Great Throughts Treasury

"A C.E.O.'s incentive is not to learn, because he's not paid on real value. He's paid on cosmetic value. So he's paid to be nice to the Merrill Lynch analysts or the Wall Street analysts. So this is where the problem starts."

"A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator."

"A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox."

"A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the unforeseen aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an explosive series of branching unforeseen responses, each one worse than the preceding one. Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession."

"A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers."

"A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading."

"A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe."

"A lesson I learned from this ancient culture is the notion of megalopsychon (a term expressed in Aristotle?s ethics), a sense of grandeur that was superseded by the Christian value of humility. There is no word for it in Romance languages; in Arabic it is called Shhm?best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don?t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing."

"A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it."

"A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation."

"A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient."

"A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation."

"A king, angry at his son, swore that he would crush him with a large stone."

"A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion?in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to."

"A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty."

"A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point."

"A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a solution and creates a problem."

"A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion."

"A saying from Steve Jobs: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you?ve got to focus on. But that?s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I?m actually as proud of the things we haven?t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."

"A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says f*** you to fate."

"A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars). This would get priestly people into office."

"A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see."

"A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are."

"A theory is a very dangerous thing to have."

"A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys with increased statistical confidence."

"A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."

"A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence."

"Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity."

"Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful."

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing."

"A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revolution. The society included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald, and even Bertrand Russell for a moment. In retrospect, it turned out to be a very effective strategy, not so much as a way to achieve their objectives, but rather to accommodate the fact that these objectives are moving targets. Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies. And of course members did change their minds after seeing the failures and horrors of Stalinism and similar regimes."

"Adam Smith himself made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own."

"A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it."

"Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious."

"Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously."

"After more than twenty years as a transactional trader and businessman in what I called the strange profession, I tried what one calls an academic career. And I have something to report?actually that was the driver behind this idea of anti-fragility in life and the dichotomy between the natural and the alienation of the unnatural. Commerce is fun, thrilling, lively, and natural; academia as currently professionalized is none of these. And for those who think that academia is quieter and an emotionally relaxing transition after the volatile and risk-taking business life, a surprise: when in action, new problems and scares emerge every day to displace and eliminate the previous day?s headaches, resentments, and conflicts. A nail displaces another nail, with astonishing variety. But academics (particularly in social science) seem to distrust each other; they live in petty obsessions, envy, and icy-cold hatreds, with small snubs developing into grudges, fossilized over time in the loneliness of the transaction with a computer screen and the immutability of their environment. Not to mention a level of envy I have almost never seen in business...My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like recognition and credit warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy."

"Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and anti-fragility within the current U.S. political discourse?that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism?both are the same to me here."

"Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcomes that counts."

"All I hear is how to live longer, richer, and, of course, more laden with electronic gadgets. We are not the first generation to believe that the worst possible thing to befall us is death. But for the ancients, the worst possible outcome was not death, but a dishonorable death, or even just a regular one. For a classical hero, dying in a retirement home with a rude nurse and a network of tubes coming into and out of your nose would not be the attractive telos for a life. And, of course, we have this modern illusion that we should live as long as we can. As"

"All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options."

"Also consider that lobbyists?this annoying race of lobbyists?cannot exist in a municipality or small region."

"Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge-we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers."

"Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the normal, particularly with bell curve methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud."

"Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi."

"Almost all people answer that the opposite of fragile is robust, resilient, solid, or something of the sort. But the resilient, robust (and company) items that neither break nor improve, so you would not need to write anything on them--have you ever seen a package with robust in thick green letters stamped on it? Logically, the exact opposite of a fragile parcel would be a package on which one has written please mishandle or please handle carelessly."

"Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love."

"An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite."

"An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message."

"An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile."

"An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."