Some practical and philosophical aphorisms from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[Cain]

Or rather, more accurately, from his last book, The Bed of Procrustes (which is really just a hundred and sixty or so pages of aphorisms).

You'll see some of these in the feed:

Preludes:

The person you're most afraid of contradicting is yourself.

An idea starts to become interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

In science you need to understand the world, in business you need others to misunderstand it.

Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during hours not officially spent working: be select about professions.

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with anyprecision you are a little bit dead—the more precision the more dead you are.

There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.


Counter Narratives

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

The most painful moments are not those we spend with uninteresting people; rather, they are those spent with uninteresting people trying hard to be interesting.

I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.

It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.


Matters Ontological

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.


The Sacred and the Profane

To mark a separation between holy and profane, I take a ritual bath after any contact, or correspondence (even emails), with consultants, economists, Harvard Business School professors, journalists, and those in similarly depraved pursuits; I then feel and act purified from the profane until the next episode.

You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative


Chance, Success, Happiness and Stoicism

You don't become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

You want to avoid being disliked without being envied or admired

Some pursuits are much duller from the inside. Even piracy, they say.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

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.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don't want to resemble when you grow up.

Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, noble, elegant, robust, and heroic life.

They are born, then 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 go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.


Charming and Less Charming Sucker Problems

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren't scientific at all.


Theseus, or living the Paleo Life

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

My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.

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

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.


The Republic of Letters

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books skip both the text and the footnotes

It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.

Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.


The Universal and the Particular

Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither


Fooled by Randomness

The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what's worse, the opposite.

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around. Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.


Aesthetics

To understand "progress": all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome).

We love imperfection, the right kind of imperfection; we pay up for original art and typo-laden first editions.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.


Ethics

If you find any reason why you and someone are friends you are not friends.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.

We find it to be in extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it "national pride."

I trust everyone except those who tell me they are trustworthy

For soldiers, we use the term "mercenary," but we absolve employees of responsibility with "everybody needs to make a living."


Robustness and Fragility

Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or, even better, a rationalist-proof one.

The main disadvantage of being a writer, particularly in Britain, is that there is nothing you can do in public or private that would damage your reputation.


The Ludic Fallacy and Domain Dependence

Upon arriving at the hotel in Dubai, the businessman had a porter carry his luggage; I later saw him lifting free weights in the gym.

Games were created to give nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don't know who really won or lost (except too late), but you can tell who is heroic and who is not.


Epistemology and Subtractive Knowledge

Since Plato, Western thought and the theory of knowledge have focused on the notions of True-False; as commendable as it was, it is high time to shift the concern to Robust-Fragile, and social epistemology to the more serious problem of Sucker-Nonsuckers

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.

The perfect sucker understands that pigs can stare at pearls but doesn't realize he can be in an analog situation.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been  hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work  within institutions.


The Scandal of Prediction

The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

They would take forecasting more seriously if it were pointed out to them that in Semitic languages the words for forecast and "prophecy" are the same.

For Seneca, the Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for
self-destruction.


Being a Philosopher and Managing to Remain One

In twenty-five centuries, no human came along with the brilliance, depth, elegance, wit, and imagination to match Plato—to protect us from his legacy.

Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.

For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.


Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.

The stock market, in brief: participants are calmly waiting in line to be slaughtered while thinking it is for a Broadway show.

The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement "this is my last cigarette" holds true.

At a panel in Moscow, I watched the economist Edmund Phelps, who got the "Nobel" for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.


The Sage, the Weak and the Magnificent

The only definition of an alpha male:  if you try to be an alpha male, you will never be one.

Regular men are a certain varying number of meals away from lying, stealing, killing, or even working as forecasters for the Federal Reserve in Washington; never the magnificent.

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificaLe of impotence.

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death.

[Disco Pickle]

Love this guy.  Discovered him several years back.  Always found him spot on.

Smart investor too.

[LMNO]

Whoa.  I'm going to have to print these out.  Thanks, man.

[Elder Iptuous]

Nice.
are these all his, or is it a collection that he has assembled?

[Cain]

They're all his own thoughts and writings.

[Doktor Howl]

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

This man is a FUCKING GENIUS.

[Icey]

I have his book, The Black Swan. So good. So hard to read.

[Disco Pickle]

I have his book, The Black Swan. So good. So hard to read.

Tail risk hedging is how I currently have a majority of my portfolio positioned.  I moved it into that position right after this last bout of extreme swings started.

I think I'm going to stay there for a few years and build up some new cash I feel more comfortable taking larger risks with.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan are both some of the best things I've read that was recommended to me by someone on PD. I acquired The Bed of Procrustes a little while back, but got distracted and didn't get more than halfway. Great stuff.

[Placid Dingo]

Hell yeah. I'd be happy to see them all in the feed.

[Don Coyote]

Ooooo

[Placid Dingo]

Got Black Swan second hand two days ago.

[LMNO]

TODAY'S CONTENT:

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision you are a little bit dead—the more precision the more dead you are.

I find this to be off-putting in a way I sometimes see in Taleb's writings.  I get his point, but it seems to be highly inaccurate as far as pragmatism is concerned.

The quote suggests falling for the Eristic Illusion – that Disorder is preferable to Order.  It is, of course, dependent on how you define "precision": Does "I will walk to the subway around 7:00 to catch the first train into the City so I can be at my job by at least 7:30" count?  What about "I will go to work."  Too precise?  Not enough?

What about things you want to do?  "I am going LARP-ing today."  If, in fact, you know precisely where, when, and how you are going to LARP, does that mean that you are 'a little bit dead'?  I'm sure we can all think of instances where, for one reason or another, we need to be in a certain place at a certain time – A band you love is playing that night, or the boat has to sail on the tides, or the bank will foreclose on your home if you're not at the bank at 3:15.  That's not an accurate depiction of death.

Instead, what I think he's trying to get at is more along the lines of, "The more blind you are to spontaneity, the more dead you become."  Making plans and trying to follow them isn't folly, nor is it soul-killing.  Sticking to those plans no matter what else happens, well... that's just silly.  That's the Aneristic Illusion, that Order is preferable to Disorder.  That implies an inflexibility that is impervious to growth.  Which, it could be argued, is somewhat like death.

So, you need to make some plans much of the time, but you need to be open to things changing, and adapting to those changes.  You also need to be open to changing your goals in response to your experiences; it's not just of what you do, you need to be flexible with why you're doing it.

I find that when Taleb writes stuff like this, it throws me for a minute.  Because what it sounds like he's describing is a purely reactive existence, being passively tossed around by his experiences, rather than getting shit done and TAKING IT TO THE WALL.

[Triple Zero]

Well, in one of his books he also wrote he vowed to never run for a bus or a train, because the most interesting things happen as you wait for the next one.

It sounded like a good idea, but I find that as I am really REALLY bad at being on-time in certain circumstances, not running for a bus, ever, definitely is a bad idea. Or maybe not. The end result would usually be that I'd be even more later than I was already going to be had I caught the bus.

Well, I dunno. It sounds like some things are maybe just for Taleb, or perhaps for how Taleb would like the world to be?

[Cainad (dec.)]

Well, in one of his books he also wrote he vowed to never run for a bus or a train, because the most interesting things happen as you wait for the next one.

It sounded like a good idea, but I find that as I am really REALLY bad at being on-time in certain circumstances, not running for a bus, ever, definitely is a bad idea. Or maybe not. The end result would usually be that I'd be even more later than I was already going to be had I caught the bus.

Well, I dunno. It sounds like some things are maybe just for Taleb, or perhaps for how Taleb would like the world to be?

Taleb is also pretty financially secure, afaik. I'm willing to bet that changes his worldview a bit.


LMNO, I have the same experiences sometimes with what Taleb says. I usually resolve it by trying to determine the (usually unstated) context of his pithy statements.