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March 21 - March 21, 2022
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
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.
Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
Executive programs allow us to watch people who have never worked lecturing those who have never pondered.
Failure of second-order thinking: he tells you a secret and somehow expects you to keep it, when he just gave you evidence that he can’t keep it himself.
In real life exams, someone gives you an answer and you have to find the best corresponding questions.
If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity … or get another job.
What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
I wonder why newssuckers don’t realize that if news had the slightest predictive and nonanecdotal value journalists would be monstrously rich. And if journalists were really not interested in money they would be writing literary essays.
In any subject, if you don’t feel that you don’t know enough, you don’t know enough.
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.
The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the Elder to a modern politician.* Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared.
Soldiers are more loyal to their comrades (and willing to die for them) than to their country. Academics are more loyal to their peers than to truth.
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
General principle: the solutions (on balance) need to be simpler than the problems.
Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not.
Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.
A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.
Saying someone is good at making profits but not good at managing risk is like saying someone is a great surgeon except for cases when the patients die.
An economist is a mixture of 1) a businessman without common sense, 2) a physicist without brains, and 3) a speculator without balls.
Journalists as reverse aphorists: my statement “you need skills to get a BMW, skills plus luck to become a Warren Buffett” was summarized as “Taleb says Buffett has no skills.”
Stiglitz understands everything about economics except for tail risks, which is like knowing everything about flight safety except for crashes.
The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion—it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties.* Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat.
Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live.
