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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7192f7f | No es extrano ver que un suceso se produce precisamente porque no se esperaba que fuera a ocurrir? ?Que tipo de defensa tenemos contra ello? Cualquier cosa que se nos ocurra (que Nueva York es un blanco facil para los terroristas, por ejemplo) puede resultar ineficaz si el enemigo sabe que lo sabemos. Quiza parezca raro que, en un juego estrategico de este tipo, lo que sabemos pueda ser por completo intrascendente. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| de8a3f9 | La estrategia de los descubridores y emprendedores es confiar menos en la planificacion de arriba abajo y centrarse al maximo en reconocer las oportunidades cuando se presentan, y juguetear con ellas. De modo que no estoy de acuerdo con los seguidores de Marx y los de Adam Smith: si los mercados libres funcionan es porque dejan que la gente tenga suerte, gracias al agresivo metodo del ensayo y error, y no dan a las personas recompensas ni <.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2eed5de | the following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more compl.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 86d0f58 | The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden--just as Germans still pay for war crimes--would immediately add consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a true disincentive, without imparting any sense.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 360dbd6 | As for our majority... one is enough. | Benjamin Disraeli | ||
| fc64390 | It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8f82fd7 | you have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ee07c02 | Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity--yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fb9cf18 | What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work; the harder they try, the more captive they are." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a4cecb9 | I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obtained by multiplying the probabilities by the corresponding outcomes). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 97f052b | An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5286a5a | The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as" -- | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f0d42b6 | Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 07855ba | A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 474a98e | 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 once again the example of the gambler. If you look at the population of beginning gamblers taken as a whole, you can be close to certain that one of them (but you do not know in ad.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5f9937b | Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 96bf7c1 | He is susceptible to conference room boredom and is incapable of talking to businessmen, particularly the run-of-the-mill variety. Nero is allergic to the vocabulary of business talk, not just on plain aesthetic grounds. Phrases like "game plan," "bottom line," "how to get there from here," "we provide our clients with solutions," "our mission," and other hackneyed expressions that dominate meetings lack both the precision and the coloratio.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| aa0c473 | Yo observaba que personas muy inteligentes e informadas no tenian ventaja alguna sobre los taxistas en sus predicciones, pero habia una diferencia crucial. Los taxistas no pensaban que comprendieran las cosas mejor que las personas con estudios; ellos no eran los especialistas, y lo sabian. Nadie sabia nada, pero los pensadores de elite estaban convencidos de que sabian mas que los demas porque eran pensadores reputados, y cuando se es miem.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8ae4311 | La mejor forma de demostrar el caracter arbitrario de estas categorias, y el efecto de contagio que producen, es recordar con que frecuencia esos grupos cambian por completo a lo largo de la historia. No hay duda de que la actual alianza entre los fundamentalistas cristianos y el lobby israeli seria incomprensible para un intelectual del siglo XIX: los cristianos eran antisemitas, y los musulmanes protegian a los judios, a quienes preferian.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b999b0e | it took me a lifetime to figure out the second point: implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8e2a885 | taking the half-invented into the invented is often the real breakthrough | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9b0ac6c | the simpler and more obvious the discovery, the less equipped we are to figure it out by complicated methods. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e583624 | We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those "risk experts" in the economic domain who fight the previous war)--these are the scientists now trying to impose the solutions on us. But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6734f02 | the Swiss doctor Claparede had an amnesic patient completely crippled with her ailment. Her condition was so bad that he would have to reintroduce himself to her at a frequency of once per fifteen minutes for her to remember who he was. One day he secreted a pin in his hand before shaking hers. The next day she quickly withdrew her hand as he tried to greet her, but still did not recognize him. Since then plenty of discussions of amnesic pa.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 298e17f | both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 77aec4d | Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9ac67f9 | You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet we tend to not be aware of this property. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9de1697 | I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the "intellectual" profession who bothers me." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9d077f7 | examined the cures from cancer that resulted from a visit to Lourdes in France, where people were healed by simple contact with the holy waters, and found out the interesting fact that, of the total cancer patients who visited the place, the cure rate was, if anything, lower than the statistical one for spontaneous remissions. It was lower than the average for those who did not go to Lourdes! Should a statistician infer here that cancer pat.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9e25255 | Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3a265d2 | Take a population of 10 people, 9 having a net worth of $ 30,000 and 1 having a net worth of $ 1,000. The average net worth is $ 27,100 and 9 out of 10 people will have above average wealth. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c69835e | He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.* | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 53cd974 | What do the popular expressions "a swimmer's body" and "beginner's luck" have in common? What do they seem to share with the concept of history? There is a belief among gamblers that beginners are almost always lucky. "It gets worse later, but gamblers are always lucky when they start out," you hear. This statement is actually empirically true: researchers confirm that gamblers have lucky beginnings (the same applies to stock market specula.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 222d39d | More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, Stoic, manipulator-politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the following story. One Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, "Where were the .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f3780b8 | la muerte a menudo es un buen paso profesional para el escritor). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5dbf21b | The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right. | Benjamin Disraeli | ||
| e9cf890 | newspapers do not have to have a screaming headline saying that nothing new is taking place (though the Bible was smart enough to declare ein chadash tachat hashemesh--" nothing new under the sun," providing the information that things just do recur)." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e5e569e | adumbration | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| db21179 | it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8a68ca5 | As the skeptics' main teaching was that nothing could be accepted with certainty, conclusions of various degrees of probability could be formed, and these supplied a guide to conduct. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 676af6b | Bob Rubin Trade: payoff in a skewed domain where the benefits are visible (and rewarded with some compensation) and the detriment is rare (and unpunished owing to absence of skin in the game). Can be generalized to politics, anything where the penalty is weak and the victims are abstract and distributed (say taxpayers or shareholders). | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1cf59aa | You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples--it depends on how the choices are presented to you. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c2ee4e0 | Such trait of absence of marriage to ideas is indeed rare among humans. Just as we do with children, we support those in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propagate our genes, so we do with ideas. An academic who became famous for espousing an opinion is not going to voice anything that can possibly devalue his own past work and kill years of investment. People who switch parties become traitors, renega.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c521e44 | In that sense harboring superstitions is not irrational by any metric: nobody has managed to build a criterion for rationality based on actions that bear no cost. But actions that harm you are detectable, if not observable. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |