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Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:53 pm
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[a selection from N.Taleb, The bed of Procrustes]
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
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Never say no twice if you mean it.
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Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
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Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.
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You never win an argument until they attack your person.
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Nothing is more permanent than “temporary” arrangements, deficits, truces, and relationships; and nothing is more temporary than “permanent” ones.
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The most painful moments are not those we spend with uninteresting people; rather, they are those spent with uninteresting people trying hard to be interesting.
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The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.
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The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it (and how many times); the test of whether you really liked someone’s company is if you are ready to meet him again and again—the rest is spin, or that variety of sentiment now called self-esteem.
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It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
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People reserve standard compliments for those who do not threaten their pride; the others they often praise by calling “arrogant.”
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When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you.
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Being unimaginative is only a problem when you are easily bored.
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Friendship that ends was never one; there was at least one sucker in it.
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It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.
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You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
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People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
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Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules (e.g., avoid debt). People can understand the notion of God, not unexplained rules, interdicts, and categorical heuristics.
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One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be “slightly” kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham.
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To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
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The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.
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You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master
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Quite revealing of human preferences that more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.
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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
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The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
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You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
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Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
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You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
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To see if you like where you are, without the chains of dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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The less said the less disavowed.
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No good deed goes unpunished.
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The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.
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Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.
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I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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In most debates, people seem to be trying to convince one another; but all they can hope for is new arguments to convince themselves.
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There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
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Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.
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For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.
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Ten times a day you must overcome yourself: that makes you good and tired and is opium for the soul.
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Great advice often comes in the form of an insult.
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It is those who use others who are the most upset when someone uses them.
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You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
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Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura*.
*"a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it"
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All that is intransitory is but an image.
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For a classicist, 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.
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Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and organized.
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You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.
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Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
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You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
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With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.
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What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
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What I learned on my own I still remember.
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What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
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The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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If you find any reason why you and someone are friends, you are not friends.
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My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.
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We find it to be in extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it “national pride.”
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Promising someone good luck as a reward for good deeds sounds like a bribe—perhaps the remnant of an archaic, pre-deontic pre-classical morality.
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You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional worse insult of having to become humble
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Robustness is progress without impatience.