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Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio (only when the words outperform silence).
affirming the consequent
I saw mosques in the clouds announced Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century French symbolic poet. This interpretation took him to “poetic” Abyssinia (in East Africa), where he was brutalized by a Christian Lebanese slave dealer, contracted syphilis, and lost a leg to gangrene. He gave up poetry in disgust at the age of nineteen, and died anonymously in a Marseilles hospital ward while still in his thirties.
that which came with the help of luck could be taken away by luck (and often rapidly and unexpectedly at that). The flipside, which deserves to be considered as well (in fact it is even more of our concern), is that things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness.
it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
a coup de foudre, a sudden intense (and obsessive) infatuation that strikes like lightning.
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today—as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.
What is easy to conceive is clear to express / Words to say it would come effortlessly.
Einstein’s remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.
In a well-known psychology case the Swiss doctor Claparède had an amnesic patient completely crippled with her ailment. Her condition was so bad that he would have to reintroduce himself to her at a frequency of once per fifteen minutes for her to remember who he was. One day he secreted a pin in his hand before shaking hers. The next day she quickly withdrew her hand as he tried to greet her, but still did not recognize him.
When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.
Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.
hindsight bias, the “I knew it all along” effect.
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
was amused to discover a similar evolutionary argument in mate selection that considers that women prefer (on balance) to mate with healthy older men over healthy younger ones, everything else being equal, as the former provide some evidence of better genes. Gray hair signals an enhanced ability to survive—conditional on having reached the gray hair stage, a man is likely to be more resistant to the vagaries of life.
The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise.
Note also that the implication that wealth does not count so much into one’s well-being as the route one uses to get to it.
We look after our customer’s interests / the road ahead / our assets are our people / creation of shareholder value / our vision / our expertise lies in / we provide interactive solutions / we position ourselves in this market / how to serve our customers better / short-term pain for long-term gain / we will be rewarded in the long run / we play from our strength and improve our weaknesses / courage and determination will prevail / we are committed to innovation and technology / a happy employee is a productive employee / commitment to excellence / strategic plan / our work ethics.
Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability, for example, are the most prone to crashes.
These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.
Aside from the misperception of one’s performance, there is a social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again.
Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.
An Interrupted Tennis Game It is not uncommon for someone watching a tennis game on television to be bombarded by advertisements for funds that did (until that minute) outperform others by some percentage over some period. But, again, why would anybody advertise if he didn’t happen to outperform the market? There is a high probability of the investment coming to you if its success is caused entirely by randomness. This phenomenon is what economists and insurance people call adverse selection. Judging an investment that comes to you requires more stringent standards than judging an investment
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