Author of quotes: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Page 4

Joint activities of the whole tribe of doctors can roughly estimate, based on the specimens available for observation. The same is true for plumbers, taxi drivers, prostitutes and representatives of other professions, where there are no "superstars".
Because of the "star" of the dynamics of what we call "literary heritage" and "literary masterpieces" that represents only a tiny fraction of the collectively created. Here's the thing. This prevents us to identify talents.
Let's say you attribute the success of Honore de Balzac, French novelist of the nineteenth century, his ruthless "realism", "insights", "the acuteness of the senses", "study of the characters", "ability to captivate the reader" and so on. These "excellent" qualities you can recognize a necessary prerequisite to the creation of excellent artworks provided and only provided that those who do not have the so-called "talent", do not have these qualities. What if there was dozens of equally wonderful literary creations that we have not reached? If you really were written and disappeared equally valuable manuscripts, I'm sorry to say, your idol Balzac differs from his opponents only obscure the fact that he was incredibly lucky. Moreover, bowing to the Balzac, do you allow the injustice to others.
I do not mean that Balzac was not talented, I just want to say that his talent is less unique than it seems.

The losers of history - how people and ideas - like the pious dead in the water, do not leave behind autobiographies (it is desirable to stay alive).

More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, stoic, politician, manipulator and (almost always) a noble gentleman Marcus Tullius Cicero in his treatise "On the nature of the gods" told a story. The Greek philosopher Diagorou, surnamed the Atheist, showed images of people who prayed to the gods, and escaped the shipwreck. The implication was that prayer that saves from death. Diagor asked: "where are the images of those who prayed, but still drowned?"

People will believe any of your words, if not detect weakness in front of them; they, like animals, can smell the smallest cracks in the armor of confidence even before they become apparent. And the best rim confidence the ultimate courtesy and friendliness that allow you to manipulate people without offending them.

It is believed that the memory of the responsible hippocampus. This is the most creative part of the brain; it is also considered that it absorbs all the negativity of the regular troubles like chronic stress we constantly experience from the daily injection of negative emotions, - as opposed to "pretty bracing stress" from the sudden appearance of a tiger in your living room. We can reason with yourself all you want, but the hippocampus chronic stress takes seriously and begins an irreversible process of atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not make us stronger; they can cripple our personality.

Easier to survive the big one, but a brief sorrow, than that pain stretch for many years.

For happiness is more important than how often we experience a pleasant feeling, or, as psychologists say, "positive affect", and not how much the feeling. In other words, the good news is first of all good news; how good it is, is not so important. So to live happily, you need to get your little "positive affects" how can you more regularly. Just a lot of good news is better than one good news.

I really hope that someday scientists and politicians re-discover what has always been known to our ancestors: the most valuable in human culture is respect.

Economist Hyman Minsky identified the cyclical nature of attitudes towards risk in the economy. The scheme is as follows: in periods of financial stability people are not afraid to take risks, they are confident in the success and rarely think about possible problems. But a crisis occurs - and frightened the most is "hiding in shell", afraid to do anything to invest.

Respect for the elderly, developed in many cultures, is perhaps an attempt to compensate for a short century of human memory. The word "Senate" comes from the Latin "senatus" - "elderly". The Arabic word "Sheikh" means not only "representative of the ruling elite", but "the elder". The memory of the old storage complex, centuries of experience, including knowledge about rare events. Old people scare us with stories - that's why we are so afraid of certain Black swans. To his surprise, I learned that this applies to the animal world: in the journal "science" wrote that old females-the leaders of the elephants play the role of "consultants for rare events".

Greg Barron and IDO Erev in a series of experiments found that people tend to underestimate low probability, if they themselves have to calculate, that is, if it is not indicated in the figures. Imagine that you are pulling balls from an urn, in which very little red and a lot of black balls, and you need to guess the color of the ball you'll get in and you don't know the exact ratio of red and black. Most likely, in your estimation, the probability to pull a red ball will appear lower than it really is. But if you say, for example, that the red ball is 3 percent, you, on the contrary, will make mistakes, saying "red" more often than necessary.

Kahneman and Tversky noticed that people are able to think seriously about the seemingly unlikely events, if you engage them in discussion of such phenomena and to give the feel that these events are not so unreal. For example, if you ask a person, what is the probability of death in a plane crash, he is likely to inflate the figure.

According to the psychologist Paul Slavich and his colleagues, people imagine are more willing to pay for insurance against terrorist attacks than plane crashes (although the number of recent terrorist acts includes as a special case). <...>
At the same time, according to Slovic, the insurance people usually neglect events with low probability. This can be formulated as follows: people prefer insurance against possible small losses, while less probable but much more severe losses are not taken into account.

Those Black swans we imagine, discuss, and fear isn't really threatening us Black swans. Soon you will become clear that we do not fear what should be feared.