artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial. Secundo, they have some type of "art" in their profession; they stay away from mos.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4ecf5c3 | Science isn't the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6703563 | Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people's feelings. Such restrictions do not necessarily come from the state itself, rather from the forceful establishment of an intellectual monoculture by an overactive thought police in the media and cultural life. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e9d97ca | The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b970273 | you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game--having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |