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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f35470b | Heikot toimivat tarpeidensa mukaan, vahvemmat velvollisuutensa. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3654c56 | Sanallinen uhka on aidon voimattomuuden sertifikaatti. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 194598b | system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ef52be9 | He provides the example of a philosopher who puzzles about the reality of time, but who nonetheless applies for a research grant to work on the philosophical problem of time during next year's sabbatical--without doubting the reality of next year's arrival. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e7d0985 | Koulutus tekee viisaasta hieman viisaamman, mutta holmosta valtavasti vaarallisemman. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7feab5e | To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course soc.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5f981f3 | Kun nainen huutaa, etta tekosi oli anteeksiantamaton, han on jo alkanut antaa anteeksi. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 63e07b7 | Nykyaika: loimme nuoruuden ilman sankaruutta, ian ilman viisautta ja elaman ilman loistoa. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1d41bab | Consider the iatrogenics of newspapers. They need to fill their pages every day with a set of news items--particularly those news items also dealt with by other newspapers. But to do things right, they ought to learn to keep silent in the absence of news of significance. Newspapers should be of two-line length on some days, two hundred pages on others--in proportion with the intensity of the signal. But of course they want to make money and.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7209efb | innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6b04e33 | with a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0926955 | L'odio e amore con un piccolo errore da qualche parte nella programmazione: un errore che si potrebbe correggere, ma che e molto difficile trovare | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 23bfbeb | Chiedere alla scienza di spiegare la vita, e questioni vitali, e come chiedere a un grammatico di spiegare la poesia | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d44fb8c | Tu esisti pienamente se e solo se la tua conversazione (o i tuoi scritti) non possono essere facilmente ricostruiti con ritagli da altre conversazioni | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ba1fb09 | Sei vivo in proporzione inversa alla densita delle frasi fatte che usi nei tuoi scritti | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bb38210 | anything locked into planning tends to fail precisely because of these attributes--it is quite a myth that planning helps corporations: in fact we saw that the world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future. What survives comes from the interplay of some fitness and environmental conditions. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5415c2a | Greenspan's actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3105e49 | we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ff1fd5e | My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafes away from information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silen.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f98de3d | It is hard to resist discussion of artificial history without a comment on the father of all pseudothinkers, Hegel. Hegel writes a jargon that is meaningless outside of a chic Left Bank Parisian cafe or the humanities department of some university extremely well insulated from the real world. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 079959c | preponderates, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7b8abd4 | epistemology, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fd86e6f | 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 | ||
| 49a6c65 | A random series will always present some detectable pattern. I | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f5836d8 | the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e108caa | Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 37c843b | There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent--and most conspicuous--and that is the world of markets. By | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7100f13 | I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.) | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b228da8 | 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 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 03a3ef6 | doxastic | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c2e5004 | In a now famous experiment they found that the majority of people, whether predictors or nonpredictors, will judge a deadly flood (causing thousands of deaths) caused by a California earthquake to be more likely than a fatal flood (causing thousands of deaths) occurring somewhere in North America (which happens to include California). As a derivatives trader I noticed that people do not like to insure against something abstract; the risk th.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ac9a2a0 | It turned out that the ancients--again, those ancients!--were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ec83c0a | One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil's Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 17cf342 | later--unlike gardeners, who understand rather well that pruning trees strengthens them. Likewise peace--some kind of forced, constrained, non-natural peace--may be costly in lives: just | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 084985b | Joseph Stiglitz, with two colleagues, the Orszag brothers (Peter and Jonathan), looked at the very same Fannie Mae. They assessed, in a report, that "on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero."* Supposedly, they ran simulations--but didn't see the obvious. They also said that the probability of a default was found to be "so small that it is difficult to detect... | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5873eb7 | The central point: had Stiglitz been a businessman with his own money on the line, he would have blown up, terminated. Or had he been in nature, his genes would have been made extinct--so people with such misunderstanding of probability would eventually disappear from our DNA. What I found nauseating was the government hiring one of his coauthors. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7477866 | To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course soc.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 87d33a0 | Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2d249c1 | Education has benefits aside from stabilizing family incomes. Education makes individuals more polished dinner partners, for instance, something non-negligible. But the idea of educating people to improve the economy is rather novel. The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and "learning," not economic growth (they were not suc.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8f63be3 | Or, if I have to work, I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the rest of the time (assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition, rather than being subjected to the tedium of Japanese style low-intensity interminable office hours with sleep deprivation. Main course and dessert are separate. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9068a02 | I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth--there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ddfc7d1 | This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation "theory" is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs "chimeras" rather than theories." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 28f02a4 | Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel) | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 78eb51e | Before the "enlightenment" and the age of rationality, there was in the culture a collection of tricks to deal with our fallibility and reversals of fortunes. The elders can still help us with some of their ruses." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |