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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5e42d64 | Aside from France, I was baffled by the puzzle of Sweden and other Nordic states, which are often offered as paragons of the large state "that works"--the government represents a large portion of the total economy. How could we have the happiest nation in the world, Denmark (assuming happiness is both measurable and desirable), and a monstrously large state? Is it that these countries are all smaller than the New York metropolitan area? Unt.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2702b9b | Too often, corporate strategy is built on the misguided notion that we can reliably predict the future. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of the most cogent writers on the illusion of predictability, has said, "We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future--but this is not necessarily bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts." | Brian J. Robertson | ||
| 89a5c90 | 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" | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 67c5f24 | The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom [helicopter parent]....They try to eliminate the trial and error from children's lives and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (parent-compatible) maps of reality. They are good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers, except slower. Further, they are totally .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 5bb8cfc | After things got bad for him, they somehow recovered by some invisible hand, and he was led to believe that it was his intrinsic property to recover from hardships by running every time into a new opportunity. He | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| adcbdc1 | The fact that you survived is a condition that may weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the shallow notion of "cause." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b226b3f | The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck. Consider | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| fc51368 | major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6712f17 | 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 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 53c9cc8 | my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2f73d7b | In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under "rational" scrutiny." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 156273a | Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d689723 | You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4c7985a | Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories. Contagion | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6c30ee7 | bottom-up political systems, and | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 987fc93 | Per lo studioso e leader religioso arabo 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (che non e un mio parente), mantenere le distanze da una persona ignorante equivale a stare in compagnia di un saggio. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1e50bc5 |
Steve Jobs: < |
Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9dee4af | It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried--but eventually failed--to harm us." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e796e57 | This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| dbadd76 | Real politics are the possession and distribution of power. | Benjamin Disraeli | ||
| 471b97a | Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, professors, and other agents. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 723e4b9 | Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a46ee9b | Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono gia morte. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a85bb5f | The stock exchanges have converted from "open outcry" where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild--in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the "flash crash"); in August 201.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| d57e17c | Questo stimolo all'acquisto di cose nuove che sono destinate a perdere le loro caratteristiche di novita, soprattutto se paragonate a quelle ancora piu nuove, viene definito effetto tapis roulant (treadmill). Come il lettore puo intuire, nasce dalla stessa fonte di bias trattata nel paragrafo precedente (la tendenza a concentrarsi sulle variazioni): notiamo le differenze e ci sentiamo insoddisfatti di alcuni oggetti e tipologie di prodotti... | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 50a96d6 | Ainoa asia, jota onnetar ei saatele, on kayttaytymiseni. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3282300 | Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 971cab6 | Yet 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. Less is more and usually more effective. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 9d64353 | A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion--in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 73f2eea | With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 48669ff | Our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cd8f84b | Le grandi aziende adorano l'idea del piano strategico. Vogliono pagare qualcuno per comprendere dove stanno andando. Eppure non esistono prove che dimostrino che la pianificazione strategica funzioni davvero: anzi, pare che vi siano prove del contrario. Uno studioso di gestione aziendale, William Starbuck, ha pubblicato alcuni articoli che sfatano il mito dell'efficacia della pianificazione, la quale rende le aziende cieche alle opzioni, da.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| ac4ab4c | la prova dell'assenza non significa assenza della prova, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1f3c79a | Recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick from it. See how the silent hero is rewarded: even his own hormonal system will conspire to offer no reward. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1fa5b43 | a saying from Steve Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 38ec44a | piu la risposta e non lineare, meno rilevante e la media e piu importante e la stabilita intorno a questa media. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 70fdecc | There is no gambling like politics. | Benjamin Disraeli | ||
| d80dd83 | Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest--and the more volatility and dispersion, the rosier the best story will be (and the darker the worst story). Someone | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 3545638 | Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education--not an optical illusion. We | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e34c7ec | In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 88aba49 | 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 suckers at the time)--a point also made by Alison Wolf." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 4029557 | The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8b7fa30 | People can't predict how ong they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as "limits of prediction." They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see." | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1071b43 | Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |