1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
7620
7621
7622
7623
7624
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5a10e07 | For instance, it has been argued since the 1970s that limiting speed on the highway (and enforcing it) leads to an extremely effective increase in safety. This can be plausible because risks of accidents increase disproportionally (that is, nonlinearly) with speed, and humans are not ancestrally equipped with such intuition. Someone recklessly driving a huge vehicle on the highway is endangering your safety and needs to be stopped before he.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 94e9043 | Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and antifragility within the current U.S. political discourse--that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism--both are the same to me here. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4fc148a | And the key phrase reverberating in Seneca's oeuvre is nihil perditi, "I lost nothing," after an adverse event. Stoicism" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 986465f | If you can't put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else. | soul | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| e0bf30b | Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden government trying to "reinstill confidence" you know they are fragile, hence doomed." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 304529d | is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 09066dd | Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.* | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7591edd | Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions) very long sample paths would end up resembling each other. The properties of a very, very long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f777054 | Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 728f5ba | Je prefererais etre bete et antifragile qu'extremement intelligent et fragile, a n'importe quel moment. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d47e7fc | The brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human. The converse should be true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human. Can o.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 217c94e | Le processus de la decouverte (ou de l'innovation, ou du progres technologique) depend lui-meme d'un bricolage antifragile, d'une brusque prise de risques plutot que d'une culture formelle. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d4252ec | Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c4ae492 | I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what's done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 638a896 | And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ee0271a | We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 896e292 | 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. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 886f5f5 | Stalin could not have existed in a municipality. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dce0c51 | The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d8b0f4d | We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics-- | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6e574c1 | He is often involved in a strange ritual, something commonly called "a meeting." Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn't see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 88afde6 | I suggest this passage from the German "philosopher" (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper): Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore,.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c6038eb | But I also buy the opposite argument that regulating street signs does not seem to reduce risks; drivers become more placid. Experiments show that alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system (again, lack of overcompensation). Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator--fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than usi.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9acbfba | Some libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work, how it is whetted by a sense of danger and responsibility. As a result, many German and Dutch towns have reduced the number of street signs. We saw a version of the Drachten effect in Chapter 2 in t.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7103ea1 | My life has been of but little worth mostly fild [sic] up with vanity. | Tony Horwitz | ||
| cb0823b | But one needs to be careful not to overgeneralize the Drachten effect, as it does not imply the effectiveness of removing all rules from society. As I said earlier, speed on the highway responds to a different dynamic and its risks are different. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 89b9347 | A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revolution. The society included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald, and even Bertrand Russell for a moment. In retrospect, it turned out to be a very effective strategy, not so much as a way to achieve th.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| edd1855 | The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that's what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| de05b32 | In his book The Nature of Rationality he gets, as is typical with philosophers, into amateur evolutionary arguments and writes the following: "Since not more than 50 percent of the individuals can be wealthier than average." Of course, more than 50% of individuals can be wealthier than average. Consider that you have a very small number of very poor people and the rest clustering around the middle class. The mean will be lower than the medi.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5de0e09 | The very same desire for order, interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits-it is just that, unlike art, the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 686b5cd | Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur? | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a9bed80 | expositor | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 11a6121 | The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people's greed rather than their benevolence, but there is no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment (the reader can easily see that, aside from very few exceptions like George Soros, I am not impressed by people with money). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1ee4f2c | Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cdb3c20 | Indeed, our bodies discover probabilities in a very sophisticated manner and assess risks much better than our intellects do. To take one example, risk management professionals look in the past for information on the so-called worst-case scenario and use it to estimate future risks--this method is called "stress testing." They take the worst historical recession, the worst war, the worst historical move in interest rates, or the worst point.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9688588 | While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0ba4eb0 | my wish is for people in general to remain fools of randomness (so I can trade against them), yet for there to remain a minority intelligent enough to value my methods and hire my services. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0e743dd | what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bce1611 | dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7cb48d2 | A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion. | leadership prophecy | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| e560ec7 | The Discovery of France, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b37d162 | As to liquid, my rule is drink no liquid that is not at least a thousand years old--so its fitness has been tested. I drink just wine, water, and coffee. No soft drinks. Perhaps the most possibly deceitfully noxious drink is the orange juice we make poor innocent people imbibe at the breakfast table while, thanks to marketing, we convince them it is "healthy." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1b20575 | equable | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3bcb556 | We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn't change. We | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |