Link to article: 35
Brilliant Insights From Nassim Taleb
……..
Taleb quotes from the
article:
The artificial gives us hangovers, the natural
inverse-hangovers.
The only problem with the last laugh is that the winner has
to laugh alone.
Intelligence without imagination: a deadly combination.
There is no more unmistakable sign of failure than that of a
middle-aged man boasting of his successes in college.
Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
One of life's machinations is to make some people both rich
and unhappy, that is, jointly fragile and deprived of hope.
[If] someone is making an effort to ignore you he is not
ignoring you.
The danger of reading financial & other news (or
econobullshit) is that things that don't make sense at all start making sense
to you after progressive immersion.
It's a sign of weakness to worry about showing signs of
weakness.
Friends, I wonder if someone has computed how much would be
saved if we shut down economics and political science departments in
universities. Those who need to research these subjects can do so on their
private time.
I trust those who trust me and distrust those who are
suspicious of others.
A good man is warm and respectful towards the waiter or
people of lower rank.
Journalists feel contempt for those who fear them and a deep
resentment for those who don't.
When someone starts a sentence with the first half
containing "I", "not", and "but", the
"not" should be removed and the "but" replaced with
"therefore.”
High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort,
physical effort in place of mental expenditure, & mental expenditure in
place of mental clarity.
The only valid political system is one that can handle an
imbecile in power without suffering from it.
Journalists cannot grasp that what is interesting is not
necessarily important; most cannot even grasp that what is sensational is not
necessarily interesting.
Never buy a product that the owner of the company that makes
it doesn't use, or, in the case of, say, medication, wouldn't contingently use.
Just realized that to politely get rid of someone people in
Brooklyn say "call me if you need anything."
Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the
self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.
We often benefit from harm done to us by others; almost
never from self-inflicted injuries.
You will never know if someone is an asshole until he
becomes rich.
When someone writes "I dislike you but I agree with
you", I read "I dislike you because I agree with you."
A great book eludes summaries. A great aphorism resists
expansion. The rest is just communication.
For a free person, the optimal - most opportunistic - route
between two points should never be the shortest one.
What counts is not *what* people say, it is *how much*
energy they spend saying it.
Used skillfully, a compliment will be much more offensive
than any disparagement.
I trust those who are greedy for money a thousand time more
than those who are greedy for credentials.
Just as eating cow-meat doesn't turn you into a cow,
studying philosophy doesn't make you wiser.
It is a great compliment for an honest person to be mistaken
for a crook by a crook.
Many want to learn how to memorize things; few seek that
rare ability to forget.
If you have something very important to say, whisper it.
The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain
"why" you did something.
A book that can be summarized should not be written as a
book.