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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label 'Lebanese,' preferring the less restrictive 'Levantine' designation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us-and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb