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Diether

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“Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

27 likes

“You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

33 likes

“If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

50 likes

“We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

14 likes

“Recall the confirmation fallacy: governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact, they engage in what could be labeled as phony “philanthropy,” the activity of helping people in a visible and sensational way without taking into account the unseen cemetery of invisible consequences. Bastiat inspired libertarians by attacking the usual arguments that showed the benefits of governments. But his ideas can be generalized to apply to both the Right and the Left.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

5 likes

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