The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Read Free Book Online Page A

a journalist or consultant, the opposite.
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    Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.
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    If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.
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    I wonder if those who advocate generosity for its rewards notice the inconsistency, or if what they call generosity is an attractive investment strategy. *
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    Those who think religion is about “belief” don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.
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    Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
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    In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.
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    Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
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    Compliance with the straitjacket of narrow (Aristotelian) logic and avoidance of fatal inconsistencies are not the same thing.
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    Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.
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    Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
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    If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are.
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    There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
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    You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
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    Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
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    Nobody wants to be perfectly transparent; not to others, certainly not to himself.
    * I need a qualifier here. There are exceptions, but there are also many known cases in which a prostitute falls in love with a client.
    * A generous act is precisely what should aim at no reward, neither financial nor social nor emotional; deontic (unconditional observance of duties), not utilitarian (aiming at some collective—or even individual—gains in welfare). There is nothing wrong with “generous” acts that elicit a “warm glow” or promise salvation to the giver; these are not to be linguistically conflated with deontic actions, those emanating from pure sense of duty.

COUNTER NARRATIVES
    The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said.
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    When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
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    It is harder to say
no
when you really mean it than when you don’t.
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    Never say
no
twice if you mean it.
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    Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
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    The only objective definition of aging is when a person starts to talk about aging.
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    They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom.
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    Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.
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    If you want people to read a book, tell them it is overrated.
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    You never win an argument until they attack your person.
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    Nothing is more permanent than “temporary” arrangements, deficits, truces, and relationships; and nothing is more temporary than “permanent” ones.
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    The most painful moments are not those we spend with uninteresting people; rather, they are those spent with uninteresting people trying hard to be interesting.
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    Hatred is love with a typo somewhere in the computer code, correctable but very hard to find.
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    I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
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    The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and