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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 72e310a | Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fc83313 | There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b6f3f5c | Mother Nature is not perfect, but has so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists. So my approach is to combine evidence-based research (stripped of biological theory), with an a priori that Mother Nature has more authority than anyone. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ddde59d | I don't mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all "social scientists" who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fe071ca | cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e3dc027 | In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly--it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6632083 | research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 306beaf | However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9b6680a | Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5b9d772 | There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 04dcf2b | My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a4f68cc | In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8d283ad | People don't walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0691b31 | Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us c.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 734d9ff | Recall that someone with only casual knowledge about the problems of randomness would believe that an animal is at the maximum fitness for the conditions of its time. This is not what evolution means; on average, animals will be fit, but not every single one of them, and not at all times. Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky, the "best" operators in a given business can come from a subset of operators who .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9ceecb9 | This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7d68763 | We are not naive enough to believe that someone will be immortal because we have never seen him die, or that someone is innocent of murder because we have never seen him kill. The problem of naive generalization does not plague us everywhere. But such smart pockets of inductive skepticism tend to involve events that we have encountered in our natural environment, matters from which we have learned to avoid foolish generalization. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 889fee1 | We" are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit." | karl-popper | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| 7d62e4c | I have two further points to make on this subject. First, justification of overoptimism on grounds that "it brought us here" arises from a far more serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we are built to understand nature and our own nature and that our decisions are, and have been, the result of our own choices. I beg to disagree. So many instincts drive us." -- | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c4f10c8 | My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 41e17b4 | randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ec44eba | Economics Schmeconomics. It is all market dynamics | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1fbe242 | Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters--we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial--and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; be.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 54c29f1 | I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3d5e774 | But have the integrity to deliver your "because" very sparingly; try to limit it to situations where the "because" is derived from experiments, not backward-looking history." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1d47b81 | No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism w.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b7313bc | Well, it's only temporary, until the rest of the house is in order. Then it goes downstairs to the living room. What movie do you want to see?" "What do you have?" "Practically everything. My mom's a movie nut." "Well," I said, "you probably don't have The Parent Trap, do you?" "Of course we do. That was the last thing" | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 0d59013 | She was wearing a wonderful Claudia outfit -- a purple-and-white striped bodysuit under a gray jumper-thing. The legs of the bodysuit stretched all the way to her ankles, but she was wearing purple push-down socks anyway. Around her middle was a wide purple belt with a buckle in the shape of a telephone. And on her feet were black ballet slippers. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 4d1c34c | One night last year when my father and I were eating supper at 6.17 p.m., I said to him, "Did you have a favourite?" "A favourite what?" asked my father. "A favourite foster mother." "Yes, I did," said my father. "Her name was Hannah Pederson." "That is very interesting," I told him, recalling Mrs Leibler's conversational tips, "because 'Hannah' is a kind of word called a palindrome. That means you can spell it the same way whether you star.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 8aa8a36 | Why am I the only Thomas kid who acts her age?) Ignoring his obnoxious comment, I pressed the receiver to my ear and tried to listen. "House of Wiley?" asked Mary Anne. (That's what it sounded like. It was hard to tell over the noise.) "Whaaat?" I asked. Sam rolled his eyes. "I said, when are you going to be off the phone?" "How ... was ... Hawaii?" Mary Anne said loudly. Before I could answer either of them, Sam pulled open the fridge, rel.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 13f447f | Now, Tom had seemed like a decent guy when we watched him during track practice, and seeing that sign on the bulletin board had given us a clue that he had a good heart, too. But it was almost as if he knew we needed more convincing. And by the time we lost him--just a few streets away from our block--we were he couldn't be the same guy who had robbed Speedy Jack's. In fact, he turned out to be the nicest, most polite, most civic-minded b.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 9271839 | example of one of the big differences between Kristy and me. I was wearing a very short pink cotton dress, white tights, and black ballet slippers. I had swept all of my hair way over to one side, where it was held in place with a piece of pink cloth that matched the dress. Only one ear showed, and in it I had put my big palm tree earring. (Kristy was not wearing any jewelry.) | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 544bd47 | seeing my | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 6a577a7 | business | Ann M. Martin | ||
| b305d91 | Josh's arm was in a cast, and his face was covered with bruises. Mr. Freeman had a large bandage on his forehead, and Mrs. Freeman was on crutches. They looked as if the world had defeated them. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 3d1c9c5 | Dear Reader, In Claudia and Crazy Peaches, we get to know Aunt Peaches better, and to see the special relationship Claudia has with her aunt. I have three aunts -- Aunt Adele, Aunt Martha, and Aunt Merlena -- and I have special memories of all of them. Aunt Martha is my father's sister-in-law. She and Uncle Lyman used to give my sister and me the best presents. One Christmas, when we were very little, they gave us stockings with garters. Th.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| da798d7 | Honestly, boys can be such pains. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 76cc75d | Sorry, Mary Anne, I can't hear you!" I shouted into the phone receiver. Mary Anne Spier cleared her throat and began, "I said, hi, I really missed you, and --" "EEEEEEEE!" That was my two-year-old sister, Emily Michelle, racing through the kitchen. Behind" | Ann M. Martin | ||
| bdb622c | Behind her was my youngest brother, David Michael (seven, going on three). He was brandishing an ugly figurine carved from a coconut, which he'd somehow convinced my mom and dad to buy in Hawaii. "Nyyyah-hah-hah, the coco-monster's going to get you!" I stepped out of his way. My foot hooked into a backpack that was on the floor, and I fell into a kitchen chair. "ANYBODY SEEN MY BACKPACK?" called my seventeen-year-old brother, Charlie, from .. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| cde419e | Stacey is glamorous. She moved to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, from New York City last summer. She's very sophisticated, and is even allowed to have her hair professionally styled, so that she has this fabulous-looking shaggy blonde mane, and she wears the neatest clothes -- big, baggy shirts and tight-fitting pants -- and amazing jewelry, like parrots and palm trees. She even has a pair of earrings that consist of a dog for one ear and a bone.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 508f3be | It's awfully hard helping your parents grow up. But it has to be done. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 54f3334 | Everyone in the club is thirteen and in the eighth grade, except for our junior officers, Mallory Pike and Jessica Ramsey. Mal and Jessi are best friends. They are eleven years old and in the sixth grade. Both have pierced ears, and both adore horses -- and any movie, book, or video game that has a horse in it. I don't know how many times they've read Marguerite Henry's Misty of Chincoteague, but I do know they've seen The Black Stallion at.. | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 6582a5b | An average person has an IQ of 100. An above-average person has an IQ of 120 to 140. A person with an IQ of 150 is considered a genius. Janine's IQ is 196. Sometimes | Ann M. Martin | ||
| 76db596 | elaborate | Ann M. Martin |