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The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
β
Love without sacrifice is like theft
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
β
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 thatβs what you are seeking.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
β
Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
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What I learned on my own I still remember
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
β
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Difficulty is what wakes up the genius
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
β
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Things always become obvious after the fact
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
β
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
β
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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Remember that you are a Black Swan.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
β
It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
β
I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesnβt convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.
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β
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the game)
β
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
β
If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just donβt do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
β
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto))
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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Only the autodidacts are free.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
β
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with βWow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?β and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you donβt know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows 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 menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4))
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We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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I want to live happily in a world I donβt understand.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Ideas come and go, stories stay.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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What matters isnβt what a person has or doesnβt have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
β
I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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If an emotion can't change the condition or the situation you're dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. But it's what I feel. Right, no one said anything about not feeling it. No one said you can't ever cry. Forget "manliness." If you need to take a moment, by all means, go ahead. Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one's emotions, not in pretending they don't exist.
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
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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 alow you to put there.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivatedβthe busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
β
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto))
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Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries,
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
β
No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
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More dataβsuch as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the streetβcan make you miss the big truck.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they haveβor donβt haveβin their portfolio.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto))
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The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy itβbooks have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4))
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that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. Iβd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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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.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms)
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Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
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We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it werenβt for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isnβt so when stripped of personal risks.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.
The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.
Trial and error is freedom.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
β
Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environmentβin fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludicβextremely organizedβconstructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
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Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesnβt introspect, doesnβt exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the βvictimsβ of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errorsβthough never the same error more than onceβis more reliable than someone who has never made any.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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Steve Jobs: βPeople think focus means saying yes to the thing youβve got to focus on. But thatβs not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. Iβm actually as proud of the things we havenβt done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
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Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative βlow riskβ game.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
β
Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the birdβs belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race βlooking out for its best interests,β as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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I donβt run for trains.β Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. 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 thatβs what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
β
I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. 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 Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though....
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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For studying courage in textbooks doesnβt make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professorβand the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
β
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. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children's natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning . . . . Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)