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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a2f63f5 | There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries do the grunt work and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the noncreative technical grind | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d98dd9e | if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it "efficient" inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 406baff | Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0802937 | What the French call "the caviar left," la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance--not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John X.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0d3916f | The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn't mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend (IYI-style) to believe are important can distract us from more central attributes of the price mechanism. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2fe9a06 | experiments have shown that players rely on several heuristics. The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 48694b7 | The theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite--ex cura theoria nascitur. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 59e28a8 | Este mult mai dificil sa pierzi intr-un joc pe care l-ai pus la punct tu insuti. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 99fed81 | what you see is likely to be less Black Swannish than what you do not see. | seen unknown unseen | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| f6940ee | those who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f391316 | The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 48a373f | Accidentul pozitiv (ca in cazul medicamentului pentru hipertensiune care a produs beneficii colaterale ce au condus apoi la Viagra) a reprezentat metoda centrala a empiristilor in descoperirea medicala. Aceeasi idee poate fi generalizata in cazul vietii: profitati la maxim de intamplarile fericite din jur. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9ff09bd | The notion of "economies of scale"--that companies save money when they become large, hence more efficient--is often, apparently behind company expansions and mergers. It is prevalent in the collective consciousness without evidence for it; in fact, the evidence would suggest the opposite. Yet, for obvious reasons, people keep doing these mergers--they are not good for companies, they are good for Wall Street bonuses; a company getting larg.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 43e2aa3 | Nu cautati ceea ce este precis si local. Nu fiti ingust la minte. Marele descoperitor Pasteur, care a venit cu ideea ca norocul il favorizeaza pe cel pregatit, a inteles ca pentru a lasa contingenta sa-ti afecteze viata nu trebuie sa cauti ceva anume in fiecare dimineata, ci sa muncesti din greu. Asa cum a spus un alt mare ganditor, Yogi Berra, "Daca nu stii incotro mergi, trebuie sa fii foarte atent, pentru ca s-ar putea sa nu ajungi acolo.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 93e39bf | As a matter of fact, 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 other words, good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small "affects" across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 89e2ba5 | If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 89ea991 | Everything nonstable or breakable has had ample chance to break over time. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a1ac1ce | First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2b82a43 | Who gets rewarded, the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to "correct" his predecessors' faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery? Who is more valuable, the politician who avoids a war or the one who starts a new one (and is lucky enough to win)?" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2c3161b | I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 742003c | You will never fully convince | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ae703f3 | You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 558b5cf | The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation--even Charles Darwin, who uncultured scientists claim "invented" the survival of the fittest, was not the first to mention it." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e9f1f01 | Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6d10d8f | Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 06cdc33 | If The Black Swan is about epistemic limitations, then, from this definition, we can see that it is not about some objectively defined phenomenon, like rain or a car crash--it is simply something that was not expected by a particular observer. So I was wondering why so many otherwise intelligent people have casually questioned whether certain events, say the Great War, or the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, were Black .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2051aba | The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1ae76db | She received enough attention to get the courtesy of rejection letters and occasional insulting comments instead of the far more insulting and demeaning silence. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8d6bf3a | you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant | wittgenstein | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| 372883b | At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fc965e7 | Whenever your survival is in play, don't immediately look for causes and effects. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 288373a | Further, as we discovered during the financial crisis that started in 2008, these blowup risks-to-others are easily concealed owing to the growing complexity of modern institutions and political affairs. While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 7d8b15c | I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people--really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatical.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8d53058 | An essay is an impulsive meditation, not science reporting. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1a88d80 | It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others--that is, other imitators. It fights solitude. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f807c11 | If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably--they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| af2cb45 | Our tendency to perceive--to impose--narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease--dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity. But memory and the arrow of time can get mixed up. Narrativity can viciously affect the remembrance of past events as follows: we will .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 330858d | The "persecution" of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d01120f | The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything | success | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| a828e71 | that there is no evidence of the possibility of large events, i.e., Black Swans. You are likely to confuse that statement, however, particularly if you do not pay close attention, with the statement that there is evidence of no possible Black | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 979f4e5 | Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2e958cc | Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dc15ab2 | Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 994813d | Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. "The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |