Some pearls from "The Black Swan".
"What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errros, but our absence of awareness of it"
(in the presence of Black Swans)..."The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves"
"Recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, and that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick from it".
"Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books"
"I had no defined specialty and wanted none"
"By imitating, we get closer to others---that is, other imitators. It fights solitude"
"Death is often a good career move for an author"
"We all become stingy and calculating when our wealh grows and we start taking money seriously."
"What we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading".
"Do you face the possibility of an adverse event? Don´t worry. Who knows, it may turn out to be good for you. Doubting the consequences of an outcome will allow you to remain imperturbable".
"Both Huet and Bayle were erudites and spent their lives reading. Huet, who lived into his nineties, had a servant follow him with a book to read aloud to him during meals and breaks and thus avoid lost time. He was deemed the most read person in his day. Erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies and open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters".
"We have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world, these instances are always easy to find".
"Uncertainty: understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit".
"We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads".
"The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck."
"Someone who could figure out how to buy me at the price I am truly worth and sell me at what I think I am worth would be able to pocket a huge difference"
"You cannot ignore self-delusion. The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know".
"In the end we are being driven by history, all the while thinking that we are doing the driving"
"Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgment. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I do not know"
"I do not worry a lot, I try to worry about matters I can do something about. I worry less about the embarrassment that about missing an opportunity."
Comments
Regarding the sentence about self-delusion, I could think the author copied the idea from Scott Adams, drawer of Dilbert. Yesterday I was just reading an interview to him that was done in 2002, where, referring to the knowledge and the experiencie he adquired in his MBA, he said: "when I encounter people who have not had a similar educational experiencie, the thing I´m amazed at is that they don´t know what they don´t know".
I´ll take one for my blog. :)