Thaddeus > Thaddeus's Quotes

“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world. What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed. This is a fact of nature just as much as the currents of the winds and the seas. The flow of force and matter is a system, with laws and maturation patterns. We should harbor no guilt for complying with those laws—even if they sometimes require a little inhumanity. —TRIBUNO CANDIANO, LETTER TO THE COMPANY CANDIANO CHIEF OFFICER’S ASSEMBLY”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside

“Ecotone. It means an in-between spot. Eco, like ecosystem. And tone, from tonos. That’s Greek. It means ‘tension.’ So it’s like the tension between ecosystems, you understand? The overlap between two worlds. Two worlds in conflict with each other. You see all that land behind us?” He pointed a thumb back at the soft rolling grassy hills. “That land wants to be prairie. But this here land in front of us, it wants to be forest. And this spot, this is where the prairie and the forest are fighting. And this little guy”—he brushed the baby elm gently with a finger—“he’s the advance guard. There’s a slow-motion war happening right here, Jack, beneath our feet, on a scale we can’t even imagine.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“In the effort to understand, we may go too far in personalizing institutions, and even entire industries; we may forget that none of these things really exist. It is only individual human beings who have agendas—and these agendas are themselves complex expressions of political and personal drives, some unconscious. So long as institutions must be comprised of individuals, then, institutions will have fractures, gradients; they will be many things, and in combinations that will change over time. We speak and think in models. And so we say that “The New York Times” wants to accomplish this, or that “the CIA” is after that. So long as we recognize this as shorthand, necessary”
― Barrett Brown, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir