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Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
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Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
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But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
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Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum
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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.
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Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!
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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. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.
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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! 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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The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it
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The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
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Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.
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The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Creative Commons
Born:
1960
(age 64)
Bio:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
Known for:
Antifragile (2012)
The Bed of Procrustes (2016)
Dynamic Hedging (1997)
Most used words:
people
life
control
understand
risk
box
randomness
science
robust
worst
modern
knowledge
random
man
modernity
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