Author of quotes: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Page 1

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book - when the third. A book that is not worth it to read, and doesn't deserve to even read it.

A mathematician thinks of numbers, the lawyer - laws, idiot - words. These words mean nothing.

In business, survival of the one who is able to give.

Chance favors the prepared minds.

We create toys. Some of them change the world.

Almost all modern technological breakthroughs - the creation of what is called the word Serendipity. This term was first used in a letter to the English writer Horace Walpole, while under the influence of the fairy tale "Three princes of Serendip". These illustrious princes "by accident or their own savvy are constantly committing open, finding what was looking for."

To be the boss, do not need much intelligence, it requires a certain charisma, plus the ability to represent the boredom and terrible employment (due to a very busy work schedule). Add to that the "duty" to go in the evenings to the Opera.

The person who causes damage to their predictions, either a fool or a liar. Some forecasters are more dangerous than any criminal. Figuratively speaking, let these gentlemen do not sit behind the wheel of a school bus blindfolded.

They say: "a Wise person is one who can foresee the future". No, the truly wise, who knows what the distant future is unknown for everybody.

When choosing a strategy is extremely important extreme risk-limit - Yes, it is more important to know the worst than the overall forecast. And this is especially important if the worst case scenario is simply unacceptable.

The perversity of all state government plans are obvious: they can't create the possible margin of error (tolerance for error).

Like many biological variables, life expectancy - the value of Srednekanskaya, that is subject to the ordinary accidents. It is not scalable because the older we get, the less chance we have to move on. In a developed country tables insurance companies predict the newborn girl's death in 79 years. When it will celebrate the 79th birthday, the expected duration of her life in the typical case will be 10 years. At the age of 90 years, she can expect to 4.7 years.
In 100 years - 2.5 years. If she miraculously live to 119 years old, it will be about 9 months. As it crosses another threshold, the number of additional years decreases. This is an illustration of the main properties of random variables, described by a "Gaussian curve". The older a person is, the less additional years he has in reserve.
With human plans and projects, the situation is different. They are often scalable, as I said in Chapter 3. And in the case of scalable, i.e. crinastanciu, variables, you will get exactly the opposite effect. For example, it is assumed that the project will be completed in 79 days (take the same number as in the example with the age of the woman). If on the 79th day the project is not completed, you will need to take him for another 25 days. 90-day - about 58. 100-th - 89. On 119 -149. If the project is not completed on the day number 600, you will need 1590 days. As you can see, the longer you wait, the longer you have to wait.

Here has a classic mental mechanism - the so-called anchor effect. You tame your fear of uncertainty, thinking and clinging to it as an island in the middle of nowhere. This effect was discovered by the fathers of the psychology of uncertainty Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky when they were just starting to explore misconceptions in the use of heuristics. The effect works as follows. Kahneman and Tversky offered volunteers to rotate the roulette wheel. Volunteers looked at the number, knowing it by accident. They were then asked to mention the number of members of the United Nations of African countries. The response correlated with the number drawn.
Ask someone to call you the last four digits of your social security number, and then the approximate number of dentists in Manhattan. You will see that by activating the consciousness of the interlocutor a four-digit number, you force him to relate his assumption with this number.

In the not so distant past, say the pre-computer era, the plans remained vague and qualitative (non-quantitative sense), had to make a mental effort to keep them in mind, and to do the layout for the distant future was a real pain. To plan, required pencils, erasers, desks, littered with papers, and a huge trash can. Accounting add love to a tedious and monotonous work. In short, planning was time-consuming and unpleasant activity related to the same with constant doubt.
But the introduction of spreadsheets has produced a real revolution. Using ekselevskoy table computer literate person can effortlessly renew the "sales plan" to infinity. On paper, on a computer screen or, more trenchant, in powerpointonly format the plan takes on a life of its own, loses its vagueness and abstractness, "beastlies", as the philosophers say, is filled with concrete, starts a new life as a material object.
My friend Brian Hinchcliffe, while we're together sweat in the local gym, put forward the following idea. Perhaps it is the ease with which you can design a future, multiplying the cells in these programmes-tables, has led to the emergence of an army of soothsayers who confidently issue long-term forecasts (without leaving a "tunnel" of their own assumptions).