how different indeed!
The primacy of *Observation* and philosphy as a love of wisdom-knowledge in *action*.....
Korzybski would fit right in here.
Reality comes first.
This link has been bookmarked by 85 people . It was first bookmarked on 06 Jun 2008, by someone privately.
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04 May 17
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“Equilibrium” and Self-Deception (December 9, 2005)
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29 Mar 15
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152 "Déja Vu" Illusion
For something to look original to people in a profession, say academia, it is needs to be nonoriginal, and, what is worse, vice versa. When work is original, it tends to elicit "nothing new".
The "nothing new" response is likely to come from nonspecialists or people who do not know a subject well. For a philistine, Verdi's Trovatore is not new, since it sounds like another opera he heard by Mozart with women torturing their throat. One needs to know a subject very well to place it in context.
Now academics learn to take a paper or a class of papers, imitate the style, the organization; copy the phraseology, discuss the historical literature and find some wrinkle on the problem that makes it look like a contribution. This is what tends to be published, and this is what seems to be "original". And these works never survive the author.
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Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate.
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26 Apr 14
Leonardo de Oliveira MartinsEssa nota 156 do @nntaleb é mto relevante na discussao de combate à desigualdade. O problema sao os gatos gordos http://t.co/NBMSWXlKvC
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15 Sep 11
vikramsjnquoted by swaroopch as...
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”— Nassim Taleb -
22 Aug 11
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106- On Killing Oneself
Thierry de la Villehuchet --an acquaintance of mine -- just killed himself in the aftereffects of the Madoff case. He had dragged his clients into investing with Madoff . "Killing himself over money?" I kept hearing. No, it is not about the money --it was other people's money. It is about dignity. I could not help comparing it to Madoff, pictured walking around Manhattan with a faint smirk --totally insensitive to the harm he caused.
This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere -- and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably ("it is all about money"). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate.
Thierry, veuillez recevoir l'expression de mon respect le plus profond.
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We can easily have an illusion of causality, with what I called cosmetic cause. Why do you eat? Because you are hungry? Come on, this is not the true cause! An evolutionary thinker would dislike your answer as naive and limited. He would say the following: “if your genes were not endowed with the desire to eat to consume calories, you would not have been among us today”. So hunger is not the true cause of eating; it is only some weaker cause, it is only “how” your genes manifest their goal, not the end goal, which is not the satisfaction of hunger but survival. Likewise why do you get interested in some private semi-aerobic indoor activity with someone of the opposite (or perhaps the same) gender? The answer is “for pleasure” –but you would be missing a layer of causality: you would not be here today if we humans did not have a propensity to procreate and mother nature is giving you an incentive to do so. So you are seeing the “how” and mistaking it for the “why”
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s a colorful fellow who stayed colorful a long time; that is, he lived one hundred and one year, and kept working throughout, producing a clearly written book calle
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Just as a package sent by mail bears a stamp "fragile" on it, "handle with care", imagine the opposite: "please mishandle" or "be careless", as it benefits from shocks. Such package is said to be "antifragile".
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Ask anyone the antonym of fragility, they will answer robustness. Wrong
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fragile
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robust
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antifragile
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This is my situation now: a breakdown in the banking system benefits my portfolio
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The absence of such word -and absence of the awareness- is symptomatic of the error of fragility: if you shoot for robustness, you ususally get robustness, but on the occasion you get fragility. If you shoot for antifragility, at worst you get robustness
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132- Life's Barbells --The Barbell Heuristic
(Barbells are more robust than monomodal strategies.)
Walk most of the time, sprint as fast as you can on the occasion; never jog.
Fast for long periods of famine, then feast; never diet.
Endorse Nick Clegg & David Cameron, in combination, never labor.
For social life, a linear combination of Fat Tony & philosophers outperforms the frequentation of middle brows.
Go for city-states under loose empires, never nation-states.
Be a flåneur, lounging most of the time; then work as intensely as possible for a maximum of one hour; never work at low intensity --the 4-Hour Workweek.
Do nothing most of the time, then workout like a nut as intensely & unpredictably as possible.
Invest mostly in close to no-risk, (cash inflation protected, 80-90%), and maximal risk securities (10-20%); never in medium risk.
Read trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never the New York Times (or something even more aberrant, Newsweek).
Talk to graduate students or the highest caliber scholars; never, never, never medium academics.
Lose all your money, never half of it.
Respect those who make a living lying down or standing up, never those who do so sitting down.
Separate the holy and the profane.
Do crazy things (break furniture once in a while), like the Greeks and stay "rational" in larger decisions.
If you dislike someone, leave him alone or eliminate him; don't attack him verbally.
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29 Aug 10
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Dan SchaefflerLe Corre understands the value of moderate unpredictability, the importance of improvization, and unconstrained exercise --to avoid the "fossilization" of routines. My idea of naturalistic/Paleo fitness: the broadest domain bandwidth, freedom from the cap
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Gustavo Lacerda<< However I certainly do not buy the notion that money does not make you happy, counter to the literature on the hedonic treadmill. ... I agree with the reversion to a hedonic baseline. But if spending money does not make me happy, most certainly, having
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03 Jan 10
Thomas James110- Being Self-Owned is a State of Mind
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Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactlyNassimNicholasTaleb philosophy probability maths statistics science risk finance psychology knowledge epistemiology economics rationality rationalism empiricism phronesis medicine
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07 Sep 09
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29 Jun 09
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61 Aesthetics & Religion [Platonicity & Empiricisms]: Two Interesting Thinkers –In More than One Respect
Religion has very little to do with “belief”; it is an indivisible package of aesthetics, ethics, social-emotional commitments, and transmission of κηρύγμα, a set of customs and rituals inherited from the elders. Indeed the complication of “belief” is mostly a Western Christianity type of constructed problems, and a modern one at that: ask an Eastern Orthodox monk “what he believes”, and he will be puzzled: he would tell you what he practices. [I discussed the “amin” in an earlier note]. Orthodoxy is principally liturgy, fasting, practices, and tradition; it is an ornate religion that focuses on aesthetics and requires a very strong commitment. “Belief” is meaningless; practice is real. What we now translate by “veneration”, προσκυνει is literally bowing down to the ground a very physical act [Note that I am not partaking of the current debate on religion out of disrespect for almost all the participants: aside from being journalistic in the worst bildungsphilistinistic sense, particularly when they talk about “probability”, most are not even wrong].
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15 May 09
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Finally I showed a graph of the rise of the US stock market since 1900, on a regular (non-Log) plot. Without logarithmic scaling we see a huge move in the period after1982 –the bulk of the variation comes from that segment, which dwarfs the previous rises. It resembles Murray’s graph about the timeline of the quantitative contributions of civilization, which exhibits a marked jump in 1500. Geometric (i.e. multiplicative) growth overestimates the contribution of the ending portion of a graph.
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I am now setting up a program to help humanity formulate decisions under ignorance by changing the world in such a way as to make our forecast errors inconsequential --how to change the world for it to allow for our ignorance; the exact opposite of the enlightenment program. We should make our structures less complex (less debt) to face the growing complexity from globalization & the net, etc.
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I am now setting up a program to help humanity formulate decisions under ignorance by changing the world in such a way as to make our forecast errors inconsequential --how to change the world for it to allow for our ignorance; the exact opposite of the enlightenment program. We should make our structures less complex (less debt) to face the growing complexity from globalization & the net, etc.
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I am now setting up a program to help humanity formulate decisions under ignorance by changing the world in such a way as to make our forecast errors inconsequential --how to change the world for it to allow for our ignorance; the exact opposite of the enlightenment program. We should make our structures less complex (less debt) to face the growing complexity from globalization & the net, etc.
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I am now setting up a program to help humanity formulate decisions under ignorance by changing the world in such a way as to make our forecast errors inconsequential --how to change the world for it to allow for our ignorance; the exact opposite of the enlightenment program. We should make our structures less complex (less debt) to face the growing complexity from globalization & the net, etc.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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Add Sticky NoteIn other words: "you are a philosopher and a theoretician" meant "you are wise and worldly" --theoria means looking! It is exactly the opposite of the modern effect for both: lover of wisdom (not a nerd), and someone who has seen things (not some tenured person with blinders)!
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Add Sticky NoteBut my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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One of the reasons this is true is that most of our thinking/processing happens in our physiology and preconscious nervous system. This is what makes health so elusive; it requires a shift in something that our society can't even recognize.
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Add Sticky NoteI am now setting up a program to help humanity formulate decisions under ignorance by changing the world in such a way as to make our forecast errors inconsequential --how to change the world for it to allow for our ignorance; the exact opposite of the enlightenment program. We should make our structures less complex (less debt) to face the growing complexity from globalization & the net, etc.
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He's talking about health here! This is how life works; we are most often making decisions under ignorance. Resilience and adpatability are key in enabling robust function over the long haul, and making good choices as we go requires an awareness of *our* capacity to adapt, not increasinglu ridiculous attempts to know the future through statistics and probability.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.
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Add Sticky Note
It looks like we need randomness in both energy output and expenditure, with a negative correlation between the two. Just consider that we worked harder when hungry (thus compounding the deficit), and conserved energy during periods of feeding --exactly the opposite of the dictates of Platonic "equilibrium". The effect is to make our net energy "lumpier": large deficits followed by large excesses, followed of course by large deficits, etc.
I am discovering from the literature (under Art De Vany's guidance and based on his ideas on metabolic switches) that three meals a day is for morons --we need episodes of hunger punctuated brief by periods of replenishing. Hunger improves insulin sensitivity, brain function, etc. So it is a good idea to, counterintuitively, fast on days when we need the energy, rather than the opposite. Our Platonic "make sense" indicates that you need to "eat well" during a period of physical stress --the opposite holds true empirically: fasting chemo patients do much much better. Without actual testing, every cancer patient has been told to "eat well but not excessively".
The same applies to thirst.
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Sounds like healthy ranges (link later) and some form of indirect (you could say taoist) feedback. Don't resist what is happening, folllow along, adding what is necessary to keep integrity where it is needed. The situation goes through it's extreme on the way back toward the middle of the range, and you've exercised your adaptability (increased your health) in the process.
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Add Sticky NoteSo, by tinkering, I figured out that I fare best under the following conditions: no breakfast, working out randomly (but in a lumpy way: long walks & intense weight lifting without a scheduled time limit), "working" randomly, fasting when working out, avoiding modern carbs (and modernized fruits), avoiding contact with economists and finance idiots, taking red eye flights & fasting during episodes of jet lag and similar physical stressors.
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Systema training, mixed with some Warrior Diet (Hofmeker), Weston Price and other points. Not at all saying he got it there, just that others with specific knowledge would corroborate this.
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Add Sticky NoteComplex systems tend to optimize –therefore become more fragile.
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Therefore the *constant* need to stretch our capacities, and optimize for adaptability. Especially in modern ties, where the range of common experience is so narrow.
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Add Sticky NoteBiology: Complex systems, like the human body, and mother nature, are NOT optimized. They harbor plenty of duplicate pathways, plenty of redundancies.
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Here it is, said somewhat differently and indirectly. We need to develop and/or maintain this at all levels. I think the physical health piece would give him a key to behavior that he's missing. I'll want to get in touch at some point.
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Add Sticky Note
Theory came later, in a lame way, to satisfy the intellectual bureaucrats. But that’s not what you tend to read in standard histories of technology –I am convinced that, when writing history, we project our mental biases in a way to produce agency and increase the role of theory.
Mokyr’s other problem is that he focuses on applications that are linear in nature, those that have tractable mathematics, thin-tailed statistics: conventional engineering [Mediocristan] –assuming theories work there. His ideas of “knowledge base” do not apply to medicine or technology in the information age –where an epistemic base causes mental tunneling. Indeed medicine is an area in which theories and ideas have been bad for our health. Or take economics: we still don’t understand the subject. So it is easy for motivated researchers to focus on some applications in which propositional knowledge can lead to consequences and generalize to everything. This reminds me of a hotshot mathematician who gave a lecture about “the uses of mathematics in society’ (producing examples of traffic lights, cryptography, etc.). He did not consider the non-mathematicized non-mathematicizable applications, etc.
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Something key here....
Back to the arrow of experience to knowledge from above, breaking it down a bit.
The assumption of universal "logical" application, based on incomplete understanding of context. (Not enough observation.)
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02 Jan 09
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02 May 07
ken .Nassim Taleb - one note amongst many: "my project with the Ludic Fallacy is to expose “decontextualized knowledge” (or Platonicity)... But I am ending up spending more time reading the perpetrators of the logical disease (s.a. Aristotle...
blog history knowledge logic narrative philosophy psychology risk statistics
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21 Jun 06
Public Stiky Notes
The primacy of *Observation* and philosphy as a love of wisdom-knowledge in *action*.....
Korzybski would fit right in here.
Reality comes first.
Back to the arrow of experience to knowledge from above, breaking it down a bit.
The assumption of universal "logical" application, based on incomplete understanding of context. (Not enough observation.)
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