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In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations
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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.
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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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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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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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Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.
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If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
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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.
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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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If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.
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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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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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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.
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Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
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We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.
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Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
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Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
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We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order...we take what we know a little too seriously.
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I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18...
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The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
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Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
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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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Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.
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You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
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There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
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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