The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have!How many of these books have you read?" and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don't know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan
Some quotations:
28 March 2016
Should I include material from computer science here? It disturbs me that most of the people I've met who've studied the discipline that deals with efficient implementation of automated abstractions, don't seem to be doing the things that have much impact on the world or significantly easing their life. The second failure appalls me much more than the first. Despite all this, I still retain some hope that pursuing a university degree in computer science and engineering is a worthwhile endeavor.
23 April 2016
The practitioner's ethos - you eat your own cooking. This stricture doesn't mean that one's personal experiences constitute a sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about an idea; it is just that one's experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of opinion.
- Antifragile
27 April 2016
I once received another piece of life-changing advice, which, unlike the advice I got from a friend in Chapter 3 , I find applicable, wise, and empirically valid. My classmate in Paris, the novelist-to-be Jean-Olivier Tedesco, pronounced, ashe prevented me from running to catch a subway, "I don't run for trains." Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. Quitting a high-paying position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved (this may seem crazy, but I've tried it and it works). This is the first step toward the stoic's throwing a four-letter word at fate. You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself. Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop's fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts. It is more difficult to be a loser in a game you set up yourself. In Black Swan terms, this means that you are exposed to the improbable only if you let it control you. You always control what you do; so make this your end.
- The Black Swan (page 297)
10 August 2016
For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers, particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, journal articles are priced such that they prohibit access to science to many academics - and all non-academics - across the world, and render it a token of privilege. Read the Letter of Solidarity.