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0a74ab2 So we can learn a lot from data--but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It Nassim Nicholas Taleb
a076082 naive empiricism--successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone Nassim Nicholas Taleb
9af74fc positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If Nassim Nicholas Taleb
6448d0c Beware of precise plans by governments. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb
6319f04 No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
9e2b257 My, liudi, ne prosto kraine poverkhnostny (eto eshche mozhno bylo by kakto ispravit') -- my ochen' nespravedlivy. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
ab92ebc My prevoznosim tekh, ch'i imena popali na stranitsy uchebnikov istorii, -- za schet tekh, ch'i dostizheniia proshli mimo istorikov. My, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
5e42d64 Aside from France, I was baffled by the puzzle of Sweden and other Nordic states, which are often offered as paragons of the large state "that works"--the government represents a large portion of the total economy. How could we have the happiest nation in the world, Denmark (assuming happiness is both measurable and desirable), and a monstrously large state? Is it that these countries are all smaller than the New York metropolitan area? Unt.. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2702b9b Too often, corporate strategy is built on the misguided notion that we can reliably predict the future. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of the most cogent writers on the illusion of predictability, has said, "We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future--but this is not necessarily bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts." Brian J. Robertson
89a5c90 your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive affect," than on their intensity when they hit. In" Nassim Nicholas Taleb
67c5f24 The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom [helicopter parent]....They try to eliminate the trial and error from children's lives and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (parent-compatible) maps of reality. They are good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers, except slower. Further, they are totally .. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
5bb8cfc After things got bad for him, they somehow recovered by some invisible hand, and he was led to believe that it was his intrinsic property to recover from hardships by running every time into a new opportunity. He Nassim Nicholas Taleb
adcbdc1 The fact that you survived is a condition that may weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the shallow notion of "cause." Nassim Nicholas Taleb
b226b3f The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck. Consider Nassim Nicholas Taleb
fc51368 major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
6712f17 The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider Nassim Nicholas Taleb
53c9cc8 my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2f73d7b In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under "rational" scrutiny." Nassim Nicholas Taleb
156273a Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb
d689723 You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
4c7985a Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories. Contagion Nassim Nicholas Taleb
6c30ee7 bottom-up political systems, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb
987fc93 Per lo studioso e leader religioso arabo 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (che non e un mio parente), mantenere le distanze da una persona ignorante equivale a stare in compagnia di un saggio. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
1e50bc5 Steve Jobs: <>. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
9dee4af It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried--but eventually failed--to harm us." Nassim Nicholas Taleb
e796e57 This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
471b97a Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, professors, and other agents. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs.. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
723e4b9 Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
a46ee9b Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono gia morte. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
a85bb5f The stock exchanges have converted from "open outcry" where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild--in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the "flash crash"); in August 201.. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
d57e17c Questo stimolo all'acquisto di cose nuove che sono destinate a perdere le loro caratteristiche di novita, soprattutto se paragonate a quelle ancora piu nuove, viene definito effetto tapis roulant (treadmill). Come il lettore puo intuire, nasce dalla stessa fonte di bias trattata nel paragrafo precedente (la tendenza a concentrarsi sulle variazioni): notiamo le differenze e ci sentiamo insoddisfatti di alcuni oggetti e tipologie di prodotti... Nassim Nicholas Taleb
50a96d6 Ainoa asia, jota onnetar ei saatele, on kayttaytymiseni. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
3282300 Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders Nassim Nicholas Taleb
971cab6 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. Less is more and usually more effective. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
9d64353 A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion--in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
73f2eea With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
48669ff Our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
cd8f84b Le grandi aziende adorano l'idea del piano strategico. Vogliono pagare qualcuno per comprendere dove stanno andando. Eppure non esistono prove che dimostrino che la pianificazione strategica funzioni davvero: anzi, pare che vi siano prove del contrario. Uno studioso di gestione aziendale, William Starbuck, ha pubblicato alcuni articoli che sfatano il mito dell'efficacia della pianificazione, la quale rende le aziende cieche alle opzioni, da.. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
ac4ab4c la prova dell'assenza non significa assenza della prova, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
1f3c79a Recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick from it. See how the silent hero is rewarded: even his own hormonal system will conspire to offer no reward. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
1fa5b43 a saying from Steve Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." Nassim Nicholas Taleb
38ec44a piu la risposta e non lineare, meno rilevante e la media e piu importante e la stabilita intorno a questa media. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
d80dd83 Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest--and the more volatility and dispersion, the rosier the best story will be (and the darker the worst story). Someone Nassim Nicholas Taleb
3545638 Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education--not an optical illusion. We Nassim Nicholas Taleb