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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 98fe240 | Did you do something crazy, like cut it all off?" "Well," I said, "not all." "But it's real short, right?" "Yeah, but --" "Why did you do it?" | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 36abe44 | Dawn be so rotten? | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 51b8a99 | After all, you can't force a friendship. | friendship idea summer | Ann M. Martin | |
| 76bac20 | I think beaches kind of get in your blood, and if you grow up near one you never feel quite right when you're away from it. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| e2df5c1 | It was like they sent out a beacon that screamed "I'm incredibly datable," and I sent out a beacon that screamed, "Look at the two other options right next to me." | Maggie Ann Martin | ||
| a6a414c | at eight A.M. We landed in Los Angeles five hours later, but our connecting flight was delayed for four hours. Well, L.A. time is two hours later than Hawaii time, so it was dinner hour when we boarded the next plane for another five-hour flight that actually put us in New York eight hours later, because of the three-hour time change. Then, after waiting forty-five minutes for our luggage, we took an hour-and-a-half limo ride from New York .. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 2d65800 | I am Rose Howard and my first name has a homonym. To be accurate, it has a homophone, which is a word that's pronounced the same as another word, but spelled differently. My homophone name is Rows. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 2a99c4d | What's fun about homonyms is hearig a word in a sentence and suddenly realizing that it has a homonym or maybe two (or three, but that's so rare I don't often think about homonym quartets) and that you haven't thought of that homonym pair or trio before. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 5ebddd9 | For the first time in my life, I'm being sent home with weekly progress reports that I have to give to my father. The reports are written by Mrs. Leibler and read and signed by Mrs. Kushel, which is my teachers' way of saying that they're in agreement about my behavior. The reports list all my notable behaviors for Monday through Friday. Some of the comments are nice such as the ones about when I participate appropriately in a classroom d.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| b84be3c | Rain and I have routines. We like routines. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 5636bed |
Si chino per accarezzarmi. Fece scorrere la mano lungo la schiena e poi sotto al mento. < |
animals dog love | Ann M. Martin | |
| 365115c | True, I played, fought and studied with other children, but always I stood apart within. ... A cosmic loneliness was my shadow. | Valerie Boyd | ||
| 1fa7e70 | Qwilleran's Siamese cat was a celebrity at the Press Club. Koko's portrait hung in the lobby along with Pulitzer Prize winners, and he was probably the only cat in the history of journalism who had his own press card signed by the chief of police. Although Qwilleran's suspicious nature and inquisitive mind had brought a few criminals to justice, it was commonly understood at the Press Club that the brains behind his success belonged to a fe.. | Lilian Jackson Braun | ||
| 63837c1 | The Madame deplored fat men. They had no laps, and of what use is a lapless human? Nevertheless, she gave him the common courtesy of a sniff at his trouser cuffs and immediately backed away, twitching her nose and showing her teeth. | Lilian Jackson Braun | ||
| 87a0e5d | His wise parent disapproved of this uncatly conduct; it indicated a certain lack of character, and no good would come of it. By her own example she tried to guide him. When dinner was served she gave the plate a haughty sniff and walked away, no matter how tempting the dish. That was the way it was done by any self-respecting feline. In a minute or two she returned and condescended to dine, but never with open enthusiasm. | Lilian Jackson Braun | ||
| 9520573 | My days keep getting shorter. When I'm a hundred, I'll be going to bed before I get up. | Lilian Jackson Braun | ||
| 7e2977d | Enchante!" said Qwilleran, bending low over her hand in a courtly gesture. Then he drew from his pocket a perfect Bosc pear with bronze skin and long, curved stem, offering it in the palm of his hand like a jewel-encrusted Faberge bauble. "The perfect complement for your beautiful apartment, Mademoiselle." The Countess was a trifle slow in responding. "How charming . . . Please be seated . . . Ferdinand, you may bring the tea tray." She sea.. | Lilian Jackson Braun | ||
| b575f12 | Amanda raised her glass in a toast. "Here's a wet one to Saint Iris of the Hummocks!" Then she winced and scowled at Riker, who had kicked her under the table. Polly raised her glass and quoted from Hamlet: "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." | Lilian Jackson Braun |