Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes (2016)

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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What they call play (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called work in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking outside the box ; and when they die they are put in a box.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb