- “Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.”
- “Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.”
- “In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”
- “Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.”
- “In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.”
- “Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.”
- “Catholic countries had more serial monogamy than today, but without the need for divorce—life expectancy was short; marriage duration was much, much shorter. “
- “You never win an argument until they attack your person.”
- “The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.”
- “To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
- “People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.”
- “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.”
- “Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.”
- “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 best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stockbroker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.”
- “The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement ‘this is my last cigarette’ holds true.”
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Procrustean Bed
I like Taleb. He was a lot like Roubini back in the day (07-08). And his collected sayings are definitely worth consideration:
