The Bed of Procrustes is Prof. Taleb’s third book in the Incerto series (2010). We are following up today on his aphorisms or “shortcuts” to wisdom. Read Part I and II here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a new book coming out soon, Skin In The Game. I will do a review of it once I get a chance to read it. Although I don’t follow Taleb any longer I remember he chose his book “endorsed” by random people on the Internet instead of the usual scholarly or reputable sources. I didn’t jump in because I thought he was fishing for attention too hard, too often. I like to think that both myself and Professor Taleb agree on one thing [at least], that is, the overwhelming majority of people are dumb as fuck. That being said, why would you want your hard worked, researched book be endorsed by Joe Schmuck. That’s not when you do a lottery.
This is what I picked for today:
1. “The difference between the politician and the philosopher is that, in a debate, the politician doesn’t try to convince the other side, only the audience.”
2. “Distributive justice isn’t taking from a risk taker who earned honorably, it is keeping his probability of losing it very high”. I guess you can call that skin in the game.
3. “The problem with the idea of ‘learning from one’s mistakes’ is that most of what people call mistakes aren’t mistakes.”
4. “For a free person, the optimal—most opportunistic—route between two points should never be the shortest one.”
5.”You are free in inverse proportion to the number of people to whom you can’t say “fuck you.” But you are honorable in proportion to the number of people to whom you can say ‘fuck you’ with impunity but don’t.
6. “Contra the prevailing belief, ‘success’ isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.”
7. “The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.”
8. ” When you cite some old wisdom-style quote and add “important truth,” “to remember,” or “something to live by,” you are not doing so because it is good, only because it is inapplicable. Had it been both good and applicable you would not have had to cite it. Wisdom that is hard to execute isn’t really wisdom.” He’s teaching us to avoid those terms.
9. “We viciously accept narcissism in nation-states, while repressing it in individuals: complexity exposes the system’s shaky moral foundations.”
10. ” Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.”
11. “A philosopher uses logic without statistics, an economist uses statistics without logic, a physicist uses both.”
12. “Let us find what risks we can measure and these are the risks we should be taking.”
13. “An economist is a mixture of 1) a businessman without common sense, 2) a physicist without brains, and 3) a speculator without balls.
14. “Being an entrepreneur is an existential not just a financial thing.”
15. “Bring the good news in trickles, the bad news in lumps.” That is a good one. Perhaps the best yet.
16. “ If something (say, a stock price) looks slightly out of line, it is out of line. If it looks way out of line, you are wrong in your method of evaluation.”
17. ” Never ask your client for advice.” What do lawyers and accountants have to say about that ?
18. “Never take investment advice from someone who has to work for a living.”
19. “There are three types of large corporations: those about to go bankrupt, those that are bankrupt and hide it, those that are bankrupt and don’t know it.” Wow, that’s way too nihilistic.
20. “Economics is about making simple things more complicated, mathematics about making complicated things simpler.”
21. “If you detect a repressed smile on the salesperson’s face, you paid too much for it.”
22. ” Stiglitz understands everything about economics except for tail risk, which is like knowing everything about flight safety except for crashes.”
23. “When positive, show net; when negative, show gross.”
24. ” A happier world is one in which everyone realizes that 1) it is not what you tell people, it is how you say it that makes them feel bad; 2) it is not what you do to them but how you make them look that gets them angry; 3) they should be the ones putting themselves in a
specific category.”
25. “Complaints don’t deliver complaints, they mostly reveal your weakness.”
26. “Knowing stuff others don’t know is most effective when others don’t know you know stuff they don’t know.”
27. “If your beard is gray, produce heuristics and advice but explain the ‘why.’ If your beard is white, skip the why, just say what should be done.”
29. “Swearing on occasion, amid a rich vocabulary, is costly signaling that you are self-owned.”
30. “The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.”
31. “An enemy who becomes a friend will stay a friend; a friend turned enemy will never become one.”
32. “Humans need to complain just as they need to breathe. Never stop them; just manipulate them by controlling what they complain about and supply them with reasons to complain. They will complain but be thankful.”
33. “The ones who refer to you repeatedly as “my friend” are most likely to betray you.”
34. “What counts is not what people say about you, it is how much energy they spend in saying it.”
35. “When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.”
36. “We often benefit from harm done to us by others, almost never from self-inflicted injuries.”
37. “Wisdom isn’t about understanding things (and people); it is knowing what they can do to you.”
Long story short, Taleb is loath on economists and academics.