PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
“ ”We end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating moderniest slogans stripped of all depth...The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do not harm; even more we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in decision making (p.10).
Their three flaws 1) they think in statics not dynamics 2) they think in low, not high dimensions 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions....The first flaw is they are incapable in thinking in second steps and unaware of the need of them...The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single dimensional representations. The third flaw is they can't forecast the evolution of those one helps by attaching, or the magnification one gets from feedback. (p.9)
About Nassim Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1 January 1960 in Amioun, Lebanon) is an essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Nassim Taleb
Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4
Silver Rule in intellectual debates. You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant. The former is more sensational, hence lends itself more readily to dissemination. The mark of a charlatan — say the writer and pseudo-rationalist Sam Harris — is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on some specific statement (“look at what he said”) rather than blasting his exact position (“look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”) — for the latter requires an extensive grasp of the proposed idea. Note that the same applies to the interpretation of religious texts, often extracted from their broader circumstances.
You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.