Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 26-27 | Added on Saturday, May 9, 2015 7:07:38 PM Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 33-34 | Added on Saturday, May 9, 2015 7:08:39 PM Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 526-526 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 12:54:59 AM The salvation of man is through love and in love. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 608-611 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 1:08:22 AM To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 825-826 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 7:59:52 PM We found out just how uncertain human decisions are, especially in matters of life and death. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 828-828 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:00:24 PM Death in Teheran. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 835-836 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:01:22 PM (The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?) ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 869-870 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:11:46 PM Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 872-873 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:12:29 PM everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 881-882 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:14:49 PM Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 884-884 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:15:26 PM It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Bookmark on Location 882 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:16:10 PM ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 885-888 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:49:59 PM An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 889-889 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:50:16 PM there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 890-890 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:50:36 PM Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 889-889 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 8:53:10 PM If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 970-971 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 9:36:10 PM All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 974-975 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 9:36:33 PM Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 975-976 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015 9:36:54 PM The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 1010-1011 | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 8:40:27 AM it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 1015-1015 | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 9:06:24 AM Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 1021-1023 | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 9:13:49 AM When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 1027-1027 | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 9:15:05 AM For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 1178-1179 | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 11:49:23 AM Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them. ========== Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl, Viktor) - Your Highlight on Location 1789-1792 | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 11:57:38 AM To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 6995-6996 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2015 10:37:01 AM this book thinks of a signal as an indication of the underlying truth behind a statistical or predictive problem. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7012-7015 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2015 10:44:45 AM It is much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling, since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings. It comes to the observer embedded in an atmosphere of “noise,” i.e., in the company of all sorts of information that is useless and irrelevant for predicting the particular disaster. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7018-7019 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2015 10:45:42 AM We need signal analysis capabilities to isolate the pertinent signals from the echo chamber. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7049-7050 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2015 10:49:20 AM When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7055-7057 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2015 10:50:13 AM [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.—Donald Rumsfeld ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7077-7078 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2015 10:52:24 AM An unknown unknown is a contingency that we have not even considered. ========== Ethics (Benedictus de Spinoza) - Your Highlight on Location 67-67 | Added on Friday, May 15, 2015 9:08:42 PM Those who are ignorant of true causes, make complete confusion— ========== Ethics (Benedictus de Spinoza) - Your Highlight on Location 68-69 | Added on Friday, May 15, 2015 9:09:08 PM So, also, those who confuse the two natures, divine and human, readily attribute human passions to the deity, especially so long as they do not know how passions originate in the mind. ========== Meditations (Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius) - Your Highlight on Location 665-666 | Added on Friday, May 15, 2015 10:55:02 PM 'Why doth a little thing said or done against thee make thee sorry? It is no new thing; it is not the first, nor shall it be the last, if thou live long. At best suffer patiently, if thou canst not suffer joyously.' ========== Meditations (Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius) - Your Highlight on Location 820-821 | Added on Saturday, May 16, 2015 8:49:35 PM His care to preserve his friends; ========== Meditations (Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius) - Your Highlight on Location 819-819 | Added on Saturday, May 16, 2015 8:49:49 PM His accurate examination of things in consultations, and patient hearing of others. ========== Foundation and Empire (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 508-510 | Added on Saturday, May 16, 2015 11:16:52 PM Without pretending to predict the actions of individual humans, it formulated definite laws capable of mathematical analysis and extrapolation to govern and predict the mass action of human groups." ========== Meditations (Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius) - Your Highlight on Location 888-889 | Added on Sunday, May 17, 2015 12:31:01 AM And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again. ========== Meditations (Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius) - Your Highlight on Location 904-906 | Added on Tuesday, May 19, 2015 7:52:55 AM there is but a certain limit of time appointed unto thee, which if thou shalt not make use of to calm and allay the many distempers of thy soul, it will pass away and thou with it, and never after return. ========== Meditations (Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius) - Your Highlight on Location 955-957 | Added on Tuesday, May 19, 2015 8:07:54 AM His service doth consist in this, that a man keep himself pure from all violent passion and evil affection, from all rashness and vanity, and from all manner of discontent, either in regard of the gods or men. ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 334-336 | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015 6:59:56 AM “I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.” ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 538-539 | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015 9:28:53 AM It seemed like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense.” ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 542-544 | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015 9:30:00 AM “He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.” ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 545-545 | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015 9:30:08 AM “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 903-905 | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015 3:46:21 PM “We are the kinds of people that can be by ourselves at a party and not feel awkward,” Farooq said. “We can think to ourselves and not feel socially weird about it.” ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 1248-1250 | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015 11:07:53 PM All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.” ========== Predictive Analysis of Financial Time Series - Your Highlight on page 3-3 | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015 11:36:33 PM While many say that technical analysis is a form of art instead of an exact scienti c method, most of the techniques used can be formalized, into simple decision rules very much like in classi cation problems. ========== Predictive Analysis of Financial Time Series - Your Highlight on page 4-4 | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015 11:39:35 PM We can see the basic ideas of technical analysis relate to asymmetric market information and the exploitation of human feelings, such as greed or fear ========== Predictive Analysis of Financial Time Series - Your Highlight on page 5-5 | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015 11:41:16 PM The EMH says that market prices fully and instantly re ect all the available information, basically saying that future prices cannot be predicted from past market information ========== Foundation and Empire (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 3526-3526 | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015 10:38:17 PM this strange insight came. Even now, it seems – tenuous. ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 1607-1607 | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015 5:14:16 PM He has this belief that he is the guy who can change the world.” ========== Second Foundation (Isaac Asimov) - Your Bookmark on Location 1247 | Added on Sunday, May 31, 2015 4:12:32 AM ========== Second Foundation (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 1480-1484 | Added on Monday, June 1, 2015 10:28:36 AM Psychohistory had been the development of mental science, the final mathematicization thereof, rather, which had finally succeeded. Through the development of the mathematics necessary to understand the facts of neural physiology and the electrochemistry of the nervous system, which themselves had to be, had to be, traced down to nuclear forces, it first became possible to truly develop psychology. And through the generalization of psychological knowledge from the individual to the group, sociology was also mathematicized. ========== Second Foundation (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 1484-1486 | Added on Monday, June 1, 2015 10:29:29 AM The larger groups; the billions that occupied planets; the trillions that occupied Sectors; the quadrillions that occupied the whole Galaxy, became, not simply human beings, but gigantic forces amenable to statistical treatment – so that to Hari Seldon, the future became clear and inevitable, and the Plan could be set ========== Second Foundation (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 1484-1486 | Added on Monday, June 1, 2015 10:30:25 AM The larger groups; the billions that occupied planets; the trillions that occupied Sectors; the quadrillions that occupied the whole Galaxy, became, not simply human beings, but gigantic forces amenable to statistical treatment – so that to Hari Seldon, the future became clear and inevitable, and the Plan could be set up. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7498-7499 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2015 7:40:16 PM By that time, many problems in the natural world that now vex our predictive abilities will have come within the range of our knowledge. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7507-7508 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2015 7:41:58 PM The volume of information is increasing exponentially. But relatively little of this information is useful—the signal-to-noise ratio may be waning. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7512-7515 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2015 7:43:06 PM Bayes’s theorem begins and ends with a probabilistic expression of the likelihood of a real-world event. It does not require you to believe that the world is intrinsically uncertain. It was invented in the days when the regularity of Newton’s laws formed the dominant paradigm in science. It does require you to accept, however, that your subjective perceptions of the world are approximations of the truth. ========== The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't (Nate Silver) - Your Highlight on Location 7594-7595 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2015 7:57:42 PM Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. ========== Foundation's Edge (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 1097-1098 | Added on Friday, June 19, 2015 9:20:03 PM often enough of the immense revolution that gravitics would make in the world, but the fusion of computer and mind was still a state secret. ========== Foundation's Edge (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 1097-1098 | Added on Friday, June 19, 2015 9:20:38 PM He had read often enough of the immense revolution that gravitics would make in the world, but the fusion of computer and mind was still a state secret. It would surely produce a still greater revolution. ========== Foundation's Edge (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 1609-1610 | Added on Saturday, June 20, 2015 10:17:22 AM Pelorat said, “It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.” ========== Foundation's Edge (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on Location 5019-5020 | Added on Thursday, June 25, 2015 12:59:59 AM All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, Ashlee) - Your Highlight on Location 4956-4957 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:03:23 AM Each facet of Musk’s life might be an attempt to soothe a type of existential depression that seems to gnaw at his every fiber. ========== Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Michael Lewis) - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 727-730 | Added on Monday, July 20, 2015 11:11:32 PM When bids and offers for shares sent to these places arrived at precisely the same moment, the markets acted as markets should. If they arrived even a millisecond apart, the market vanished, and all bets were off. Brad knew that he was being front-run—that some other trader was, in effect, noticing his demand for stock on one exchange and buying it on others in anticipation of selling it to him at a higher price. ========== The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 730-732 | Added on Monday, July 20, 2015 11:43:09 PM The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there. ========== Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Michael Lewis) - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 936-938 | Added on Thursday, July 23, 2015 10:56:57 AM The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. ========== Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Michael Lewis) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1442-1449 | Added on Friday, July 24, 2015 6:49:50 PM Imagine, for instance, that someone passed a rule, in the U.S. stock market as it is currently configured, that required every stock market trade to be front-run by a firm called Scalpers Inc. Under this rule, each time you went to buy 1,000 shares of Microsoft, Scalpers Inc. would be informed, whereupon it would set off to buy 1,000 shares of Microsoft offered in the market and, without taking the risk of owning the stock for even an instant, sell it to you at a higher price. Scalpers Inc. is prohibited from taking the slightest market risk; when it buys, it has the seller firmly in hand; when it sells, it has the buyer in hand; and at the end of every trading day, it will have no position at all in the stock market. Scalpers Inc. trades for the sole purpose of interfering with trading that would have happened without it. In buying from every seller and selling to every buyer, it winds up: a) doubling the trades in the marketplace and b) being exactly 50 percent of that booming volume. It adds nothing to the market but at the same time might be mistaken for the central player in that market. ========== Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Michael Lewis) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1686-1688 | Added on Saturday, July 25, 2015 12:25:27 AM Brad decided that the game was probably over inside all the big Wall Street banks. All of them, one way or another, were probably using the unequal speeds in the market to claim their share of the prey. ========== Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Michael Lewis) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1890-1891 | Added on Saturday, July 25, 2015 12:46:50 AM Finance is a gambling game for people who enjoy gambling.” ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 162 | Location 2101-2103 | Added on Monday, July 27, 2015 10:39:06 AM Free prices and free profits will maximize production and relieve shortages quicker than any other system. Arbitrarily fixed prices and arbitrarily limited profits can only prolong shortages and reduce production and employment. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 161 | Location 2098-2099 | Added on Monday, July 27, 2015 10:39:19 AM If there is no profit in making an article, it is a sign that the labor and capital devoted to its production are misdirected: the value of the resources that must be used up in making the article is greater than the value of the article itself. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 174 | Location 2271-2273 | Added on Monday, July 27, 2015 11:38:26 PM And this is precisely its political function. It is because inflation confuses everything that it is so consistently resorted to by our modern “planned economy” governments. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 2559-2560 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:33:13 AM But we ought to make sure in each case that both sides of the coin have been considered, that all the implications of a proposal have been studied. And this is seldom done. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 194 | Location 2569-2569 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:36:01 AM But lesser men get lost in complications. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 194 | Location 2570-2572 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:39:10 AM The reader, depending upon his own beliefs, may or may not accept the aphorism of Bacon that “A little philosophy inclineth men’s minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 194 | Location 2573-2574 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:40:42 AM For depth in economics consists in looking for all the consequences of a policy instead of merely resting one’s gaze on those immediately visible. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 2640-2641 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:52:07 AM The fact that there is more and cheaper coffee for everyone is lost sight of; what is seen is merely that some coffee growers cannot make a living at the lower price. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 2647-2647 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:53:26 AM the insane doctrine of wealth through scarcity. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 2648-2650 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:53:57 AM It is a doctrine that may always be privately true, unfortunately, for any particular group of producers considered in isolation—if they can make scarce the one thing they have to sell while keeping abundant all the things they have to buy. But it is a doctrine that is always publicly false. It can never be applied all around the circle. For its application would mean economic suicide. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 2650-2652 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:54:25 AM And this is our lesson in its most generalized form. For many things that seem to be true when we concentrate on a single economic group are seen to be illusions when the interests of everyone, as consumer no less than as producer, are considered. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 2652-2653 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 10:55:46 AM To see the problem as a whole, and not in fragments: that is the goal of economic science. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on page 211 | Location 2782-2782 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 5:27:10 PM Government’s main economic function is to encourage and preserve a free market. ========== Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (Hazlitt, Henry) - Your Highlight on Location 2795-2806 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 5:29:47 PM THOSE WHO DESIRE to read further in economics should turn next to some work of intermediate length and difficulty. I know of no single volume in print today that completely meets this need, but there are several that together supply it. There is an excellent short book (126 pages) by Faustino Ballvè, Essentials of Economics (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education), which briefly summarizes principles and policies. A book that does that at somewhat greater length (327 pages) is Understanding the Dollar Crisis by Percy L. Greaves (Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1973). Bettina Bien Greaves has assembled two volumes of readings on Free Market Economics (Foundation for Economic Education). The reader who aims at a thorough understanding, and feels prepared for it, should next read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1949, 1966, 907 pages). This book extended the logical unity and precision of economics beyond that of any previous work. A two-volume work written thirteen years after Human Action by a student of Mises is Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (Mission, Kan.: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1962, 987 pages). This contains much original and penetrating material; its exposition is admirably lucid; and its arrangement makes it in some respects more suitable for textbook use than Mises’ great work. ========== On Intelligence (Blakeslee, Sandra;Hawkins, Jeff) - Your Highlight on Location 2566-2567 | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 5:58:43 PM Prediction by analogy—creativity—is so pervasive we normally don’t notice it. ========== On Intelligence (Blakeslee, Sandra;Hawkins, Jeff) - Your Highlight on Location 2841-2843 | Added on Wednesday, July 29, 2015 9:38:01 AM Neurons are just cells. There is no mystical force that makes individual nerve cells or collections of nerve cells behave in ways that differ from what they would normally do. Given this fact, we can now turn our attention to how we might implement the ability of brain cells to remember and predict—our cortical algorithm—in silicon. ========== On Intelligence (Blakeslee, Sandra;Hawkins, Jeff) - Your Highlight on Location 2897-2905 | Added on Wednesday, July 29, 2015 9:46:31 AM Here, then, is the recipe for building intelligent machines. Start with a set of senses to extract patterns from the world. Our intelligent machine may have a set of senses that differ from a human’s, and may even “exist” in a world unlike our own (more on this later). So don’t assume that it has to have a set of eyeballs and a pair of ears. Next, attach to these senses a hierarchical memory system that works on the same principles as the cortex. We will then have to train the memory system much as we teach children. Over repetitive training sessions, our intelligent machine will build a model of its world as seen through its senses. There will be no need or opportunity for anyone to program in the rules of the world, databases, facts, or any of the high-level concepts that are the bane of artificial intelligence. The intelligent machine must learn via observation of its world, including input from an instructor when necessary. Once our intelligent machine has created a model of its world, it can then see analogies to past experiences, make predictions of future events, propose solutions to new problems, and make this knowledge available to us. ========== On Intelligence (Blakeslee, Sandra;Hawkins, Jeff) - Your Highlight on Location 3255-3255 | Added on Wednesday, July 29, 2015 10:06:37 AM Now is the turning point. ========== On Intelligence (Blakeslee, Sandra;Hawkins, Jeff) - Your Highlight on Location 3264-3265 | Added on Wednesday, July 29, 2015 10:09:35 AM With this book, I hope to entice young engineers and scientists to study the cortex, adopt the memory-prediction framework, and build intelligent machines. ========== On Intelligence (Blakeslee, Sandra;Hawkins, Jeff) - Your Highlight on Location 3268-3270 | Added on Wednesday, July 29, 2015 10:10:29 AM If you are in high school or college and this book motivates you to work on this technology—to build the first truly intelligent machines, to help start an industry—I encourage you to do so. Make it happen. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 34-35 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2015 5:11:58 PM Symbolism is the child of our inability and unwillingness to accept randomness; we give meaning to all manner of shapes; we detect human figures in inkblots. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 39-40 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2015 5:14:33 PM European intellectual life developed what seems to be an irreversible taste for symbolism –we are still paying its price, with psychoanalysis and other fads. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 127-128 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2015 5:39:23 PM If there is one and only cause for this confusion between the left and the right side of our table, it is our inability to think critically –we may enjoy propounding conjectures as truth. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 587-588 | Added on Tuesday, August 4, 2015 2:09:02 PM Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness foolishness. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 595-596 | Added on Tuesday, August 4, 2015 2:13:38 PM people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1426-1426 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 12:26:05 AM Just as in finance, an event that, although rare, carries a large magnitude, cannot just be ignored. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1395-1396 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 12:26:46 AM I cannot interpret much from a past times series if I know that it can be subjected to those infrequent bad and severe hits, yet my sample contains none. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1437-1440 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 12:29:45 AM If we were dealing with a deterministic world –that is, a world stripped of randomness (the right-column world in Table 1-1 in the Prologue), and we knew with certainty that it were the case, things would be rather easy. The pattern of the series would reveal considerable and predictive information. You could tell with precision what would happen one day ahead, one year ahead, and perhaps even a decade ahead. We would not even need a statistician: a second rate engineer would do. ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 225-225 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 2:28:47 AM if the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 133 | Location 2032-2033 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 10:10:48 PM 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. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 137 | Location 2087-2088 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 10:23:33 PM Just as in finance, an event, although rare, that brings large consequences cannot just be ignored. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2120-2122 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 10:41:10 PM As a skeptic, I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data. My major reason is the rare event, but I have plenty of others. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 144 | Location 2202-2203 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 10:51:01 PM The “science” of econometrics consists of the application of statistics to samples taken at different periods of time, which we called “time series.” It is based on studying the time series of economic variables, data, and other matters. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 144 | Location 2208-2209 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 10:51:58 PM For a sum of zeros, even repeated a billion times, remains zero; likewise an accumulation of research and gains in complexity will lead to naught if there is no firm ground beneath it. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2211-2213 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 10:53:24 PM Robert Lucas dealt a blow to econometrics by arguing that if people were rational then their rationality would cause them to figure out predictable patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 961-963 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 11:38:11 PM Now, the reason why we reject systematic skepticism in everyday life is more or less obvious and is similar to the reason we reject solipsism. The best way to account for the coherence of our experience is to suppose that the outside world corresponds, at least approximately, to the image of it provided by our senses. ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 980-981 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 11:40:40 PM The main reason for believing scientific theories (at least the best-verified ones) is that they explain the coherence of our experience. ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1025-1028 | Added on Sunday, August 9, 2015 11:48:24 PM In a sense, we always return to Hume’s problem: No statement about the real world can ever literally be proven; but to use the eminently appropriate expression from Anglo-Saxon law, it can sometimes be proven beyond any reasonable doubt. The unreasonable doubt subsists. ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 77 | Location 1180-1182 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2015 11:31:43 AM One has to assume implicitly that there is not a cosmic conspiracy in which the real curve is very different from the curve we have drawn, but in which all our data (old and new) happen to fall on the intersection of the two. To take a phrase from Einstein, one must imagine that the Lord is subtle, but not malicious. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 146 | Location 2236-2237 | Added on Thursday, August 13, 2015 9:25:38 AM Nowhere is the problem of induction more relevant than in the world of trading—and nowhere has it been as ignored! ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 146 | Location 2239-2240 | Added on Thursday, August 13, 2015 9:27:51 AM No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 147 | Location 2244-2244 | Added on Thursday, August 13, 2015 9:31:53 AM The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2267-2268 | Added on Thursday, August 13, 2015 9:39:41 AM I can use data to disprove a proposition, never to prove one. I can use history to refute a conjecture, never to affirm it. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 152 | Location 2323-2325 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 12:34:34 AM The fact that Soros’ speculative portfolio turned a profit proves very little of anything. One cannot infer much from a single experiment in a random environment—an experiment needs a repeatability showing some causal component. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 152 | Location 2330-2332 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 12:35:58 AM But in spite of some of the nonsense in his writing, probably aimed at convincing himself that he was not just a trader, or because of it, I succumbed to the charm of this Hungarian man who like me is ashamed of being a trader and prefers his trading to be a minor extension of his intellectual life even if there is not much scholarship in his essays. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 157 | Location 2404-2404 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 1:00:05 AM I am an exceedingly naive falsificationist. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 161 | Location 2457-2470 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 10:52:37 AM If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them would come out with an exact version of the Iliad. Upon examination, this may be less interesting a concept than it appears at first: Such probability is ridiculously low. But let us carry the reasoning one step beyond. Now that we have found that hero among monkeys, would any reader invest his life’s savings on a bet that the monkey would write the Odyssey next? In this thought experiment, it is the second step that is interesting. How much can past performance (here the typing of the Iliad) be relevant in forecasting future performance? The same applies to any decision based on past performance, merely relying on the attributes of the past time series. Think about the monkey showing up at your door with his impressive past performance. Hey, he wrote the Iliad. The major problem with inference in general is that those whose profession is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently than others. The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For common wisdom among people with a budding knowledge of probability laws is to base their decision making on the following principle: It is very unlikely for someone to perform considerably well in a consistent fashion without his doing something right. Track records therefore become preeminent. They call on the rule of the likelihood of such a successful run and tell themselves that if someone performed better than the rest in the past then there is a great chance of his performing better than the crowd in the future—and a very great one at that. But, as usual, beware the middlebrow: A small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2574-2576 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 12:53:41 PM The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people’s greed rather than their benevolence, but there is no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 171 | Location 2607-2608 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 12:58:39 PM In a nutshell, the survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realization will be the most visible. Why? Because the losers do not show up. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2741-2744 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 11:48:49 PM The information that a person derived some profits in the past, just by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. In other words, without knowing how many managers out there have tried and failed, we will not be able to assess the validity of the track record. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2785-2789 | Added on Friday, August 14, 2015 11:56:09 PM When the statistician looks at the data to test a given relationship, say, to ferret out the correlation between the occurrence of a given event, like a political announcement, and stock market volatility, odds are that the results can be taken seriously. But when one throws the computer at data, looking for just about any relationship, it is certain that a spurious connection will emerge, such as the fate of the stock market being linked to the length of women’s skirts. And just like the birthday coincidences, it will amaze people. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 191 | Location 2917-2918 | Added on Saturday, August 15, 2015 12:50:58 AM case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 2951-2952 | Added on Saturday, August 15, 2015 12:55:07 AM People frequently misinterpret my opinion. I never said that every rich man is an idiot and every unsuccessful person unlucky, only that in absence of much additional information it is preferable to reserve one’s judgment. It is safer. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 235-237 | Added on Saturday, August 15, 2015 1:28:57 AM “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. ” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 296-297 | Added on Saturday, August 15, 2015 1:35:58 AM “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 829-830 | Added on Monday, August 17, 2015 12:27:55 AM I salve my own conscience. I give him the surcease of religion before betraying him. Thus may I say to myself that he has gone where I cannot go. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 857-864 | Added on Monday, August 17, 2015 12:32:32 AM How do we approach the study of Muad‘Dib’s father? A man of surpassing warmth and surprising coldness was the Duke Leto Atreides. Yet, many facts open the way to this Duke: his abiding love for his Bene Gesserit lady; the dreams he held for his son; the devotion with which men served him. You see him there—aman snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father? ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 931-933 | Added on Monday, August 17, 2015 1:19:47 PM “How could you win the loyalty of such men?” “There are proven ways: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. It can be done. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 90 | Location 1366-1371 | Added on Tuesday, August 18, 2015 12:53:20 PM Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad‘Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1635-1635 | Added on Wednesday, August 19, 2015 12:40:17 AM “My lungs taste the air of Time Blown past falling sands....” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 172 | Location 2632-2636 | Added on Thursday, August 20, 2015 1:22:57 AM Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 215 | Location 3287-3291 | Added on Friday, August 21, 2015 1:03:08 AM Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 220 | Location 3373-3374 | Added on Friday, August 21, 2015 1:19:19 PM There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 263 | Location 4022-4025 | Added on Friday, August 21, 2015 6:32:46 PM Paul’s mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery—as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 268 | Location 4110-4111 | Added on Friday, August 21, 2015 6:45:32 PM The eyes were like pits, mouth a straight line, cheeks indrawn. It’s the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortality. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 256 | Location 3923-3924 | Added on Saturday, August 22, 2015 5:50:32 PM “Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 257 | Location 3941-3941 | Added on Saturday, August 22, 2015 5:54:31 PM “Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place. ” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 277 | Location 4242-4243 | Added on Saturday, August 22, 2015 6:29:16 PM For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 278 | Location 4259-4261 | Added on Saturday, August 22, 2015 6:31:19 PM My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth”can be. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 309 | Location 4738-4740 | Added on Saturday, August 22, 2015 9:26:52 PM “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 194 | Location 2974-2975 | Added on Monday, August 24, 2015 1:08:37 PM Chaos theory concerns itself primarily with functions in which a small input can lead to a disproportionate response. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 3028-3035 | Added on Monday, August 24, 2015 1:15:30 PM What has gone wrong with the development of economics as a science? Answer: There was a bunch of intelligent people who felt compelled to use mathematics just to tell themselves that they were rigorous in their thinking, that theirs was a science. Someone in a great rush decided to introduce mathematical modeling techniques (culprits: Leon Walras, Gerard Debreu, Paul Samuelson) without considering the fact that either the class of mathematics they were using was too restrictive for the class of problems they were dealing with, or that perhaps they should be aware that the precision of the language of mathematics could lead people to believe that they had solutions when in fact they had none (recall Popper and the costs of taking science too seriously). Indeed the mathematics they dealt with did not work in the real world, possibly because we needed richer classes of processes—and they refused to accept the fact that no mathematics at all was probably better. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 3061-3061 | Added on Monday, August 24, 2015 1:19:00 PM Owing to this nonlinearity, people cannot comprehend the nature of the rare event. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 202 | Location 3083-3084 | Added on Monday, August 24, 2015 1:26:31 PM Too much success is the enemy (think of the punishment meted out on the rich and famous); too much failure is demoralizing. I would like the option of having neither. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 206 | Location 3159-3161 | Added on Monday, August 24, 2015 1:41:26 PM You stop when you get a near-satisfactory solution. Otherwise it may take you an eternity to reach the smallest conclusion or perform the smallest act. We are therefore rational, but in a limited way: “boundedly rational.” He believed that our brains were a large optimizing machine that had built-in rules to stop somewhere. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 354 | Location 5419-5421 | Added on Tuesday, August 25, 2015 12:09:42 AM “The mind can go either direction under stress—towardpositive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training. ” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 372 | Location 5694-5697 | Added on Wednesday, August 26, 2015 12:27:35 PM “Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same,” his father said. “An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population.” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 372 | Location 5699-5703 | Added on Wednesday, August 26, 2015 12:29:18 PM “Our timetable will achieve the stature of a natural phenomenon,” his father said. “A planet’s life is a vast, tightly interwoven fabric. Vegetation and animal changes will be determined at first by the raw physical forces we manipulate. As they establish themselves, though, our changes will become controlling influences in their own right—and we will have to deal with them, too. Keep in mind, though, that we need control only three per cent of the energy surface—only three per cent—to tip the entire structure over into our self-sustaining system.” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 374 | Location 5723-5724 | Added on Wednesday, August 26, 2015 12:32:53 PM the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 374 | Location 5725-5733 | Added on Wednesday, August 26, 2015 12:34:08 PM Prophecy and prescience—How can they be put to the test in the face of the unanswered question? Consider: How much is actual prediction of the “wave form” (as Muad‘Dib referred to his vision- image) and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What of the harmonics inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife? ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 423 | Location 6481-6482 | Added on Friday, August 28, 2015 12:57:25 PM The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 434 | Location 6642-6643 | Added on Friday, August 28, 2015 4:50:46 PM Paul sat silently in the darkness, a single stark thought dominating his awareness: My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 499 | Location 7639-7640 | Added on Tuesday, September 1, 2015 1:26:13 PM The man without emotions is the one to fear. But deep emotions... ah, now, those can be bent to your needs.” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 501 | Location 7675-7676 | Added on Tuesday, September 1, 2015 1:32:52 PM Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 510 | Location 7820-7829 | Added on Thursday, September 3, 2015 1:06:12 AM There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 540 | Location 8269-8272 | Added on Friday, September 4, 2015 1:27:43 PM You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 549 | Location 8415-8416 | Added on Friday, September 4, 2015 1:54:09 PM When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 571 | Location 8750-8750 | Added on Friday, September 4, 2015 6:35:25 PM How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 601 | Location 9209-9210 | Added on Saturday, September 5, 2015 7:01:49 PM “He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it,” Paul said. “We can destroy the spice.” ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 207 | Location 3170-3171 | Added on Saturday, September 5, 2015 7:04:27 PM Strangely, economists studied uncertainty for a long time and did not figure out much—if anything, they thought they knew something and were fooled by it. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 208 | Location 3186-3187 | Added on Saturday, September 5, 2015 7:07:09 PM Some economists, for example those of the efficient-market religion, believe that our studies should be based on the hypothesis that humans are rational and act rationally because it is the best thing for them to do (it is mathematically “optimal”). ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 215 | Location 3285-3286 | Added on Saturday, September 5, 2015 7:26:08 PM What emotions are elicited by events determine their probability in your mind. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 216 | Location 3310-3311 | Added on Saturday, September 5, 2015 7:30:22 PM (1) We do not think when making choices but use heuristics; (2) We make serious probabilistic mistakes in today’s world—whatever the true reason. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 608 | Location 9314-9315 | Added on Sunday, September 6, 2015 11:02:58 AM You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They’ve discovered they’re a people. They’re awakening.” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 674 | Location 10321-10323 | Added on Monday, September 7, 2015 12:08:53 PM Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God’s universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.” ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 676 | Location 10363-10363 | Added on Monday, September 7, 2015 12:16:27 PM “Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 678 | Location 10386-10388 | Added on Monday, September 7, 2015 12:23:07 PM A man’s flesh is his own and his water belongs to the tribe—and the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience. Omens help you remember this. And because you are here, because you have the religion, victory cannot evade you in the end. ========== Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 694 | Location 10629-10631 | Added on Monday, September 7, 2015 12:44:40 PM JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt)—the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 221 | Location 3383-3385 | Added on Monday, September 7, 2015 1:41:16 PM One cannot make a decision without emotion. Now, mathematics gives the same answer: If one were to perform an optimizing operation across a large collection of variables, even with a brain as large as ours, it would take a very long time to decide on the simplest of tasks. So we need a shortcut; emotions are there to prevent us from temporizing. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 228 | Location 3483-3486 | Added on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 12:04:40 AM What is less unpleasant: to lose 100 times $1 or lose once $100? Clearly the second: Our sensitivity to losses decreases. So a trading policy that makes $1 a day for a long time then loses them all is actually pleasant from a hedonic standpoint, although it does not make sense economically. So there is an incentive to invent a story about the likelihood of the events and carry on such strategy. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 228 | Location 3491-3493 | Added on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 12:06:07 AM One example to illustrate further option blindness. What has more value? (a) a contract that pays you $1 million if the stock market goes down 10% on any given day in the next year; (b) a contract that pays you $1 million if the stock market goes down 10% on any given day in the next year due to a terrorist act. I expect most people to select (b). ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 235 | Location 3590-3591 | Added on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 12:37:52 PM We can see that my activity in the market (and other random variables) depends far less on where I think the market or the random variable is going so much as it does on the degree of error I allow around such a confidence level. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 235 | Location 3592-3594 | Added on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 12:38:16 PM We close this chapter with the following information: I consider myself as prone to foolishness as anyone I know, in spite of my profession and the time spent building my expertise on the subject. But here is the exception; I know that I am very, very weak on that score. My humanity will try to foil me; I have to stay on my guard. I was born to be fooled by randomness. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 236 | Location 3609-3611 | Added on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 12:40:52 PM The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. Besides, I believe that I need my emotions to formulate my ideas and get the energy to execute them. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 259 | Location 3969-3971 | Added on Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:34:11 PM While shaken with emotion. No stiff upper lip. There is nothing wrong and undignified with emotions—we are cut to have them. What is wrong is not following the heroic or, at least, the dignified path. That is what stoicism truly means. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 260 | Location 3977-3979 | Added on Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:35:28 PM The stoic is a person who combines the qualities of wisdom, upright dealing, and courage. The stoic will thus be immune from life’s gyrations as he will be superior to the wounds from some of life’s dirty tricks. But ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 260 | Location 3987-3995 | Added on Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:38:29 PM Dress at your best on your execution day (shave carefully); try to leave a good impression on the death squad by standing erect and proud. Try not to play victim when diagnosed with cancer (hide it from others and only share the information with the doctor—it will avert the platitudes and nobody will treat you like a victim worthy of their pity; in addition, the dignified attitude will make both defeat and victory feel equally heroic). Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money (instead of taking it out on him as many of the traders whom I scorn routinely do). Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity, even if your significant other bolts with the handsome ski instructor or the younger aspiring model. Do not complain. If you suffer from a benign version of the “attitude problem,” like one of my childhood friends, do not start playing nice guy if your business dries up (he sent a heroic e-mail to his colleagues informing them “less business, but same attitude”). The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck. ========== Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 264 | Location 4045-4050 | Added on Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:44:50 PM I am excluding entrepreneurs from this discussion for the obvious reason: These are people who stuck their necks out for some idea, and risked belonging to the vast cemetery of those who did not make it. But CEOs are not entrepreneurs. As a matter a fact, they are often empty suits. In the “quant” world, the designation empty suit applies to the category of persons who are good at looking the part but nothing more. More appropriately, what they have is skill in getting promoted within a company rather than pure skills in making optimal decisions—we call that “corporate political skill.” These are people mostly trained at using PowerPoint presentations. ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 133 | Location 2039-2041 | Added on Friday, September 11, 2015 1:05:25 PM The day will come when, by study pursued through several ages, the things now concealed will appear with evidence; and posterity will be astonished that truths so clear had escaped us. —Seneca on the motion of comets, cited by Laplace (1902 [1825], p. 6) ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 137 | Location 2098-2103 | Added on Friday, September 11, 2015 11:58:48 PM What is chaos theory about? There are many physical phenomena governed172 by deterministic laws, and therefore predictable in principle, which are nevertheless unpredictable in practice because of their “sensitivity to initial conditions”. This means that two systems obeying the same laws may, at some moment in time, be in very similar (but not identical) states and yet, after a brief lapse of time, find themselves in very different states. This phenomenon is expressed figuratively by saying that a butterfly flapping its wings today in Madagascar could provoke a hurricane three weeks from now in ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 137 | Location 2098-2103 | Added on Friday, September 11, 2015 11:59:21 PM What is chaos theory about? There are many physical phenomena governed172 by deterministic laws, and therefore predictable in principle, which are nevertheless unpredictable in practice because of their “sensitivity to initial conditions”. This means that two systems obeying the same laws may, at some moment in time, be in very similar (but not identical) states and yet, after a brief lapse of time, find themselves in very different states. This phenomenon is expressed figuratively by saying that a butterfly flapping its wings today in Madagascar could provoke a hurricane three weeks from now in Florida ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2120-2122 | Added on Saturday, September 12, 2015 12:02:49 AM Chaotic systems are therefore characterized by the fact that their predictability is sharply limited, because even a spectacular improvement in the precision of the initial data (for example, by a factor of 1000) leads only to a rather mediocre increase in the duration over which the predictions remain valid. ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2131-2133 | Added on Saturday, September 12, 2015 12:04:12 AM Besides, thoughtful scientists have always known that they cannot hope to predict or compute everything. It is perhaps unpleasant to learn that a specific object of interest (such as the weather three weeks hence) escapes our ability to predict it, but this does not halt the development of science ========== Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal) - Your Highlight on page 189 | Location 2885-2886 | Added on Sunday, September 20, 2015 11:11:15 AM When one combines neglect of the empirical side with a good deal of scientistic dogmatism, one can be led into the worst lucubrations, ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 231-232 | Added on Sunday, September 20, 2015 10:27:33 PM We know this moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction is lethal. ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 246-246 | Added on Sunday, September 20, 2015 10:44:18 PM There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 382-383 | Added on Sunday, September 20, 2015 11:17:01 PM Every question can be boiled down to the one: ‘Why is there anything?’ ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 658-659 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:13:21 AM I never wanted to be a god, he thought. I wanted only to disappear like a jewel of trace dew caught by the morning. I wanted to escape the angels and the damned—alone … as though by an oversight. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 66-67 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:45:03 AM Knowledge of the blueprints behind the market’s plumbing had become extremely valuable, worth hundreds of millions of dollars to those in the know. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 67-68 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:46:01 AM The reason: A new breed of trader had emerged who focused on gaming the plumbing itself, exploiting complex loopholes and quirks inside the blueprints ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 106-111 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:54:07 AM The heart of the problem, Mathisson explained, was that fast-moving robot trading machines were front-running long-term investors on exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market. For instance, if Fidelity wanted to buy a million shares of IBM, the Bots could detect the order and start buying IBM themselves, in the process driving up the price and making IBM more expensive. If Fidelity wanted to sell a million shares of IBM, the Bots would also sell, pushing the price down and causing Fidelity to sell on the cheap. To escape, the victims of the front running were turning to dark pools. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 115-118 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:55:59 AM Large traders used dark pools like a cloaking device in their efforts to hide from robo algos programmed to ruthlessly hunt down their intentions like single-minded Terminators on exchanges. But unlike exchanges, dark pools were virtually unregulated. And the blueprints for how they worked were a closely guarded secret. As such, there were highly paid people on Wall Street, often sporting Ph.D.s in fields such as quantum physics and electrical engineering, who did nothing all day long but try to divine those secrets and ruthlessly exploit them. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 125-126 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:57:54 AM Every single investor in the United States was involved—and at risk. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 142-142 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 10:00:48 AM In short, the dark pools themselves were swarming with predator algos. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 150-155 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 10:03:50 AM Computer programmers designed hunter-seeker algorithms that could detect, like radar, which way the market was going. The big game in this hunt became known as a whale—an order from a leviathan fund company such as Fidelity, Vanguard, or Legg Mason. If the algos could detect the whales, they could then have a very good sense for whether a stock was going to rise or fall in the next few minutes or even seconds. They could either trade ahead of it or get out of its way. The bottom line: Mom and Pop’s retirement accounts were full of mutual funds handing over billions of dollars a year to the Bots. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 156-157 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2015 10:04:47 AM The Bots in their relentless quest for the whales had thoroughly infiltrated the dark pools. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 482-483 | Added on Friday, September 25, 2015 1:21:11 PM “Order awareness” seemed to be another phrase for “statistical front-running”—using streams of data to trade ahead of those massive whales. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 667-668 | Added on Friday, September 25, 2015 9:51:59 PM It was a game within a game, and it inspired all sorts of perverse behavior. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 676-677 | Added on Friday, September 25, 2015 9:54:17 PM No one was keeping their eyes on the Bots’ activities. No one could, since no computer on earth could capture all of the manic nanosecond action. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 678-679 | Added on Friday, September 25, 2015 9:54:24 PM Bodek began to think it had become broken at its core. If I’m swinging at market phantoms, buying too high, selling too low, what chance do ordinary investors have? ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 687-690 | Added on Friday, September 25, 2015 9:57:09 PM While dark pools had been originally designed for large investors as a haven from the hunter-seeker algos, by the late 2000s most had been thoroughly penetrated by Bots. Indeed, they couldn’t operate without them. This led to new problems: toxic dark pools swarming with predator algos designed to front-run large trader orders and game the lit market—the very problem Dan Mathisson was trying to fix with Light Pool. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 706-709 | Added on Friday, September 25, 2015 9:59:20 PM At the end of World War II, the average holding period for a stock was four years. By 2000, it was eight months. By 2008, it was two months. And by 2011 it was twenty-two seconds, at least according to one professor’s estimates. One founder of a prominent high-frequency trading outfit once claimed his firm’s average holding period was a mere eleven seconds. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 49 | Location 737-739 | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015 4:32:37 PM The end result, however, was simple: Everyday investors and even sophisticated firms like Trading Machines were buying stocks for a slightly higher price than they should, and selling for a slightly lower price and paying billions in “take” fees along the way. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 771-775 | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015 4:40:00 PM But they couldn’t tell everyone—because if everyone started using the abusive order types, no one would use limit orders, the food the new order types fed on. Bodek felt sick to his stomach. “How can you do that?” he said. “Isn’t that illegal?” The rep laughed. “It probably should be illegal, but if we changed things, the high-frequency traders wouldn’t send us their orders,” he said. They’d go to other pools that had similarly abusive order types. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 57 | Location 873-877 | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015 4:54:19 PM Exchanges appeared to be providing mechanisms to favored clients that allowed them to circumvent Reg NMS rules in ways that abused regular investors. It was complicated, a fact that helped hide the abuses, just as giant banks used complex mortgage trades to bilk clients out of billions, in the process triggering a global financial panic in 2008. Bodek wasn’t sure if it was an outright conspiracy or simply an ecosystem that had evolved to protect a single type of organism that had become critical to the survival of the pools themselves. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 924-926 | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015 5:00:07 PM It was a lab experiment in real time, with no turning back. Mathematicians, computer programmers, and physicists were conducting a grand experiment on the global financial system—one of the most chaotic, unpredictable forces on the planet, prey to the whims of people with their all-too-human fear and greed. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 941-942 | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015 5:03:57 PM The most elite high-speed trading gurus were often at a loss to explain how the market actually worked. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 972-975 | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015 5:07:23 PM WHERE had it all come from? Bodek believed it all went back to the architects of the market itself: the Plumbers. The Plumbers had designed the pipes of the system, the digital computer networks linking traders to exchanges, exchanges to exchanges, dark pools to dark pools, including the fiendishly clever order types that Bodek believed had tripped up Trading Machines. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 79 | Location 1199-1200 | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015 10:03:50 PM The difference was that market makers made money from buying and selling to regular investors. Scalpers like Houtkin made money off the market makers. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 175 | Location 2670-2675 | Added on Thursday, October 1, 2015 12:56:02 PM The result: Island was a pool full of sharks devouring one another. Andresen’s solution was a harbinger of important changes in the market to come in the next decade. Island would no longer simply court the savviest investors—the sharks, the cheetah-fast hedge funds. It would start going after what on Wall Street is known as dumb money. In other words, retail investors. That meant clients of E*Trade, Charles Schwab, Ameritrade—and even Interactive Brokers. Day traders or mom-and-pop investors who, more often than not, placed relatively unsophisticated orders into the market that the computer aces gobbled up. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 175 | Location 2675-2678 | Added on Thursday, October 1, 2015 12:57:18 PM It all went back to the “cost of ignorance” problem Levine had grappled with, which eventually led to his creation of maker-taker. Market makers often didn’t know who was on the other side of their trade, whether it was a tipped-off hedge fund manager who knew a stock was about to rocket higher (or plunge) or a dumb-as-dirt day trader making a reckless gamble. Because of that ignorance, market makers often would only buy the stock at a low price, or sell at a high price, in order to protect themselves. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 190 | Location 2901-2902 | Added on Friday, October 2, 2015 10:17:40 AM Highly sensitive programs would monitor reams of data coming from all corners of the market, learning dynamically on the fly which strategies worked best under a variety of circumstances. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 192 | Location 2930-2931 | Added on Friday, October 2, 2015 10:24:50 AM In high-frequency trading, it was all about the volume of trades, not the profit per trade. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 192 | Location 2931-2936 | Added on Friday, October 2, 2015 10:27:58 AM Of course, the frenetic trading sparked by such strategies served zero purpose for investors. The mania around WorldCom showed how the market was evolving into a giant electronic slot machine for high-speed traders plugging it for dollars … millions of dollars. Maker-taker was becoming algorithmic steroids for high-speed firms, pumping them full of a steady flow of income for posting orders (while collecting fees from firms that had to trade, such as hedge funds and mutual funds). And all that high-frequency liquidity wasn’t going into stocks to simply “make markets,” as its practitioners claimed. It was methodically hunting down every last hole in the market’s plumbing to make a very fast buck. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 195 | Location 2987-2991 | Added on Friday, October 2, 2015 12:23:35 PM While institutional traders were running from the lit markets such as Nasdaq into dark pools, in order to get away from the new breed of high-speed traders, like Tradebot, the speed traders devised methods to swim in the dark as well. Known as “latency arbitrage,” the strategy involved gaming the difference between the price of a stock in a dark pool and its price in the lit markets. Tradebot was effectively exploiting the “latency” of the system, a measurement of the time it takes for information to move from place to place in a closed system, such as a market. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 3031-3034 | Added on Friday, October 2, 2015 12:33:10 PM “We created all these different order types to accommodate how they wanted to trade,” recalls one former Archipelago employee. “We tweaked how the order would interact with our book according to what they wanted. A lot of the unique orders were created at the request of a customer, typically a high-frequency customer. You had to be a sophisticated customer to learn how to use it. They’d send it in and we’d respond. It was a happy little circle.” ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 222 | Location 3400-3403 | Added on Monday, October 5, 2015 12:33:13 AM “People (machines) now have to race to be the first person at a fixed price level,” he wrote in a July 2011 e-mail. “This has the effect of forcing marketplaces to compete in latency. You end up with exactly what you have now—people spending millions (billions?) of dollars to save milliseconds (microseconds soon?). What an expensive and needless mess. You could probably find a cure for cancer in a year if you just reassigned all the smart people who are now working on this artificially created and otherwise useless problem.” ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 223 | Location 3417-3418 | Added on Monday, October 5, 2015 12:34:46 AM A revolution born from the idealistic belief that technology could shine a light on the dark forces of finance was being corrupted. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 248 | Location 3796-3801 | Added on Monday, October 5, 2015 7:10:14 PM As Saluzzi and Arnuk repeatedly argued, the market was extremely unstable because high-frequency traders were likely to cut and run in a market shock, making the shock worse. “The last fifteen years … have seen the rise of new classes of very profitable, aggressive, and technologically savvy participants previously unknown in the U.S. markets,” Leuchtkafer wrote. “When markets are in equilibrium these new participants increase available liquidity and tighten spreads. When markets face liquidity demands these new participants increase spreads and price volatility and savage investor confidence. These participants can be more destructive to the interests of long-term investors than most have imagined.” ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 249 | Location 3815-3817 | Added on Monday, October 5, 2015 7:12:57 PM High-speed firms shrugged off the criticism. They seemed supremely self-confident, even arrogant, and had little doubt that they’d dramatically improved the market for everyone, especially small investors. If there were a few bad apples and some glitches along the way, that’s life. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 267 | Location 4083-4084 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 12:22:29 AM The market had become a high-tech poker game of programmer versus programmer, algo versus algo. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 271 | Location 4142-4146 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 11:21:46 AM And while spreads were narrower, the narrowing was something of an illusion. In the late 1990s, when spreads were typically about twelve-and-a-half cents wide, the amount of stock a market maker would buy or sell in a single trade tended to be in the thousands of shares. Now the amount was typically one hundred or two hundred shares. An investor who wanted to buy, say, thirty thousand shares (a relatively small order for an institution) could easily pay fifty cents or more above the initial offer. The reason? High-speed Bots were bidding up the price, sensing a whale in the ocean. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 271 | Location 4148-4152 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 11:22:25 AM Admittedly, the human traders and market makers the Bots had replaced had no one to blame but themselves. Nasdaq had been a nest of corruption, of scheming dealers colluding to enrich themselves at the expense of everyday investors. NYSE specialists had also been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Good old-fashioned corruption and all-too-human greed had helped destroy a system that had lasted for centuries. But were the Bots better? ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 280 | Location 4279-4315 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:09:23 PM He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and launched into his speech. “An exchange used to be a place, yes, a physical place, where people would come together to buy or sell, hoping to achieve the best price for themselves,” he said. “The more the exchange was able to attract all of the buy and sell interests in a product, the more the prices on the exchange would reflect the true state of supply and demand.” It was the old mantra: Liquidity breeds liquidity. But something had changed. “In the last twenty years came computers, electronic communications, electronic exchanges, dark pools, flash orders, multiple exchanges, alternative trading venues, direct access brokers, OTC derivatives, high-frequency traders … Reg NMS in the U.S.—and what we have today is a complete mess.” He looked out at the crowd. Dead silence. Peterffy hadn’t bothered to warm the audience up with a joke, a humorous anecdote. He cut straight to the point—and most of the people in the room didn’t like what he was saying. “It is not so much anymore that the public does not trust their brokers. They do not trust the markets, the exchanges, or the regulators either. And why should they, given our showing the past few years? To the public the financial markets may increasingly seem like a casino, except that the casino is more transparent and simpler to understand.” Visible tension spread through the room. Did Thomas Peterffy just call the market a casino? That was an attack they might have expected from the likes of Arnuk and Saluzzi or Senator Ted Kaufman—but from the founder of Timber Hill and Interactive Brokers, one of the godfathers of electronic trading? Peterffy, of course, was fully aware that his words seemed to contradict his own history. Like Josh Levine, he had believed that computers would revolutionize markets. And they had. But something had gone wrong. “I must confess to you that I was an ardent proponent of bringing technology to trading and brokerage. Unfortunately, I only saw the good sides. I saw how electronic trading and record-keeping could be used to force people to be more honest, to make the process more efficient, to lower transaction costs and to bring liquidity to the markets. I did not see the forces of fragmentation and the opportunity for people to use technology to keep to the letter but avoid the spirit of the rules—creating the current crisis.” He gazed out at his audience. Peterffy wasn’t shocked to see the stern faces, the shaking heads and averted eyes. He was certain that he’d become their enemy—and he had little hope that they would listen. The computer-trading elite would never admit that the markets they’d created were deeply flawed. Still, he kept hammering away. “It is vitally important that we bring an end to this crisis of trust before it spreads any further. That we bring back order, fair dealing, and trust in the marketplace. The financial markets of … the world’s developed countries are at a turning point. Technology, market structure, and new products have evolved more quickly than our capacity to understand or control them. The result has been a series of crises over the past few years that have caused many investors to lose confidence or to think that the whole system is a rigged game.” After Peterffy finished speaking, there was silence. Then a scattered handclap. And then the room burst into loud applause. Everyone realized: Peterffy had actually done it—he’d come out and said what so many were thinking, what they all knew deep down. The market was a complete mess. And the old guy was the only one with the balls to stand up there and call a spade a spade. It was a message Dan Mathisson at Credit Suisse would echo a few months later in his speech at the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Soon after the speech, Peterffy was hobnobbing with the titans of the exchange world. He ran into Sandy Frucher, vice chairman of Nasdaq and longtime chief of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. “How are you, Sandy?” Peterffy said. “I’m well,” said Frucher, a gray-haired veteran of the exchange wars. “But I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about which windmill to attack.” Peterffy understood exactly what Frucher was saying. In an ideal world, everyone would start behaving himself and stop focusing on the short-term buck, the quick hit. We all know the truth. You know. I know. This is Wall Street. You’re not changing a goddamn thing. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 288 | Location 4413-4416 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:30:21 PM The goal: predict a company’s performance before it became public. Effectively, they were building from scratch an AI financial analyst. Ideally, Kinetic would be able to detect a company’s fortunes even before the company’s own executives and employees knew what was happening. Sales trends, buzz on a product, a pricing war coming from a tough competitor—they were crystal balls into the future, if only you could find the right data and make sense of it. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 290 | Location 4447-4449 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:34:19 PM The signals could get dizzyingly arcane. One signal was the “maximum singular value of correlation matrix of all pairs over the previous 63 days.” It wasn’t working. In its test runs, Kinetic’s strategies, for reasons that baffled Ladopoulos, lost money (albeit fake money) far more often than they made money. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 291 | Location 4449-4454 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:34:52 PM Kinetic was discovering that trading was far more complex than simply discovering signals in the market. Firms had to carefully measure their impact on specific stocks—whether their buy and sell orders were pushing prices around. This could be especially problematic for the small stocks Kinetic was trading, since few other firms were buying them on a regular basis. An order to buy a few thousand shares of Stanley Furniture could cause the stock to jump quickly (the reason: other AI Bots with order-detection systems on the lookout for whales). If Kinetic kept buying as the stock shot higher, the trade could easily end up a loser. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 292 | Location 4463-4464 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:36:43 PM It was almost a religion, a faith in the power of the machine above all else. The machine knows all. Trust the machine. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 293 | Location 4479-4483 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:38:49 PM WHILE Kinetic had failed, the dream of creating a thinking trading machine lived on. And why not? Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that as computer power and artificial intelligence expands to the point that it has the capacity to improve itself—computers effectively designing and creating more computers—the nature of humanity will become irrevocably altered, a fearsome event he calls the Singularity. Ultimately, Kurzweil says, we humans will bend the robots to our will, allowing us to transcend our biological limitations. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 295 | Location 4517-4520 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:43:34 PM One day after work, at a bar in the riverfront Station Square section of Pittsburgh, they discussed the pluses and minuses of making the jump into finance. “It’s a heartless, soulless world,” Andre told Teller. “We wouldn’t be helping the world like we are now. Right now we’re changing people’s lives.” ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 297 | Location 4548-4550 | Added on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:46:02 PM A fierce believer in the powers of the computer, Teller became convinced that the future of Wall Street lay in artificial intelligence. If people could trade, so could computers—but much better. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 301 | Location 4604-4611 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:03:58 AM According to an academic study by a finance professor at the University of Illinois, by the late 2000s profits on rapid trading of Nasdaq stocks had turned negative, when accounting only for the spread between buy and sell prices. That meant the only way certain high-frequency firms—such as the scalper variety that profited on the difference between bids and offers—could make money was through maker-taker rebates, the fees they collected when other firms had to trade with them. The trouble for the exchanges: Everyone wanted to pocket the rebates. Every reasonably sophisticated firm, including Trading Machines, was putting orders into the market designed to earn the rebate. That posed a conundrum for the exchanges, Bodek theorized, because everyone couldn’t get the rebate. Everyone couldn’t win, because for every winner there had to be a loser. It was a zero-sum game—simple math. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 301 | Location 4611-4614 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:04:25 AM And so, Bodek reasoned, a complex system was designed to pick winners and losers. It was done through speed and exotic order types. If you didn’t know which orders to use, and when to use them, you lost nearly every time. Which is exactly what happened to Trading Machines. Worse, if you weren’t getting the rebate, you were paying the fee. For a high-volume operator, the difference could mean a loss of tens of thousands of dollars a day. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 301 | Location 4615-4617 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:04:45 AM To Bodek, it was fundamentally unfair—it was rigged. There were too many conflicts of interest, too many shared benefits between exchanges and the traders they catered to. Only the biggest, most sophisticated, connected firms in the world could win this race. Is that fair? Is that a level playing field? ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4627-4630 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:06:03 AM It was not how the market should work. Investors should be rewarded for their intelligence, for being able to make accurate predictions and take risk—not for knowing the location of secret holes inside the plumbing (or, worse, creating the holes). That was Bodek’s biggest complaint: ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4627-4629 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:06:21 AM It was not how the market should work. Investors should be rewarded for their intelligence, for being able to make accurate predictions and take risk—not for knowing the location of secret holes inside the plumbing (or, worse, creating the ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4627-4629 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:06:37 AM It was not how the market should work. Investors should be rewarded for their intelligence, for being able to make accurate predictions and take risk—not for knowing the location of secret holes inside the plumbing (or, worse, creating the holes). ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 305 | Location 4663-4665 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:09:57 AM The market, Kane complained, had been twisted to cater to high-frequency traders, since it’s in the economic interest of the exchanges to provide the traders an environment that is most conducive to making a profit. If the traders are making money on an exchange, they’ll keep coming back. ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 305 | Location 4666-4667 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:10:23 AM “An efficient market is one that brings together the buyer and the seller,” Kane said, a statement Josh Levine would surely have condoned. “But this marketplace is set up to bring in the most intermediaries between the buyer and seller as possible.” ========== Dark Pools (Scott Patterson) - Your Highlight on page 309 | Location 4729-4732 | Added on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 10:26:02 AM Star would scan the market for patterns and look for correlations. If it noticed, for instance, that more than 50 percent of the time a rise in the euro coincided with a rise in oil-and-gas companies, it might start to buy oil-and-gas companies. Star continually recalibrated such signals even as it hunted for new ones. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on Location 183-183 | Added on Thursday, October 8, 2015 10:52:21 PM If it exists, the Master Algorithm can derive all knowledge in the world—past, present, and future—from data. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 262-263 | Added on Thursday, October 8, 2015 11:09:01 PM People often think computers are all about numbers, but they’re not. Computers are all about logic. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 4 | Location 303-305 | Added on Thursday, October 8, 2015 11:16:59 PM A programmer—someone who creates algorithms and codes them up—is a minor god, creating universes at will. You could even say that the God of Genesis himself is a programmer: language, not manipulation, is his tool of creation. Words become worlds. Today, sitting on the couch with your laptop, you too can be a god. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 368-370 | Added on Friday, October 9, 2015 5:34:21 PM The goal of AI is to teach computers to do what humans currently do better, and learning is arguably the most important of those things: without it, no computer can keep up with a human for long; with it, the rest follows. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 13 | Location 459-459 | Added on Friday, October 9, 2015 11:19:39 PM Machine learning automates discovery. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 570-571 | Added on Friday, October 9, 2015 11:30:46 PM don’t just learn to defeat what your opponent does now; learn to parry what he might do against your learner. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 599-601 | Added on Friday, October 9, 2015 11:33:46 PM And if the ideas that really put a glimmer in researchers’ eyes bear fruit, machine learning will bring about not just a new era of civilization, but a new stage in the evolution of life on Earth. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 636-638 | Added on Friday, October 9, 2015 11:50:18 PM So inventing a universal learner boils down to discovering the deepest regularities in our universe, those that all phenomena share, and then figuring out a computationally efficient way to combine them with data. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 642-645 | Added on Friday, October 9, 2015 11:51:06 PM Here, then, is the central hypothesis of this book: All knowledge—past, present, and future—can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 683-685 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 2:55:30 PM If something exists but the brain can’t learn it, we don’t know it exists. We may just not see it or think it’s random. Either way, if we implement the brain in a computer, that algorithm can learn everything we can. Thus one route—arguably the most popular one—to inventing the Master Algorithm is to reverse engineer the brain. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 696-696 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 2:56:51 PM Evolution is an algorithm. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 744-746 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:05:43 PM Most of the brain’s hardware (or rather, wetware) is devoted to sensing and moving, and to do math we have to borrow parts of it that evolved for language. Computers have no such limitations and can easily turn big data into very complex models. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 747-748 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:06:03 PM Biology and sociology will never be as simple as physics, but the method by which we discover their truths can be. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 756-758 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:07:17 PM Bayes’ theorem is a machine that turns data into knowledge. According to Bayesian statisticians, it’s the only correct way to turn data into knowledge. If they’re right, either Bayes’ theorem is the Master Algorithm or it’s the engine that drives it. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 766-769 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:09:29 PM If you can solve Tetris, you can solve thousands of the hardest and most important problems in science, technology, and management—all in one fell swoop. That’s because at heart they are all the same problem. This is one of the most astonishing facts in all of science. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 769-777 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:13:12 PM Figuring out how proteins fold into their characteristic shapes; reconstructing the evolutionary history of a set of species from their DNA; proving theorems in propositional logic; detecting arbitrage opportunities in markets with transaction costs; inferring a three-dimensional shape from two-dimensional views; compressing data on a disk; forming a stable coalition in politics; modeling turbulence in sheared flows; finding the safest portfolio of investments with a given return, the shortest route to visit a set of cities, the best layout of components on a microchip, the best placement of sensors in an ecosystem, or the lowest energy state of a spin glass; scheduling flights, classes, and factory jobs; optimizing resource allocation, urban traffic flow, social welfare, and (most important) your Tetris score: these are all NP-complete problems, meaning that if you can efficiently solve one of them you can efficiently solve all problems in the class NP, including each other. Who would have guessed that all these problems, superficially so different, are really the same? But if they are, it makes sense that one algorithm could learn to solve all of them (or, more precisely, all efficiently solvable instances). ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 793-794 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:21:58 PM The Master Algorithm is for induction, the process of learning, what the Turing machine is for deduction. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 872-873 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:35:03 PM It’s true that some things are predictable and some aren’t, and the first duty of the machine learner is to distinguish between them. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 983-985 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:52:10 PM Your reaction to the datafication of life should not be to retreat to a log cabin—the woods, too, are full of sensors—but to aggressively seek control of the data that matters to you. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 1020-1021 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2015 3:56:09 PM the Master Algorithm may well be the best starting point for a theory of everything we’ll ever have. Pace Stephen Hawking, it may ultimately tell us more about the mind of God than string theory. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 57 | Location 1144-1145 | Added on Monday, October 12, 2015 5:07:23 PM Rationalists believe that the senses deceive and that logical reasoning is the only sure path to knowledge. Empiricists believe that all reasoning is fallible and that knowledge must come from observation and experimentation ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 1244-1245 | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2015 10:09:32 AM You may as well just forget about god and enjoy life without religious constraints. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 1271-1273 | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2015 10:16:33 AM Our goal is to figure out the simplest program we can write such that it will continue to write itself by reading data, without limit, until it knows everything there is to know. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1397-1398 | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2015 11:36:14 AM Thus a good learner is forever walking the narrow path between blindness and hallucination. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 85 | Location 1627-1628 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:32:39 PM the symbolist algorithm of choice is decision tree induction. Decision trees can be viewed as an answer to the question of what to do if rules of more than one concept match an instance. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 87 | Location 1648-1649 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:36:20 PM Classifiers are the most widespread form of machine learning. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 89 | Location 1679-1680 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:40:34 PM The symbolists’ core belief is that all intelligence can be reduced to manipulating symbols. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1729-1734 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:47:32 PM Hebb’s rule, as it has come to be known, is the cornerstone of connectionism. Indeed, the field derives its name from the belief that knowledge is stored in the connections between neurons. Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, stated it this way in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior: “When an axon of cell A is near enough cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.” It’s often paraphrased as “Neurons that fire together wire together.” ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1750-1754 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:51:28 PM Computers do everything one small step at a time, like adding two numbers or flipping a switch, and as a result they need a lot of steps to accomplish anything useful; but those steps can be very fast, because transistors can switch on and off billions of times per second. In contrast, brains can perform a large number of computations in parallel, with billions of neurons working at the same time; but each of those computations is slow, because neurons can fire at best a thousand times per second. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 1776-1777 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:56:16 PM The end result of this phenomenally complex pattern of neuron firings is your consciousness. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 98 | Location 1815-1816 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:03:13 PM Learning a perceptron’s weights means varying the direction of the straight line until all the positive examples are on one side and all the negative ones on the other. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1819-1820 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:03:41 PM To decide whether the perceptron fires or not, we multiply each weight by the corresponding input and compare the sum of all of them with the threshold. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 101 | Location 1854-1855 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:21:24 PM Since perceptrons can only learn linear boundaries, they can’t learn XOR. And if they can’t do even that, they’re not a very good model of how the brain learns, or a viable candidate for the Master Algorithm. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 102 | Location 1866-1866 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:23:53 PM If the history of machine learning were a Hollywood movie, the villain would be Marvin Minsky. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1957-1958 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:41:32 PM If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1957-1960 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:41:50 PM If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 108 | Location 1977-1978 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:44:59 PM This makes backpropagation—or simply backprop—the connectionists’ master algorithm. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1992-1994 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:47:42 PM Backprop, with its incremental weight changes, doesn’t know how to find the global error minimum, and local ones can be arbitrarily bad, like mistaking your grandmother for a hat. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1996-1997 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 1:48:39 PM The global minimum is hidden somewhere in the unfathomable vastness of hyperspace—and good luck finding it. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 120 | Location 2145-2147 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 2:07:49 PM Another big issue is that humans—and symbolic models like sets of rules and decision trees—can explain their reasoning, while neural networks are big piles of numbers that no one can understand. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 137 | Location 2407-2408 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 3:17:25 PM Sex just seems to be the end, rather than the means, of technological evolution. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 137 | Location 2424-2425 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 3:19:46 PM The Master Algorithm is neither genetic programming nor backprop, but it has to include the key elements of both: structure learning and weight learning. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 144 | Location 2514-2515 | Added on Thursday, October 15, 2015 8:43:14 AM At heart, Bayes’ theorem is just a simple rule for updating your degree of belief in a hypothesis when you receive new evidence: if the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis, the probability of the hypothesis goes up; if not, it goes down. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2527-2533 | Added on Thursday, October 15, 2015 8:45:55 AM One of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Laplace is perhaps best known for his dream of Newtonian determinism: An intelligence that, at a given instant, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms. For such an intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2597-2598 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015 6:20:58 AM Indeed, no one has a problem with the formula itself. The controversy is in how Bayesians obtain the probabilities that go into it and what those probabilities mean. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 149 | Location 2602-2603 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015 6:21:57 AM Bayesians’ answer is that a probability is not a frequency but a subjective degree of belief. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 151 | Location 2637-2637 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015 6:30:04 AM But machine learning is the art of making false assumptions and getting away with it. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 167 | Location 2907-2909 | Added on Saturday, October 17, 2015 11:40:27 AM For a Bayesian, in fact, there is no such thing as the truth; you have a prior distribution over hypotheses, after seeing the data it becomes the posterior distribution, as given by Bayes’ theorem, and that’s all. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 176 | Location 3041-3042 | Added on Sunday, October 18, 2015 11:00:06 AM Combining connectionism and evolutionism was fairly easy: just evolve the network structure and learn the parameters by backpropagation. But unifying logic and probability is a much harder problem. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 3093-3096 | Added on Monday, October 19, 2015 12:53:52 PM Perhaps in a future decade, machine learning will be dominated by deep analogy, combining in one algorithm the efficiency of nearest-neighbor, the mathematical sophistication of support vector machines, and the power and flexibility of analogical reasoning. (There, I just gave away one of my secret research projects.) ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 185 | Location 3187-3189 | Added on Monday, October 19, 2015 1:31:19 PM In a race between a neural network, which can be applied to an example with only a fixed number of additions, multiplications, and sigmoids and an algorithm that needs to search a large database for the example’s nearest neighbors, the neural network is sure to win. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 3212-3219 | Added on Monday, October 19, 2015 11:35:45 PM A bigger problem is that, surprisingly, having more attributes can be harmful even when they’re all relevant. You’d think that more information is always better—isn’t that the motto of our age? But as the number of dimensions goes up, the number of training examples you need to locate the concept’s frontiers goes up exponentially. With twenty Boolean attributes, there are roughly a million different possible examples. With twenty-one, there are two million, and a corresponding number of ways the frontier could wind between them. Every extra attribute makes the learning problem twice as hard, and that’s just with Boolean attributes. If the attribute is highly informative, the benefit of adding it may exceed the cost. But if you have only weakly informative attributes, like the words in an e-mail or the pixels in an image, you’re probably in trouble, even though collectively they may have enough information to predict what you want. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 3430-3431 | Added on Tuesday, October 20, 2015 12:11:58 AM If the Master Algorithm is not analogy, it must surely be something like it. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 202 | Location 3462-3464 | Added on Tuesday, October 20, 2015 12:15:49 AM There’s a gaping hole in the center of the puzzle, making it hard to see the pattern. The problem is that all the learners we’ve seen so far need a teacher to tell them the right answer. They can’t learn to distinguish tumor cells from healthy ones unless someone labels them “tumor” or “healthy.” But humans can learn without a teacher; they do it from the day they’re born. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 203 | Location 3475-3477 | Added on Tuesday, October 20, 2015 9:20:53 AM But as it is, the greatest mystery in the universe is not how it begins or ends, or what infinitesimal threads it’s woven from, it’s what goes on in a small child’s mind: how a pound of gray jelly can grow into the seat of consciousness. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 232 | Location 3935-3943 | Added on Wednesday, October 21, 2015 12:00:56 PM In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the scientist Hari Seldon manages to mathematically predict the future of humanity and thereby save it from decadence. Paul Krugman, among others, has confessed that this seductive dream was what made him become an economist. According to Seldon, people are like molecules in a gas, and the law of large numbers ensures that even if individuals are unpredictable, whole societies aren’t. Relational learning reveals why this is not the case. If people were independent, each making decisions in isolation, societies would indeed be predictable, because all those random decisions would add up to a fairly constant average. But when people interact, larger assemblies can be less predictable than smaller ones, not more. If confidence and fear are contagious, each will dominate for a while, but every now and then an entire society will swing from one to the other. It’s not all bad news, though. If we can measure how strongly people influence each other, we can estimate how long it will be before a swing occurs, even if it’s the first one—another way in which black swans are not necessarily unpredictable. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 249 | Location 4199-4201 | Added on Friday, October 23, 2015 8:13:55 PM To recap: the unified learner we’ve arrived at uses MLNs as the representation, posterior probability as the evaluation function, and genetic search coupled with gradient descent as the optimizer. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 250 | Location 4219-4222 | Added on Friday, October 23, 2015 8:21:10 PM Of course, even if you use Alchemy with no initial formulas (and you can), that doesn’t make it knowledge-free. The choice of formal language, score function, and optimizer implicitly encodes assumptions about the world. So it’s natural to ask whether we can have an even more general learner than Alchemy. What did evolution assume when it began its long journey from the first bacteria to all the life-forms around today? ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 279 | Location 4678-4680 | Added on Saturday, October 24, 2015 11:55:00 PM The need to earn a living will be a distant memory, another piece of humanity’s barbaric past that we rose above. ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 288 | Location 4836-4838 | Added on Sunday, October 25, 2015 12:07:16 AM The world beyond the Turing point will not be incomprehensible to us, any more than the Pleistocene was. We’ll focus on what we can understand, as we always have, and call the rest random (or divine). The trajectory we’re on is not a singularity ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 288 | Location 4836-4837 | Added on Sunday, October 25, 2015 12:07:32 AM The world beyond the Turing point will not be incomprehensible to us, any more than the Pleistocene was. We’ll focus on what we can understand, as we always have, and call the rest random (or divine). ========== The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos, Pedro) - Your Highlight on page 294 | Location 4893-4895 | Added on Sunday, October 25, 2015 12:13:10 AM Newton said that he felt like a boy playing on the seashore, picking up a pebble here and a shell there while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. Three hundred years later, we’ve gathered an amazing collection of pebbles and shells, but the great undiscovered ocean still stretches into the distance, sparkling with promise. ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 127 | Location 1948-1948 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2015 12:08:58 AM “I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.” ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 138 | Location 2112-2115 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2015 12:28:05 AM The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not … yet, I occurred. ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 170 | Location 2601-2603 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2015 11:23:27 PM No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/ human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals. ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 192 | Location 2942-2945 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015 1:31:52 PM The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree.You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.” ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 239 | Location 3651-3652 | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015 4:08:23 PM Do not compete with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.” ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 242 | Location 3699-3701 | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015 10:43:33 PM Life changed those irascible wastes into shapes of grace and movement, he thought. That was the message of the desert. Contrast stunned him with realization. He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: If you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together! ========== Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 242 | Location 3711-3714 | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015 10:46:44 PM This myth he’d made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs—what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else. Was this the golden genesis of man? ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Bookmark on page 46 | Location 700 | Added on Friday, October 30, 2015 10:15:08 AM ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 74 | Location 1126-1127 | Added on Friday, October 30, 2015 11:46:13 PM Moreover, in order to understand any man one must approach gradually and carefully to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and remedy afterwards. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 199 | Location 3038-3044 | Added on Friday, November 6, 2015 12:35:09 PM Science now tells us, love yourself above everyone else, for everything in the world relies on self-interest. You love yourself and manage your own affairs properly and your coat remains whole. Economic truth adds that the better private affairs are organized in society—the more whole coats, so to speak—the firmer its foundations and the better organized common welfare shall be. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for everyone, and helping to get my neighbor a little more than a torn coat; and that is not because of my private, personal liberality, but because of a general advance. The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us because we have been hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet very little intelligence is needed to perceive it . . . ” ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 209 | Location 3204-3205 | Added on Friday, November 6, 2015 12:57:24 PM Man is a vile creature! . . . And vile is he who calls man vile for that,” ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 243 | Location 3712-3715 | Added on Sunday, November 8, 2015 4:54:40 AM “Enough,” he pronounced resolutely and triumphantly. “I’ve done with imaginary terrors and phantoms! Life is real! Haven’t I lived just now? My life has not yet died with that old woman! The Kingdom of Heaven to her—and now leave me in peace! Now for the reign of reason and light . . . and of will, and of strength . . . and now we will see! We will try our strength!” he added defiantly, as though challenging some power of darkness. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 254 | Location 3894-3896 | Added on Tuesday, November 10, 2015 10:50:47 AM Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that’s just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That’s what they regard as the highest point of progress. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 255 | Location 3899-3902 | Added on Tuesday, November 10, 2015 10:54:02 AM Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in your own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you’re a human being, in the second you’re no better than a bird. Truth won’t escape you, but life can be cramped. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 315 | Location 4816-4820 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:08:24 PM Everything with them is ‘the influence of the environment,’ and nothing else. Their favorite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organized, crime will instantly cease to exist, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in an instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognize that humanity has developed by a living historical process and will eventually become normal; they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all of humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 317 | Location 4852-4853 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:12:56 PM What a strange person you are! You lead such a solitary life that you know nothing of matters that concern you directly. It’s a fact, I assure you.” ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 318 | Location 4872-4874 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:15:06 PM I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right . . . that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep . . . certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity). ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 319 | Location 4883-4884 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:16:19 PM In short, I maintain that all great people or even people who are slightly uncommon, that is to say capable of producing some new idea, must by nature be criminals—more or less, of course. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 319 | Location 4888-4889 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:18:30 PM I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to produce something new. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 319 | Location 4890-4894 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:20:00 PM The first category, generally speaking, contains men who are conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category transgresses the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 320 | Location 4899-4900 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:20:38 PM The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 322 | Location 4931-4935 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:35:34 PM The vast mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort, by some mysterious process, by some crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence. One in ten thousand perhaps—I speak roughly, approximately—is born with some independence, and with still greater independence one in a hundred thousand. The man of genius is one of millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions. In fact I have not peeped into the retort in which all this takes place. But there certainly is and must be a definite law, it cannot be a matter of chance.” ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 324 | Location 4958-4959 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:37:56 PM “If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment—as well as the prison.” ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 324 | Location 4961-4962 | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015 8:38:39 PM It’s not a matter of permission or prohibition. He will suffer if he is sorry for his victim. Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,” ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 486 | Location 7452-7455 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2015 1:13:14 PM Yes, that’s true. That’s the law of their nature, Sonia . . . that’s true! . . . And I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. Anyone who is very daring is right in their eyes. He who despises most things will be a lawgiver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right! That’s how it has been until now and that’s how it will always be. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 518 | Location 7942-7944 | Added on Wednesday, December 2, 2015 11:57:49 AM The final moment had come, the last drops had to be drained! So a man will sometimes go through half an hour of mortal terror with a brigand, yet when the knife is at his throat at last, he feels no fear. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 548 | Location 8389-8389 | Added on Thursday, December 3, 2015 6:32:52 AM And once a girl’s heart is moved to pity, it’s more dangerous than anything. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 549 | Location 8413-8415 | Added on Thursday, December 3, 2015 7:52:35 AM can never remember without laughter how I once seduced a lady who was devoted to her husband, her children, and her principles. What fun it was and how little trouble! And the lady really had principles, of her own, anyway. All my tactics lay in simply being utterly annihilated and prostrate before her purity. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 625 | Location 9578-9579 | Added on Thursday, December 3, 2015 11:47:51 AM Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind. ========== Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Your Highlight on page 631 | Location 9674-9675 | Added on Thursday, December 3, 2015 11:59:14 AM Without morality and a firm sense of God, ideas and processes like punishment, forgiveness, and redemption prove to be pointless. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 795-795 | Added on Monday, December 7, 2015 7:44:40 PM Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 134 | Location 2051-2053 | Added on Tuesday, December 8, 2015 11:09:06 AM “Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?” ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 166 | Location 2533-2535 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2015 2:31:16 PM But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 166 | Location 2535-2536 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2015 2:31:31 PM They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 190 | Location 2902-2905 | Added on Monday, December 14, 2015 10:59:27 AM The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 199 | Location 3039-3039 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2015 10:53:48 AM The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 3063-3067 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2015 11:01:21 AM The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 202 | Location 3098-3100 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2015 11:17:43 AM Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 208 | Location 3184-3185 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2015 11:35:24 AM The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. ========== 1984 (George Orwell) - Your Highlight on page 263 | Location 4031-4032 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2015 11:05:34 PM That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. ========== The End of Eternity (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on page 132 | Location 2014-2016 | Added on Friday, January 8, 2016 9:02:41 PM He knows he will live long enough to perform the action he has witnessed. Now a man in knowing his own future in even the slightest detail can act on that knowledge and therefore changes his future. ========== The End of Eternity (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on page 211 | Location 3224-3224 | Added on Saturday, January 9, 2016 1:42:36 AM Any system like Eternity, which allows men to choose their own future, will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 4 | Location 51-52 | Added on Saturday, January 9, 2016 11:47:05 AM There is a black hole at the heart of biology. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 141-142 | Added on Saturday, January 9, 2016 6:32:26 PM Not just individual cells but the whole world was a vast collaborative network of bacteria – ‘Gaia’, an idea that she pioneered with James Lovelock. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 212-213 | Added on Sunday, January 10, 2016 12:43:08 AM If so, the singular origin of complex life might have depended on the acquisition of mitochondria. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 234-235 | Added on Sunday, January 10, 2016 12:47:20 AM We know that complex cells arose on just one occasion in 4 billion years of evolution, through a singular endosymbiosis between an archaeon and a bacterium ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 319-322 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 10:18:15 AM To my mind the venture is a poignant symbol of humanity’s uncertain sense of our place in the universe, and indeed the fragility of science itself: science fiction technology so inscrutable that it hints at omniscience, trained on a dream so naive that it is barely grounded in science at all, that we are not alone. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 329-331 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 10:19:14 AM We know a great deal about the molecular mechanisms of evolution and about the history of life on our planet, but far less about which parts of this history are chance – trajectories that could have played out quite differently on other planets – and which bits are dictated by physical laws or constraints. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 336-337 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 10:21:19 AM The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 352-353 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 10:24:08 AM evolutionary theory does not predict, from first principles, why life on earth took the course that it did. I do not mean by this that I think evolutionary theory is wrong – it is not – but simply that it is not predictive. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 358-360 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 10:26:00 AM Ironically, the modern era of molecular biology, and all the extraordinary DNA technology that it entails, arguably began with a physicist, specifically with the publication of Erwin Schrödinger’s book What is Life? ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 377-377 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 10:30:25 AM Onions, wheat and amoebae have more genes and more DNA than we do. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 388-389 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 10:32:56 AM If life is about information, and information is unconstrained, then we can’t predict what life might look like on another planet, only that it will not contravene the laws of physics. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 455-456 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 1:39:57 PM Life, as biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi observed, is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 561-563 | Added on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 1:57:12 PM If rising oxygen levels removed constraints on complexity, the prediction from ‘standard’ natural selection is that adaptation to different ways of life in different populations should lead to a polyphyletic radiation. But that isn’t what we see. ========== The Vital Question (Nick Lane) - Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 630-631 | Added on Thursday, January 14, 2016 10:35:42 AM We now know that eukaryotes all share a common ancestor, which by definition arose just once in the 4 billion years of life on earth. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 12 | Location 182-183 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:08:44 PM 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. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 13 | Location 190-191 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:09:45 PM Usually, what we call a “good listener” is someone with skillfully polished indifference. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 219-220 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:14:45 PM 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. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 269-270 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:27:59 PM What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 307-308 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:33:03 PM Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 372-373 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:38:48 PM For everything, use boredom in place of a clock, as a biological wristwatch, though under constraints of politeness. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 478-479 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2016 2:16:26 PM The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 646-647 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:01:09 AM The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 650-652 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:01:46 AM The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 677-678 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:05:17 AM Why do I have an obsessive Plato problem? Most people need to surpass their predecessors; Plato managed to surpass all his successors. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 681-682 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:09:32 AM Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 710-710 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:13:35 AM Economics is like a dead star that still seems to produce light; but you know it is ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 710-710 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:14:12 AM Economics is like a dead star that still seems to produce light; but you know it is dead. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 757-758 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:19:07 AM The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent. ========== The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 769-770 | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 11:20:37 AM The two most celebrated acts of courage in history aren’t Homeric fighters but two Eastern Mediterranean fellows who died, even sought death, for their ideas. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 373-374 | Added on Thursday, January 28, 2016 12:59:25 PM Most young people these days have no real dreams, no strong ethics, no strength. They stand for nothing, they want nothing, they do nothing. Just by trying, even a little bit, you wind up better than most of them. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 666-666 | Added on Thursday, January 28, 2016 1:41:56 PM My core ethic, my overwhelming goal, is expansion of the human race as a whole. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 968-969 | Added on Friday, January 29, 2016 10:35:25 AM People who look for a "nice life" and don't stand for anything in particular often don't understand the single-minded obsession of people on a quest. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 90 | Location 1379-1380 | Added on Friday, January 29, 2016 11:19:37 AM Imperfection and inconvenience are part of the bargain of being human. Do not act rashly or impulsively. There's no reason to feel discontent or despair when things are going wrong. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1755-1756 | Added on Friday, January 29, 2016 11:44:13 PM You're going to die.   Being mildly embarrassed isn't going to hurt you. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 178 | Location 2727-2728 | Added on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 12:27:42 PM Okay, you don't know what you're passionate about. That's normal. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 178 | Location 2730-2730 | Added on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 12:27:48 PM Now realize, a lot of effortless passion is bullshit. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 184 | Location 2813-2813 | Added on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 12:51:09 PM In order to avoid dabbling, ship work in the fields you care about before moving on. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 192 | Location 2930-2932 | Added on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 7:35:37 AM But I reckon that's the formula for all passion-discovering—take some action, deliver some concrete things, and then evaluate how well it suited you. Passion rarely strikes when you're sitting sitting and contemplating. Jump in, build, create, experiment, ship … then evaluate to see how it suited you. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 3025-3025 | Added on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 12:17:20 PM The failure is less making me cringe and more making me shake my head and roll my eyes at myself. It's pretty good. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 3032-3034 | Added on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 12:19:34 PM What do you really lose when things go wrong? Pride? Your will's pretty strong, though, right? You'd survive if you made a screwup, yes? I'm thinking—fail more. It's not so bad. Succeed more too. Succeeding is good. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 203 | Location 3105-3106 | Added on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 12:26:06 PM Life is really a circus. Are you such a big deal that you can't be embarrassed, or make a mistake, or do something wrong? No, you're not. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 213 | Location 3252-3253 | Added on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 12:37:58 PM I bet you don't want to look stupid, so you spend an extensive amount of time doing everything you can to not look stupid, and that's why everything takes so long. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 225 | Location 3446-3446 | Added on Thursday, February 4, 2016 9:53:54 AM If you say the wrong thing, move to the next opportunity. If you do the wrong thing, apologize and move on. What if you do the right thing? ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 228 | Location 3488-3488 | Added on Thursday, February 4, 2016 10:40:48 AM We're all built weak, man. It's hard to confront, so most people hide. Confront it, bathe in conflict and strife, and make it serve you. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 230 | Location 3518-3519 | Added on Thursday, February 4, 2016 10:44:24 AM When you close off all the normal paths in front of you, and burn your boats behind you, you are suddenly left in uncharted places. Striving is at first lonely. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 231 | Location 3540-3541 | Added on Thursday, February 4, 2016 4:25:47 PM Siddhartha said, all is suffering. I say—indeed it is, and I will have it all. I will have as much suffering as I can handle, because it is life. ========== Ikigai (Marshall, Sebastian) - Your Highlight on page 364 | Location 5570-5572 | Added on Saturday, February 6, 2016 2:11:45 PM What is winning? Rule an empire, fist full of rice. Rule a life, fist full of ashes. Though you may master your every whim, accomplish your every goal, still all you can hope is to hold a place of honor on your children's mantle. That and the battle. To fight the battle in front of you, with every second you have. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 258-259 | Added on Sunday, February 7, 2016 10:07:13 PM “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 263-264 | Added on Sunday, February 7, 2016 10:08:10 PM If, like the courtier of times gone by, you can master the arts of indirection, learning to seduce, charm, deceive, and subtly outmaneuver your opponents, you will attain the heights of power. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 321-322 | Added on Monday, February 8, 2016 4:32:58 PM Such is the face you must create for yourself-one face looking continuously to the future and the other to the past. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 352-353 | Added on Monday, February 8, 2016 4:42:37 PM Everything good will happen—the grass will grow again, if you give it time and see several steps into the future. Impatience, on the other hand, only makes you look weak. It is a principal impediment to power. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 373-374 | Added on Monday, February 8, 2016 4:47:11 PM An understanding of people’s hidden motives is the single greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power. It opens up endless possibilities of deception, seduction, and manipulation. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 642-644 | Added on Tuesday, February 9, 2016 10:43:42 AM A man suddenly spared the guillotine is a grateful man indeed, and will go to the ends of the earth for the man who has pardoned him. In time, these former enemies became Sung’s most trusted friends. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 685-686 | Added on Tuesday, February 9, 2016 3:38:40 PM Whenever you can, bury the hatchet with an enemy, and make a point of putting him in your service. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 759-761 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2016 6:42:21 AM she patiently explained that a woman who is interested in a man wants to see that other women are interested in him, too. Not only does that give him instant value, it makes it all the more satisfying to snatch him from their clutches. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 763-764 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2016 6:42:49 AM All of this would push her into the state of emotional confusion that is a prerequisite for successful seduction. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 836-837 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2016 4:32:43 PM In seduction, set up conflicting signals, such as desire and indifference, and you not only throw them off the scent, you inflame their desire to possess you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 847-848 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2016 4:34:36 PM Hide your intentions not by closing up (with the risk of appearing secretive, and making people suspicious) but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals—just not your real ones. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 1467-1467 | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016 11:50:30 PM Society craves larger-than-life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1487-1489 | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016 11:55:01 PM People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 102 | Location 1556-1558 | Added on Thursday, February 18, 2016 12:46:43 PM By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1760-1761 | Added on Friday, February 19, 2016 12:48:09 PM He took credit for the work of those below him while graciously giving credit for his own labors to those above. That is the way to play the game. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 130 | Location 1981-1982 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2016 4:05:34 PM In the realm of power you must learn to judge your moves by their long-term effects on other people. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 130 | Location 1984-1985 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2016 4:06:44 PM words have that insidious ability to be interpreted according to the other person’s mood and insecurities. Even the best argument has no solid foundation, ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 130 | Location 1984-1985 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2016 4:07:00 PM words have that insidious ability to be interpreted according to the other person’s mood and insecurities. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 133 | Location 2032-2033 | Added on Tuesday, February 23, 2016 3:42:23 PM Never argue. In society nothing must be discussed; give only results. (Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881) ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2132-2132 | Added on Wednesday, February 24, 2016 12:13:26 PM Do not consort with fools, especially those who consider themselves wise. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 143 | Location 2189-2190 | Added on Wednesday, February 24, 2016 12:21:48 PM If you are prone to isolation, force yourself to befriend the gregarious. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 158 | Location 2418-2419 | Added on Wednesday, February 24, 2016 3:57:37 PM Learn to give before you take. It softens the ground, takes the bite out of a future request, or simply creates a distraction. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2562-2563 | Added on Thursday, February 25, 2016 12:57:08 PM When people choose between talk about the past and talk about the future, a pragmatic person will always opt for the future and forget the past. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 174 | Location 2662-2664 | Added on Tuesday, March 1, 2016 12:31:14 PM In the realm of power, your goal is a degree of control over future events. Part of the problem you face, then, is that people won’t tell you all their thoughts, emotions, and plans. Controlling what they say, they often keep the most critical parts of their character hidden—their weaknesses, ulterior motives, obsessions. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 175 | Location 2674-2675 | Added on Tuesday, March 1, 2016 12:35:38 PM The key here is Talleyrand’s ability to suppress himself in the conversation, to make others talk endlessly about themselves and inadvertently reveal their intentions and plans. ========== The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael) - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 133-134 | Added on Wednesday, March 2, 2016 12:26:51 PM I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. —Albert Einstein ========== The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael) - Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 548-548 | Added on Wednesday, March 2, 2016 7:53:20 PM One of the most profound ways to see the world more clearly is to look deliberately for the gaps— ========== The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael) - Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 569-571 | Added on Wednesday, March 2, 2016 7:57:58 PM Select your own object, issue, or topic of study and attach an adjective or descriptive phrase (such as “the First” before “World War”) that points out some reality of the situation, ideally some feature that is limiting or taken for granted. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 201 | Location 3074-3075 | Added on Wednesday, March 9, 2016 11:54:26 AM Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 204 | Location 3128-3129 | Added on Wednesday, March 9, 2016 12:00:04 PM In chess as in life, when people cannot figure out what you are doing, they are kept in a state of terror—waiting, uncertain, confused. ========== A Mind For Numbers (Barbara Oakley) - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 464-465 | Added on Thursday, March 10, 2016 12:29:25 PM If you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode, ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 217 | Location 3324-3325 | Added on Tuesday, March 15, 2016 4:02:42 PM Never imagine yourself so elevated that you can afford to cut yourself off from even the lowest echelons. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 231 | Location 3528-3529 | Added on Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:01:10 PM The ability to measure people and to know who you’re dealing with is the most important skill of all in gathering and conserving power. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 236 | Location 3611-3612 | Added on Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:11:24 PM He made promises to every side but committed ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 236 | Location 3611-3612 | Added on Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:11:34 PM He made promises to every side but committed to none, and in the end he held all the cards. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 238 | Location 3635-3635 | Added on Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:15:05 PM When you want to seduce a woman, Stendhal advises, court her sister first. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 249 | Location 3812-3813 | Added on Wednesday, April 6, 2016 12:39:46 PM Preserve the unspoken option of being able to leave at any moment and reclaim your freedom if the side you are allied with starts to collapse. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 251 | Location 3837-3838 | Added on Wednesday, April 6, 2016 12:42:57 PM “You should know that foolish people are a hundredfold more averse to meeting the wise than the wise are indisposed for the company of the foolish. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 255 | Location 3902-3903 | Added on Monday, April 11, 2016 3:22:27 PM The feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion-muscles. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 265 | Location 4049-4050 | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016 3:31:15 PM People trying to make a show of their authority are easily deceived by the surrender tactic. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 265 | Location 4061-4062 | Added on Tuesday, April 12, 2016 3:33:27 PM This is the essence of the surrender tactic: Inwardly you stay firm, but outwardly you bend. ========== How to Talk to Anyone_ 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships - Leil Lowndes - Your Highlight on page 113-113 | Added on Wednesday, April 13, 2016 6:55:49 AM So how do you find out what someone does for a living? (I thought you’d never ask. ) You simply practice the following eight words. All together now: “How ... do ... you ... spend ... most ... of ... your ...time?” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 273 | Location 4171-4173 | Added on Tuesday, May 10, 2016 3:43:53 PM Beware of dissipating your powers: strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it is sure to repent of every ill-judged outlay. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene; Joost Elffers) - Your Highlight on page 276 | Location 4217-4219 | Added on Friday, May 20, 2016 5:03:29 PM “I have always believed,” he later wrote, “that when a man gets it into his head to do something, and when he exclusively occupies himself in that design, he must succeed, whatever the difficulties. That man will become Grand Vizier or Pope.” ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 264-265 | Added on Monday, May 30, 2016 10:28:26 PM The difference is one of complexity of design. Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 482-485 | Added on Thursday, June 2, 2016 10:46:09 PM Physicists, of course, do not take iron rods for granted. They ask why they are rigid, and they continue the hierarchical peeling for several more layers yet, down to fundamental particles and quarks. But life is too short for most of us to follow them. For any given level of complex organization, satisfying explanations may normally be attained if we peel the hierarchy down one or two layers from our starting layer, but not more. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Note on page 32 | Location 485 | Added on Thursday, June 2, 2016 10:49:06 PM The problem here is that maybe quantum properties have some level of influence on the behaviour or functioning of life. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Note on page 32 | Location 485 | Added on Thursday, June 2, 2016 10:50:15 PM The problem here is that maybe quantum properties have some level of influence on the behaviour or functioning of life. nd therefore we might miss out on some crucial details by following this analysis. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 515-516 | Added on Thursday, June 2, 2016 10:55:15 PM A complicated thing is one whose existence we do not feel inclined to take for granted, because it is too ‘improbable’. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 542-542 | Added on Thursday, June 2, 2016 11:04:59 PM my characterization of a complex object – statistically improbable in a direction that is specified not with hindsight ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 585-586 | Added on Thursday, June 2, 2016 11:12:51 PM Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 852-854 | Added on Thursday, June 2, 2016 11:53:06 PM It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 57 | Location 860-862 | Added on Friday, June 3, 2016 9:58:48 AM The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant. That outside information is, in any case, translated into the same kind of nerve impulses on its way to the brain. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 924-926 | Added on Tuesday, June 7, 2016 3:43:22 PM He has no truck with shifty evasions such as ‘Christianity is a way of life. The question of God’s existence is eliminated: it is a mirage created by the illusions of realism’. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 928-930 | Added on Tuesday, June 7, 2016 3:44:37 PM The Bishop believes in evolution, but cannot believe that natural selection is an adequate explanation for the course that evolution has taken (partly because, like many others, he sadly misunderstands natural selection to be ‘random’ and ‘meaningless’). ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 76 | Location 1163-1165 | Added on Wednesday, June 8, 2016 10:46:44 AM Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 89 | Location 1360-1360 | Added on Thursday, June 9, 2016 10:25:52 AM If there is a professional programmer out there who feels like collaborating on the challenge, I should like to hear from him or her. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 169 | Location 2579-2582 | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2016 3:44:25 PM What is the vital ingredient that a dead planet like the early Earth must have, if it is to have a chance of eventually coming alive, as our planet did? It is not breath, not wind, not any kind of elixir or potion. It is not a substance at all, it is a property, the property of self-replication. This is the basic ingredient of cumulative selection. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 176 | Location 2693-2696 | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2016 1:00:54 PM And if any entity, anywhere in the universe, happens to have the property of being good at making more copies of itself, then automatically more and more copies of that entity will obviously come into existence. Not only that but, since they automatically form lineages and are occasionally miscopied, later versions tend to be ‘better’ at making copies of themselves than earlier versions, because of the powerful processes of cumulative selection. It is all utterly simple and automatic. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 181 | Location 2767-2770 | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2016 3:23:52 PM Cumulative selection is the key to all our modern explanations of life. It strings a series of acceptably lucky events (random mutations) together in a nonrandom sequence so that, at the end of the sequence, the finished product carries the illusion of being very very lucky indeed, far too improbable to have come about by chance alone, even given a timespan millions of times longer than the age of the universe so far. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2780-2782 | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2016 3:41:55 PM The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given that we are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection. But if replication needs complex machinery, since the only way we know for complex machinery ultimately to come into existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2785-2787 | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2016 3:44:01 PM All who have given thought to the matter agree that an apparatus as complex as the human eye could not possibly come into existence through single-step selection. Unfortunately, the same seems to be true of at least parts of the apparatus of cellular machinery whereby DNA replicates itself, ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2789-2791 | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2016 3:44:24 PM So, cumulative selection can manufacture complexity while single-step selection cannot. But cumulative selection cannot work unless there is some minimal machinery of replication and replicator power, and the only machinery of replication that we know seems too complicated to have come into existence by means of anything less than many generations of cumulative selection! ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 183 | Location 2799-2800 | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2016 3:47:04 PM But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 183 | Location 2801-2803 | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2016 3:48:05 PM To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like ‘God was always there’, and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say ‘DNA was always there’, or ‘Life was always there’, and be done with it. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 205 | Location 3143-3144 | Added on Monday, July 4, 2016 4:55:45 PM And if a new kind of replicator takeover is beginning, it is conceivable that it will take off so far as to leave its parent DNA (and its grandparent clay if Cairns-Smith is right) far behind. If so, we may be sure that computers will be in the van. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 206 | Location 3145-3145 | Added on Monday, July 4, 2016 4:55:54 PM Could it be that one far-off day intelligent computers will speculate about their own lost origins? ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 207 | Location 3169-3170 | Added on Tuesday, July 5, 2016 10:52:39 AM Coincidence means multiplied improbability. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 208 | Location 3188-3190 | Added on Tuesday, July 5, 2016 10:59:09 AM Our minds can’t cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 215 | Location 3292-3294 | Added on Thursday, July 7, 2016 9:50:59 PM So we have arrived at the following paradox. If a theory of the origin of life is sufficiently ‘plausible’ to satisfy our subjective judgement of plausibility, it is then too ‘plausible’ to account for the paucity of life in the universe as we observe it. According to this argument, the theory we ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 215 | Location 3292-3294 | Added on Thursday, July 7, 2016 9:51:09 PM So we have arrived at the following paradox. If a theory of the origin of life is sufficiently ‘plausible’ to satisfy our subjective judgement of plausibility, it is then too ‘plausible’ to account for the paucity of life in the universe as we observe it. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 223 | Location 3410-3411 | Added on Friday, July 8, 2016 5:04:50 PM In some animals, a high proportion of the total number of genes is in fact never read. These genes are either complete ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 223 | Location 3410-3412 | Added on Friday, July 8, 2016 5:05:03 PM In some animals, a high proportion of the total number of genes is in fact never read. These genes are either complete nonsense, or they are outdated ‘fossil genes’. ========== The Gods Themselves (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on page 175 | Location 2680-2683 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2016 11:16:22 AM “And what did he offer you in exchange for the screwing you so delicately call you-know-what.” “Just sat there.” “And stared at your breasts?” “They’re there to be stared at, but actually he didn’t. He stared at my nameplate.… Besides, what’s it to you what he fantasied? Fantasies are free and I don’t have to fulfill them. ========== The Gods Themselves (Isaac Asimov) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2779-2780 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2016 12:17:12 PM Great and possibly dangerous efforts have been abandoned because the danger was feared more than greatness was desired.” ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 162-163 | Added on Saturday, August 6, 2016 10:48:34 AM Individual investors are, happily, insulated from the arms race to go faster and faster. It doesn’t matter whether you or I are faster or slower than the professional traders, because we are doing different things. ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 165-166 | Added on Saturday, August 6, 2016 10:50:29 AM For individual investors there is no race at all. You invest because you decided that you wanted to. Nobody else in the market knows why or when you made this choice, so nobody could race you if they wanted to. ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 518-520 | Added on Sunday, August 7, 2016 1:22:36 PM The sort of tweaks mentioned by Ryan don’t imply hugely profitable evil geniuses to me. They imply a couple of guys getting lucky with some strategy, and not really having any clue as to why they are successful. As Ryan sums it up, “If you know how to pickpocket someone and you were the pickpocketer, you would do the same thing.” ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Note on page 39 | Location 597 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:22:29 AM yeah, once the order gets to the exchange... ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 596-597 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:22:29 AM Barrier 2) Stock exchanges automatically and immediately execute marketable orders. It’s impossible for a would-be front runner to buy shares before you do when your order executes automatically and immediately. ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Note on page 40 | Location 607 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:25:08 AM except that he is talking about front running through multiple exchanges, like arbitrage ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 607-607 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:25:08 AM To make his examples work he has to violate these principles, and the markets simply don’t work that way. ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Note on page 44 | Location 671 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:34:11 AM I see the point ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 669-671 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:34:11 AM When 100 shares trade on BATS, the only information available to anyone is that 100 shares just traded on BATS. To claim that anyone, based on this information, can divine whether zero additional shares were desired or 99,900 additional shares were desired is pure fantasy. Period. ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Note on page 46 | Location 693 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:38:50 AM for feal? ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 692-693 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 11:38:50 AM By law, nobody can trade at a higher price until every single offer in the market at the lower price is gone. The only way to get rid of somebody else’s lower offers is to buy them up. ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 854-860 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 12:04:25 PM It’s extremely difficult to front-run in our modern markets. Every would-be explanation of front-running relies on some imagined method for divining the mere existence of a customer order, and Lewis doesn’t even try to explain how somebody figures out the number of shares in the order – the one piece of information that is actually needed to make the scam plausible. Even with that information, the economics would be entirely skewed against the front-runner due to the markets’ rules on the price and prioritization of trades. Lastly, today’s markets are made up of a huge, diverse set of participants. It’s absurd to think that a predictable front-running scheme wouldn’t either be easily avoided, or be a target itself. Any front-running scam would have to overcome each and every one of these obstacles to succeed – and then, it would have to evade a massive surveillance system built to track every piece of trading data available. ========== Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading (Peter Kovac) - Your Highlight on page 83 | Location 1266-1267 | Added on Monday, August 8, 2016 3:32:45 PM The real numbers make high-frequency traders look like, well, an entire industry that, when combined, makes only slightly more than Chipotle Mexican Grill. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 317 | Location 4852-4853 | Added on Monday, August 15, 2016 3:53:07 PM In Darwin’s view, the whole point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non - miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 317 | Location 4856-4857 | Added on Monday, August 15, 2016 3:53:41 PM If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. ========== Diaspora (Greg Egan) - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 16-17 | Added on Saturday, August 27, 2016 10:40:24 AM it required a profound myopia of scale and similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 341 | Location 5223-5225 | Added on Saturday, August 27, 2016 11:04:33 AM The genetic code is universal. I regard this as near-conclusive proof that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor. The odds of the same dictionary of arbitrary ‘meanings’ arising twice are almost unimaginably small. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 360 | Location 5520-5521 | Added on Wednesday, August 31, 2016 8:33:17 AM Darwinian explanation, of course, involves chance too, in the form of mutation. But the chance is filtered cumulatively by selection, step by step, over many generations. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 362 | Location 5538-5540 | Added on Wednesday, August 31, 2016 8:36:53 AM Enthusiasts of the ‘body-building’ cult make use of the principle of use and disuse to ‘build’ their bodies, almost like a piece of sculpture, into whatever unnatural shape is demanded by fashion in this peculiar minority culture. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 385 | Location 5899-5900 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 4:05:54 PM All three of the kinds of real non-randomness we have considered are powerless to move evolution in the direction of adaptive improvement as opposed to any other (functionally) ‘random’ direction. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 392 | Location 6011-6012 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 4:21:33 PM Now as long as we don’t know all the ins and outs of how embryos develop, there is room for disagreement over how likely it is that particular imagined mutations have or have not ever existed. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 399 | Location 6114-6115 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 5:03:31 PM The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 399 | Location 6115-6117 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 5:06:11 PM If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must already have been vastly complex in the first place. ========== The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) - Your Highlight on page 400 | Location 6125-6125 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 5:07:31 PM The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 504-504 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 10:53:58 PM The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 504-505 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 10:54:14 PM The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 506-507 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 10:54:51 PM Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of “skin in the game.” ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 518-519 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 10:56:33 PM Black Swans (capitalized) are large-scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence—unpredicted by a certain observer, ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 527-527 | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016 10:57:38 PM You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 949-949 | Added on Thursday, September 15, 2016 2:51:53 PM To counter success, you need a high offsetting dose of robustness, even high doses of antifragility. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 976-977 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 6:19:30 AM fiscal deficits have proven to be a prime source of fragility in social and economic systems. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 68 | Location 1041-1042 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 2:55:24 PM We are all, in a way, similarly handicapped, unable to recognize the same idea when it is presented in a different context. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 1046-1047 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 2:56:43 PM This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 71 | Location 1081-1083 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:00:47 PM He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill. Consider that as I am writing these lines, we are living ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 71 | Location 1081-1083 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:01:12 PM He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1091-1091 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:02:10 PM It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1095-1097 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:02:55 PM Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1101-1102 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:03:55 PM I learned that the noise produced by the person is inverse to the pecking order: as with mafia dons, the most powerful traders were the least audible. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 75 | Location 1149 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:16:31 PM Is this not a logical inconsistancy? For we shall always underestimate. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 75 | Location 1148-1149 | Added on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:16:31 PM Well, nature, unlike Fragilista Greenspan, prepares for what has not happened before, assuming worse harm is possible. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 79 | Location 1207-1208 | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2016 10:21:46 AM the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 79 | Location 1209-1210 | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2016 10:25:04 AM Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 81 | Location 1234-1234 | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2016 10:29:47 AM Perhaps Voltaire’s charm was in that he did not know how to save his ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 83 | Location 1264-1265 | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2016 10:37:58 AM With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1416-1417 | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:22:15 PM There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence—perhaps even the first source. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1421-1423 | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:24:05 PM Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire’s “spleen,” Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced.… ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 95 | Location 1455-1456 | Added on Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:37:55 PM Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 102 | Location 1551-1554 | Added on Friday, September 23, 2016 10:12:36 PM If one looks at history as a complex system similar to nature, then, like nature, it won’t let a single empire dominate the planet forever—even if every superpower from the Babylonians to the Egyptians to the Persians to the Romans to modern America has believed in the permanence of its domination and managed to produce historians to theorize to that effect. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1628-1629 | Added on Sunday, September 25, 2016 11:28:38 AM We need to eliminate the second type of error—the one that produces contagion—in our construction of an ideal socioeconomic system. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 108 | Location 1649-1651 | Added on Sunday, September 25, 2016 11:35:34 AM Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 112 | Location 1714-1715 | Added on Monday, September 26, 2016 11:18:07 AM As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans individually irrelevant. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1788-1789 | Added on Tuesday, September 27, 2016 6:24:32 AM Depriving political (and other) systems of volatility harms them, causing eventually greater volatility of the cascading type. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 121 | Location 1851-1852 | Added on Tuesday, September 27, 2016 6:34:28 AM The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan–prone it is. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 126 | Location 1920-1921 | Added on Wednesday, September 28, 2016 9:01:24 AM We are more easily swayed by a crying baby than by thousands of people dying elsewhere that do not make it to our living room through the TV set. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 130 | Location 1989-1989 | Added on Wednesday, September 28, 2016 10:27:16 AM the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 141 | Location 2150-2151 | Added on Thursday, September 29, 2016 10:59:51 AM When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2216-2218 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 9:45:17 PM To summarize, the problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 145 | Location 2220 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 9:48:09 PM What difference is there between a volatile and non volatile system against a Black Swan? ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2220-2220 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 9:48:09 PM These artificially constrained systems become prone to Black Swans. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 146 | Location 2229 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 9:52:53 PM Not really in the limelight currently ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 146 | Location 2227-2229 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 9:52:53 PM Saudi Arabia is the country that at present worries and offends me the most; it is a standard case of top-down stability enforced by a superpower at the expense of every single possible moral and ethical metric—and, of course, at the expense of stability itself. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 147 | Location 2242-2243 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 9:55:08 PM We need to learn to think in second steps, chains of consequences, and side effects. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 149 | Location 2278-2279 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 10:09:47 PM Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 152 | Location 2324-2324 | Added on Sunday, October 2, 2016 10:26:01 PM And the final lesson is that one should not expect laurels for bringing the truth. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2576-2578 | Added on Monday, October 10, 2016 9:15:52 PM And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 169 | Location 2589-2589 | Added on Monday, October 10, 2016 9:21:48 PM The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never at small ones. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 170 | Location 2599-2599 | Added on Monday, October 10, 2016 9:23:22 PM Likewise, by presenting us with explanations and theories, the media induce an illusion of understanding the world. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 174 | Location 2663-2664 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2016 9:46:27 AM As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be unintelligent to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. Yet it is done all too often. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 176 | Location 2687-2689 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2016 9:58:09 AM No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 178 | Location 2715-2716 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2016 10:01:42 AM our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not close to zero; it is zero. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 181 | Location 2772-2773 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2016 10:17:20 AM There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 182 | Location 2785 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2016 10:21:59 AM Best line yet haha. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2784-2785 | Added on Thursday, October 13, 2016 10:21:59 AM Opportunists are now into predicting, predictioning, and predictionizing Black Swans with even more complicated models coming from chaos-complexity-catastrophe-fractal theory. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 191 | Location 2922-2923 | Added on Friday, October 14, 2016 10:17:29 AM it sometimes caused him pain to be alone with his ideas—wondering at times, typically Sunday nights, if there was something particularly wrong with him or if there was something wrong with the world. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 197 | Location 3014-3014 | Added on Tuesday, October 18, 2016 11:03:29 AM Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 199 | Location 3042-3043 | Added on Friday, October 21, 2016 10:07:27 AM The volatility of the world no longer affects you negatively. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 201 | Location 3080-3081 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2016 7:02:36 PM Antifragility implies more to gain than to lose, equals more upside than downside, equals (favorable) asymmetry ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 201 | Location 3081-3082 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2016 7:02:47 PM You are antifragile for a source of volatility if potential gains exceed potential losses (and vice versa). ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 202 | Location 3098-3099 | Added on Monday, October 24, 2016 7:08:15 PM The first step toward antifragility consists in first decreasing downside, rather than increasing upside; that is, by lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting natural antifragility work by itself. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 204 | Location 3118-3119 | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2016 11:13:11 AM if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it “efficient” inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 204 | Location 3120-3122 | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2016 11:13:44 AM As to growth in GDP (gross domestic product), it can be obtained very easily by loading future generations with debt—and the future economy may collapse upon the need to repay such debt. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 205 | Location 3141-3143 | Added on Tuesday, October 25, 2016 11:19:48 AM For antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia—clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black Swans, take care of itself. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 208 | Location 3184-3185 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 1:30:00 PM Best of all, Spinoza worked as a lens maker, which left his philosophy completely immune to any form of academic corruption. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 209 | Location 3195-3196 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 1:33:21 PM This is what Seneca elected to do: he initially had a very active, adventurous life, followed by a philosophical withdrawal to write and meditate, rather than a “middle” combination of both. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 213 | Location 3265-3267 | Added on Friday, October 28, 2016 5:54:14 PM This entire heritage of thinking, grounded in the sentence “An agent does not move except out of intention for an end,” is where the most pervasive human error lies, compounded by two or more centuries of the illusion of unconditional scientific understanding. This error is also the most fragilizing one. ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 528-532 | Added on Tuesday, November 15, 2016 6:56:04 PM ‘Nature’s beauteous form Contains a lovely essence Called by some – decay. By this lovely presence New life finds its way. Tears shed silently Are but water of the soul: They bring new life To the pain of being – A separation from that seeing Which death makes whole. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 243 | Location 3726-3728 | Added on Friday, December 2, 2016 7:41:40 PM The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, for instance, can wreak havoc on the economy yet feel convinced of its effectiveness. People are scared of the alternative. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 245 | Location 3745-3746 | Added on Friday, December 2, 2016 7:45:24 PM It is the only rigorously scientific technique that philosophers of science can use to establish causation, as they can now extract, if not measure, the so-called “Granger cause” by looking at sequences. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 258 | Location 3942-3945 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 6:13:33 PM Persons in the real world can’t afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane. Unlike researchers, they were selected for survival, not complications. So I saw the less is more in action: the more studies, the less obvious elementary but fundamental things become; activity, on the other hand, strips things to their simplest possible model. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 258 | Location 3946-3946 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 7:00:34 PM Of course, so many things are not the same “ting” in life. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 258 | Location 3949-3951 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 7:05:34 PM There is something (here, perception, ideas, theories) and a function of something (here, a price or reality, or something real). The conflation problem is to mistake one for the other, forgetting that there is a “function” and that such function has different properties. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 258 | Location 3956-3957 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 7:08:14 PM He claims to never hire economists and finance people, just physicists and mathematicians, those involved in pattern recognition accessing the internal logic of things, without theorizing. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 259 | Location 3963-3963 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 7:09:18 PM Economics is not a science and should not be there to advise policy. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 259 | Location 3968-3969 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 7:10:18 PM Sometimes, even when an economic theory makes sense, its application cannot be imposed from a model, in a top-down manner, so one needs the organic self-driven trial and error to get us to it. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 266 | Location 4073-4075 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 7:35:55 PM Didn’t he realize that these Chicago pit traders respond to supply and demand, little more, in competing to make a buck, with no need for the Girsanov theorem, any more than a trader of pistachios in the Souk of Damascus needs to solve general equilibrium equations to set the price of his product? ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 267 | Location 4092-4094 | Added on Wednesday, December 7, 2016 7:40:03 PM Traders trade → traders figure out techniques and products → academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them → new traders believe academics → blowups (from theory-induced fragility) ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 274 | Location 4194 | Added on Thursday, December 8, 2016 12:34:14 PM I do remdember reading about I do no recall whos name who wrote a paper on infirmation theory which did revolutionize and advance the creation of the computer ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 274 | Location 4193-4194 | Added on Thursday, December 8, 2016 12:34:14 PM at no point did academic science serve in setting its direction, rather it served as a slave to chance discoveries in an opaque environment, with almost no one but college dropouts and overgrown high school students along the way. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 282 | Location 4311-4312 | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 9:46:02 PM expenditures)—knowledge, or what is called “knowledge,” in complex domains inhibits research. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 283 | Location 4333-4339 | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 9:51:05 PM In the eyes of Algazel, a skeptic fideist (i.e., a skeptic with religious faith), knowledge was not in the hands of humans, but in those of God, while Adam Smith calls it the law of the market and some modern theorist presents it as self-organization. If the reader wonders why fideism is epistemologically equivalent to pure skepticism about human knowledge and embracing the hidden logics of things, just replace God with nature, fate, the Invisible, Opaque, and Inaccessible, and you mostly get the same result. The logic of things stands outside of us (in the hands of God or natural or spontaneous forces); and given that nobody these days is in direct communication with God, even in Texas, there is little difference between God and opacity. Not a single individual has a clue about the general process, and that is central. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 284 | Location 4343-4345 | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 9:52:30 PM since you cannot forecast collaborations and cannot direct them, you cannot see where the world is going. All you can do is create an environment that facilitates these collaborations, and lay the foundation for prosperity. And, no, you cannot centralize innovations, we tried that in Russia. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 284 | Location 4349 | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 9:54:03 PM Is it hipocrasy or indefference. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 284 | Location 4349-4350 | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 9:54:03 PM pro-religion (that is, in favor of others being religious). ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 284 | Location 4349 | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 9:54:35 PM Is it hipocrasy or indefference? ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 284 | Location 4351-4351 | Added on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 9:55:04 PM When I was in business school I rarely attended lectures in something called strategic planning, ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 285 | Location 4358-4359 | Added on Wednesday, December 28, 2016 9:58:33 PM Almost everything theoretical in management, from Taylorism to all productivity stories, upon empirical testing, has been exposed as pseudoscience—and like most economic theories, lives in a world parallel to the evidence. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 287 | Location 4391-4392 | Added on Wednesday, December 28, 2016 10:19:26 PM In the fragile case of negative asymmetries (turkey problems), the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the defects and display the qualities. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 288 | Location 4405-4406 | Added on Wednesday, December 28, 2016 10:23:19 PM so it is better to write about another subject, something less harmful that may interest Harvard students, like how to make a convincing PowerPoint presentation or the difference in managerial cultures between the Japanese and the French. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 289 | Location 4418-4422 | Added on Wednesday, December 28, 2016 10:31:35 PM Let me stop to issue rules based on the chapter so far. (i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs; (iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people, so look for someone capable of changing six or seven times over his career, or more (an idea that is part of the modus operandi of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen); one gets immunity from the backfit narratives of the business plan by investing in people. It is simply more robust to do so; (iv) Make sure you are barbelled, whatever that means in your business. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 294 | Location 4507-4509 | Added on Wednesday, December 28, 2016 10:43:18 PM is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life—with (as we saw in Chapter 5) the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 294 | Location 4507-4509 | Added on Wednesday, December 28, 2016 10:43:29 PM It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life—with (as we saw in Chapter 5) the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 295 | Location 4510-4510 | Added on Wednesday, December 28, 2016 10:43:57 PM Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters—those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives. ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 104 | Location 1587-1590 | Added on Wednesday, January 18, 2017 5:01:05 PM ‘Governments may rise and fall for reasons which appear insignificant, Prince. What small events! An argument between two women … which way the wind blows on a certain day … a sneeze, a cough, the length of a garment or the chance collision of a fleck of sand and a courtier’s eye. It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontifications of priests which move the hands of God.’ ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1673-1674 | Added on Wednesday, January 18, 2017 8:11:56 PM ‘Ignorance has its advantages. A universe of surprises is what I pray for!’ ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 111 | Location 1695-1696 | Added on Wednesday, January 18, 2017 8:14:57 PM She knew this trick well, had employed it many times: set a person up along one line of reasoning, then introduce the shocker from another line. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 295 | Location 4520-4521 | Added on Friday, March 17, 2017 6:52:40 AM Something cured me of the effect of education, and made me very skeptical of the very notion of standardized learning. For I am a pure autodidact, in spite of acquiring degrees. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 299 | Location 4570-4571 | Added on Friday, March 17, 2017 6:59:32 AM Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.) ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 301 | Location 4603-4604 | Added on Friday, March 17, 2017 9:04:50 AM There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 312 | Location 4782-4784 | Added on Saturday, March 18, 2017 1:43:15 AM But Hayek missed the notion of optionality as a substitute for the social planner. In a way, he believed in intelligence, but as a distributed or collective intelligence—not in optionality as a replacement for intelligence. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 315 | Location 4818-4820 | Added on Saturday, March 18, 2017 1:49:41 AM Scientists have something called “confidence level”; a result obtained with a 95 percent confidence level means that there is no more than a 5 percent probability of the result being wrong. The idea of course is inapplicable as it ignores the size of the effects, which of course, makes things worse with extreme events. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 315 | Location 4824 | Added on Saturday, March 18, 2017 1:50:45 AM is payoff quantifiable by expectation? ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 315 | Location 4824-4824 | Added on Saturday, March 18, 2017 1:50:45 AM So, to repeat, the probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 317 | Location 4850-4850 | Added on Saturday, March 18, 2017 1:54:27 AM Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 319 | Location 4892-4893 | Added on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:47:57 AM We practitioners and quants aren’t too fazed by remarks on the part of academics—it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 322 | Location 4930-4931 | Added on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:52:56 AM The realization that fragility was simply vulnerability to the volatility of the things that affect it ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 325 | Location 4976-4977 | Added on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 12:06:58 PM For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 336 | Location 5142-5144 | Added on Thursday, March 23, 2017 8:56:01 PM A fire sale of $70 billion worth of stocks leads to a loss of $6 billion. But a fire sale a tenth of the size, $7 billion would result in no loss at all, as markets would absorb the quantities without panic, maybe without even noticing. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 338 | Location 5173-5174 | Added on Thursday, March 23, 2017 9:33:50 PM It is completely wrong to use the calculus of benefits without including the probability of failure. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 341 | Location 5214-5215 | Added on Thursday, March 23, 2017 9:45:33 PM Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the beastly thing called “efficiency” that makes people now sail too close to the wind. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 341 | Location 5223-5226 | Added on Thursday, March 23, 2017 9:48:09 PM No psychologist who has discussed the “planning fallacy” has realized that, at the core, it is not essentially a psychological problem, not an issue with human errors; it is inherent to the nonlinear structure of the projects. Just as time cannot be negative, a three-month project cannot be completed in zero or negative time. So, on a timeline going left to right, errors add to the right end, not the left end of it. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 343 | Location 5248 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 6:41:25 AM Highly uhnderestimating the benefits. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 343 | Location 5245-5248 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 6:41:25 AM Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild—in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the “flash crash”); in August 2012, as this manuscript was heading to the printer, the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 345 | Location 5282-5284 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 6:47:36 AM To conclude this chapter, fragility in any domain, from a porcelain cup to an organism, to a political system, to the size of a firm, or to delays in airports, resides in the nonlinear. Further, discovery can be seen as an antideficit. Think of the exact opposite of airplane delays or project overruns—something that benefits from uncertainty. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 348 | Location 5325-5327 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 6:51:48 AM After checking similar institutions, and seeing that the problem was general, I realized that a total collapse of the banking system was a certainty. I was so certain I could not see straight and went back to the markets to get my revenge against the turkeys. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 348 | Location 5328-5329 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 6:52:15 AM Things happened as if they were planned by destiny. Fannie Mae went bust, along with other banks. It just took a bit longer than expected, no big deal. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 348 | Location 5332-5333 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 6:53:21 AM It all boils down to the following: figuring out if our miscalculations or misforecasts are on balance more harmful than they are beneficial, and how accelerating the damage is. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 349 | Location 5339-5340 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 7:23:07 AM Most people in the risk business had been frustrated by the poor (rather, the random) performance of their models, but they didn’t like my earlier stance: “don’t use any model.” They wanted something. And a risk measure was there. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 350 | Location 5352-5354 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 7:25:37 AM It looks simple, too simple, so the initial reaction from “experts” was that it was “trivial” (said by people who visibly never detected these risks before—academics and quantitative analysts scorn what they can understand too easily and get ticked off by what they did not think of themselves). ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 350 | Location 5359-5360 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 7:26:51 AM Remarkably—as has been shown—if you can say something straightforward in a complicated manner with complex theorems, even if there is no large gain in rigor from these complicated equations, people take the idea very seriously. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 350 | Location 5361-5362 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 7:27:06 AM The only problem is that mathematics is addictive. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 351 | Location 5382-5383 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 8:54:22 AM Simply do a small change in the assumptions, and look at how large the effect, and if there is acceleration of such effect. Acceleration implies—as with Fannie Mae—that someone relying on the model blows up from Black Swan effects. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 352 | Location 5384-5386 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 8:54:46 AM What I can say for now is that much of what is taught in economics that has an equation, as well as econometrics, should be immediately ditched—which explains why economics is largely a charlatanic profession. Fragilistas, semper fragilisti! ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 353 | Location 5398-5399 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 9:00:01 AM The notion of average is of no significance when one is fragile to variations—the dispersion in possible thermal outcomes here matters much more. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 356 | Location 5457-5459 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 9:11:21 AM Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 357 | Location 5472-5474 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 9:14:14 AM Let me summarize the argument: if you have favorable asymmetries, or positive convexity, options being a special case, then in the long run you will do reasonably well, outperforming the average in the presence of uncertainty. The more uncertainty, the more role for optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform. This property is very central to life. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 361 | Location 5527-5529 | Added on Friday, March 24, 2017 9:26:13 AM I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 362 | Location 5548-5549 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 12:23:23 PM since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 363 | Location 5566-5567 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 12:26:32 PM In political systems, a good mechanism is one that helps remove the bad guy; it’s not about what to do or who to put in. For the bad guy can cause more harm than the collective actions of good ones. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 367 | Location 5613-5615 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 12:35:11 PM The people involved were blind to the paradox that we have never had more data than we have now, yet have less predictability than ever. More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck. When you cross the street, you remove data, anything but the essential threat. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 367 | Location 5620-5622 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 12:36:10 PM And you do not need reams of paper full of data to destroy the megatons of papers using statistics in economics: the simple argument that Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world—and these events cannot be predicted—is sufficient to invalidate their statistics. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 368 | Location 5633-5634 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 12:38:17 PM The French essayist and poet Paul Valéry once asked Einstein if he carried a notebook to write down ideas. “I never have ideas” was the reply (in fact he just did not have chickens***t ideas). ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 371 | Location 5689-5690 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 12:49:08 PM Recall that the most fragile is the predictive, what is built on the basis of predictability—in other words, those who underestimate Black Swans will eventually exit the population. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Note on page 372 | Location 5700 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 9:37:55 PM Or they have not happened yet ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 372 | Location 5699-5700 | Added on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 9:37:55 PM The problem is that almost everything that was imagined never took place, except for a few overexploited anecdotes ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 430 | Location 6582-6584 | Added on Friday, March 31, 2017 5:00:20 PM “The harmful effects of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of every medical intervention developed since the war.… Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer.” ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 460 | Location 7048-7049 | Added on Thursday, April 13, 2017 11:00:39 AM Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 462 | Location 7078-7078 | Added on Thursday, April 13, 2017 11:05:50 AM Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 467 | Location 7154-7156 | Added on Thursday, April 13, 2017 11:17:34 AM Well, Doctor Professor Fragilista Markowitz does not use his method for his own portfolio; he has recourse to more sophisticated (and simpler to implement) cabdrivers’ methodologies, closer to the one Mandelbrot and I have proposed. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 470 | Location 7194-7194 | Added on Thursday, April 13, 2017 11:21:43 AM Only he who has true beliefs will avoid eventually contradicting himself and falling into the errors of postdicting. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 471 | Location 7212-7218 | Added on Friday, April 14, 2017 11:00:36 AM To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course society—here the retirees—has the exact opposite payoff since they finance bankers and chief executives. Retirees get less upside than downside. Society pays for the losses of the bankers, but gets no bonuses from them. If you don’t see this transfer of antifragility as theft, you certainly have a problem. ========== Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Your Highlight on page 496 | Location 7596-7598 | Added on Friday, April 14, 2017 11:35:45 AM Departments need to teach something so students get jobs, even if they are teaching snake oil—this got us trapped in a circular system in which everyone knows that the material is wrong but nobody is free enough or has enough courage to do anything about it. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman, Daniel) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 457-458 | Added on Saturday, April 15, 2017 1:30:01 AM 2. The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman, Daniel) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 835-836 | Added on Tuesday, April 18, 2017 12:09:06 AM Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 140 | Location 2096-2097 | Added on Friday, April 28, 2017 6:27:00 AM a genuine man differs from them in this especially, that he makes love in some way a noble art, and, admiring it, knows all its divine value, makes it present in his mind, thus satisfying not his body merely, but his soul. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 235 | Location 3528-3529 | Added on Thursday, June 1, 2017 1:37:57 PM such thoughts, but he had them. After a time he conceived a liking for ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 305 | Location 4592-4594 | Added on Thursday, June 1, 2017 11:29:32 PM For a while those two men looked at each other. It occurred to no one in that brilliant retinue, and to no one in that immense throng, that at that moment two powers of the earth were looking at each other, one of which would vanish quickly as a bloody dream, and the other, dressed in simple garments, would seize in eternal possession the world and the city. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 328 | Location 4928-4929 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 6:12:48 PM But thy prophet of Tarsus, in applying proofs to me, did not think, seest thou, that for me this uncertainty becomes the charm of life. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 333 | Location 5004-5005 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 6:28:54 PM evil. I know that people declare me mad. But I am not mad, I am only ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 332 | Location 5004-5005 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 6:29:22 PM must surpass the stature of man in good or evil. I know that people declare ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 332 | Location 5004-5006 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 6:29:39 PM I must surpass the stature of man in good or evil. I know that people declare me mad. But I am not mad, I am only seeking. And if I am going mad, it is out of disgust and impatience that I cannot find. I am seeking! Dost understand me? ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 401 | Location 6030-6030 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 11:56:47 PM In the world things are beautiful; but people are so vile for the greater part that life is not worth a regret. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 480 | Location 7219-7219 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 6:47:23 PM head had grown white; on his face was fixed an expression ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 507 | Location 7635-7636 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:18:00 PM That sadness which hung over the souls of both was losing its former burning bitterness, and changing gradually ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 507 | Location 7635-7636 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:18:06 PM That sadness which hung over the souls of both was losing its former burning bitterness, and changing gradually into a kind of trans-terrestrial, calm abandon to the will of God. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 517 | Location 7775-7776 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:45:11 PM Hence he rallied; he crushed doubt in himself, he compressed his whole being into the sentence, “I believe,” and he looked for a miracle. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 527 | Location 7930-7931 | Added on Sunday, June 4, 2017 12:05:11 AM Meanwhile things will happen here to make people forget thee, and in these times the forgotten are the happiest. May Fortune be thy sun in winter, and thy shade in summer.” ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 544 | Location 8191-8193 | Added on Sunday, June 4, 2017 1:47:34 PM People thus far did not know a God whom man could love, hence they did not love one another; and from that came their misfortune, for as light comes from the sun, so does happiness come from love. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 547 | Location 8234-8235 | Added on Sunday, June 4, 2017 1:54:48 PM Prometheus also sacrificed himself for man; but, alas! Prometheus is an invention of the poets apparently, while people worthy of credit have told me that they saw Christ with their own ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 547 | Location 8234-8235 | Added on Sunday, June 4, 2017 1:54:53 PM Prometheus also sacrificed himself for man; but, alas! Prometheus is an invention of the poets apparently, while people worthy of credit have told me that they saw Christ with their own eyes. I agree with thee that He is the most worthy of the gods. ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 548 | Location 8251-8253 | Added on Sunday, June 4, 2017 1:57:49 PM Paul of Tarsus told me that for Christ’s sake one must give up wreaths of roses, feasts, and luxury. It is true that he promised me other happiness, but I answered that I was too old for new happiness, that my eyes would be delighted always with roses, and that the odor of violets ========== Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (Henryk Sienkiewicz) - Your Highlight on page 549 | Location 8257-8258 | Added on Sunday, June 4, 2017 1:58:33 PM No God has promised me immortality; hence no surprise meets me. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1114-1116 | Added on Monday, June 5, 2017 11:34:30 PM If you only wait for the ones you really like, you’ll choke and walk away pissed off at yourself for not being ready and blowing a good opportunity simply because you were not prepared.“ ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1117-1120 | Added on Monday, June 5, 2017 11:34:59 PM One suggestion I would like to make is go to the mall and banter with women you don’t have any interest in at all. Joke and tease with them to develop your skills. What happens is when you start talking, teasing, joking and being humorous with a lot of different women, is that you get in the habit of doing it. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 74 | Location 1131-1132 | Added on Monday, June 5, 2017 11:36:24 PM Women who are single, friendly, available and who like you will look you in the eye and smile. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 75 | Location 1145-1149 | Added on Monday, June 5, 2017 11:38:04 PM Sometimes I will be out and a woman I’m interested in will look over. I will sometimes stick my tongue out at her. It usually catches her off guard. She may stick her tongue back out at me. This tells me she is willing to be playful, and that she is interested. Other times, I might motion with my finger for her to come over. She will often motion back for me to come to her. I won’t do it. I will simply shake my head and motion her back to me. I am letting her know that she has to come to me. If she doesn’t, I will just shrug and ignore her. Nine times out of ten, before five minutes have passed, she has joined me. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 76 | Location 1163-1164 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:26:08 AM If she is beautiful, then she has been told just that since she was five years old. She doesn’t need you telling her. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 78 | Location 1189-1190 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:35:38 AM When a guy has found a woman he is prepared to talk to, the first thought in his mind should be: My goal here is to make her smile. That’s ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 78 | Location 1189-1190 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:35:44 AM When a guy has found a woman he is prepared to talk to, the first thought in his mind should be: My goal here is to make her smile. That’s it ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 82 | Location 1243-1243 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:42:21 AM Keep your conversations positive and steer it away from negativity. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1278-1279 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:43:46 AM The quickest way to get someone to like you is to ask them questions about themselves or their opinions and be a good listener. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1281-1281 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:44:17 AM You should be asking her where she grew up and what she likes to do for fun. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1281-1283 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:44:28 AM You should be asking her where she grew up and what she likes to do for fun. Here are some good questions to ask that create attraction on dates: Google “Corey Wayne Pickup & Date Questions That Build Attraction.” Find out who she is and what is important to her. You need to keep the conversation light. ========== Candide (Voltaire) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1437-1438 | Added on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 12:09:10 AM Those who were sincere have owned to me that the poem made them fall asleep; yet it was necessary to have it in their library as a monument ========== Candide (Voltaire) - Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1755-1756 | Added on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 12:40:01 AM “Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.” ========== What is Mathematics - Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins - Your Bookmark on page 44 | Added on Thursday, June 22, 2017 11:01:08 PM ========== Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 403-406 | Added on Friday, June 23, 2017 12:04:01 AM The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, ========== Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) - Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 541-541 | Added on Friday, June 23, 2017 12:31:06 AM And no one is such a liar as the indignant man. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 98-99 | Added on Monday, June 26, 2017 10:13:26 AM Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself to be carried, even with a slight tendency, towards the attainment of lesser things. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 163-163 | Added on Monday, June 26, 2017 10:21:31 AM Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 209-210 | Added on Monday, June 26, 2017 10:25:10 AM Whoever, then, would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others else he must necessarily be a slave. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 231-233 | Added on Monday, June 26, 2017 10:27:00 AM Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a kind as the author pleases to make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one. If it is his pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 339-342 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 6:49:20 AM When you have evaluated all this, if your inclination still holds, then go to war. Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play like wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy when they have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, at another a gladiator, now a philosopher, then an orator; but with your whole soul, nothing at all. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 353-354 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 6:51:27 AM You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 402-403 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:10:15 PM Immediately prescribe some character and form of conduct to yourself, which you may keep both alone and in company. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 404-406 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:10:34 PM and in few words. We may, however, enter, though sparingly, into discourse sometimes when occasion calls for it, but not on any of the common subjects, of gladiators, or horse races, or athletic champions, or feasts, the vulgar topics of conversation; but principally not of men, so as either to blame, or praise, or make comparisons. If you ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 403-404 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:10:39 PM Be for the most part silent, or speak merely what is necessary, and in few words. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-444 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:24 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and set before you, in opposition to these, how you will be glad and applaud yourself if you abstain. And even though it should appear to you a seasonable gratification, take heed that its enticing, and agreeable and attractive force may not subdue you; but set in opposition to this how much better it is to be conscious of having gained so great a victory. ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:28 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-450 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:33 PM If you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and set before you, in opposition to these, how you will be glad and applaud yourself if you abstain. And even though it should appear to you a seasonable gratification, take heed that its enticing, and agreeable and attractive force may not subdue you; but set in opposition to this how much better it is to be conscious of having gained so great a victory. XXXV When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shun the being seen to do it, even though the world should make a wrong supposition about it; for, if you don’t act right, shun the action itself; but, if you do, why are you afraid of those who censure you wrongly? ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-444 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:40 PM If you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and set before you, in opposition to these, how you will be glad and applaud yourself if you abstain. And even though it should appear to you a seasonable gratification, take heed that its enticing, and agreeable and attractive force may not subdue you; but set in opposition to this how much better it is to be conscious of having gained so great a victory. ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1787-1796 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:42:38 AM Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-450 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:33 PM If you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and set before you, in opposition to these, how you will be glad and applaud yourself if you abstain. And even though it should appear to you a seasonable gratification, take heed that its enticing, and agreeable and attractive force may not subdue you; but set in opposition to this how much better it is to be conscious of having gained so great a victory. XXXV When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shun the being seen to do it, even though the world should make a wrong supposition about it; for, if you don’t act right, shun the action itself; but, if you do, why are you afraid of those who censure you wrongly? ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1787-1796 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:42:42 AM Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-450 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:33 PM If you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and set before you, in opposition to these, how you will be glad and applaud yourself if you abstain. And even though it should appear to you a seasonable gratification, take heed that its enticing, and agreeable and attractive force may not subdue you; but set in opposition to this how much better it is to be conscious of having gained so great a victory. XXXV When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shun the being seen to do it, even though the world should make a wrong supposition about it; for, if you don’t act right, shun the action itself; but, if you do, why are you afraid of those who censure you wrongly? ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1785-1789 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:42:50 AM The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:28 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1785-1789 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:42:56 AM The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:28 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1785-1789 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:43:12 AM The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:28 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1785-1789 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:43:16 AM The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:28 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1785-1789 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:43:23 AM The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:28 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== My Clippings - Your Highlight on Location 1785-1789 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:43:25 AM The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 10:29:28 PM you are struck by the appearance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being hurried away by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay. Then bring to your mind both points of time: that in which you will enjoy the pleasure, and that in which you will repent and reproach yourself after you have enjoyed it; and ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 497-498 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:46:59 AM Setting out, then, from these principles, you will meekly bear a person who reviles you, for you will say upon every occasion, “It seemed so to him.” ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 569-569 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:54:28 AM you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What ========== The Enchiridion (Epictetus) - Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 569-573 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 12:54:42 AM What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself? You are no longer a boy, but a grown man. If, therefore, you will be negligent and slothful, and always add procrastination to procrastination, purpose to purpose, and fix day after day in which you will attend to yourself, you will insensibly continue without proficiency, and, living and dying, persevere in being one of the vulgar. ========== What is Mathematics - Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins - Your Bookmark on page 152 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 9:20:16 PM ========== What is Mathematics - Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins - Your Bookmark on page 260 | Added on Saturday, July 8, 2017 9:34:58 PM ========== Mastering Bitcoin - Andreas M. Antopopoulos - Your Highlight on page 48-48 | Added on Saturday, July 29, 2017 12:21:43 AM 57b28365adaff61aaf60462e917a7cc9931904258127685c18f136eeaebd5d35", "8c0cc19fff6b66980f90af39bee20294bc745baf32cd83199aa83a1f0cd6ca51 ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 164 | Location 2513-2513 | Added on Thursday, September 7, 2017 3:57:13 PM Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind! ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 173 | Location 2650-2652 | Added on Friday, September 8, 2017 6:46:35 AM Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 212 | Location 3244-3245 | Added on Monday, September 11, 2017 10:41:21 AM Why do I feel a sense of loss? he wondered. What am I losing? The answer was obvious: he was losing his carefree days, time for those pursuits of the mind which so attracted him. ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 303 | Location 4638-4638 | Added on Tuesday, September 12, 2017 7:20:35 PM ‘The malady of indifference is what destroys many things,’ ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 356 | Location 5455-5456 | Added on Tuesday, September 19, 2017 10:51:26 AM Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness – they cannot work and their civilization collapses. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1407-1408 | Added on Wednesday, September 20, 2017 10:37:56 AM You have to get to the point where no matter what a woman does, it doesn’t move you off center. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 106 | Location 1611-1612 | Added on Wednesday, September 20, 2017 2:49:51 PM The best way I have found to meet women is at weddings, art shows, seminars, private parties, social events, malls, grocery stores, trade shows or even at work. ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 403 | Location 6175-6176 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 10:39:57 AM ‘Thousands of peaceful years,’ Leto said. ‘That’s what I’ll give them.’ ‘Dormancy! Stagnation!’ ========== Children Of Dune (Frank Herbert) - Your Highlight on page 430 | Location 6583-6583 | Added on Saturday, September 30, 2017 12:54:25 AM intimation of this metamorphosis when Leto had found Halleck ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 66-68 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 3:24:40 PM (Such people are the most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.) ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 70-71 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 3:26:32 PM I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 88-89 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 3:28:02 PM goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 88-89 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 3:28:09 PM Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 141-141 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 3:47:23 PM Our real innermost concern was to get as much money and praise as possible. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 167-168 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 4:01:34 PM Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother’s death. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 167-169 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 4:01:53 PM Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother’s death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 202-202 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 4:07:17 PM one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one’s family. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 214-215 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 4:08:57 PM I understood that it was no casual indisposition but something very important, and that if these questions constantly repeated themselves they would have to be answered. And I tried to answer them. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 236-237 | Added on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 10:52:42 AM could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 236-239 | Added on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 10:52:57 AM I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death—complete annihilation. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 267-268 | Added on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 10:56:48 AM One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 454-455 | Added on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 6:21:40 PM “The wise man seeks death all his life and therefore death is not terrible to him.” ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 467-471 | Added on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 6:28:16 PM “Vanity of vanities,” says Solomon—“vanity of vanities—all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation commeth: but the earth abideth forever. … The thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, ‘See, this is new?’ It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Note on page 31 | Location 471 | Added on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 6:30:51 PM Evangelion, Youi states the eva's purpose is to serve as proof of man's existence after humanity is long gone. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 490-491 | Added on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 6:33:17 PM For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool forever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 559-561 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:39:15 AM that the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave. The dullness of these people’s imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace—the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 583-585 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:44:35 AM The fourth way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer—knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books. This was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 624-627 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:39:43 AM Whether it was in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did not know—I only felt that the conclusion was rationally convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 668-670 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:47:54 AM A contradiction arose from which there were two exits. Either that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I supposed. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 694-698 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:51:10 AM Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question, and that the reply given by rational knowledge is a mere indication that a reply can only be obtained by a different statement of the question and only when the relation of the finite to the infinite is included in the question. And I understood that, however irrational and distorted might be the replies given by faith, they have this advantage, that they introduce into every answer a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 714-715 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:56:38 AM faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 763-764 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:03:00 AM But though I made all possible concessions, and avoided all disputes, I could not accept the faith of these people. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 767-769 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:06:04 AM The more fully they explained to me their doctrines, the more clearly did I perceive their error and realized that my hope of finding in their belief an explanation of the meaning of life was vain. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 772-774 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:07:22 AM I clearly felt that they deceived themselves and that they, like myself found no other meaning in life than to live while life lasts, taking all one’s hands can seize. I saw this because if they had had a meaning which destroyed the fear of loss, suffering, and death, they would not have feared these things. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 798-800 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:15:40 AM In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 800-802 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:15:56 AM In contradistinction to the way in which people of our circle oppose fate and complain of it on account of deprivations and sufferings, these people accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 833-833 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:25:02 AM perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is necessary first ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 833-834 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:25:08 AM perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is necessary first that life should not be meaningless and evil, then we ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 833-834 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:25:12 AM perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is necessary first that life should not be meaningless and evil, then ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 833-834 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:25:25 AM I perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is necessary first that life should not be meaningless and evil, then we can apply reason to explain ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 833-834 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 11:25:36 AM I perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is necessary first that life should not be meaningless and evil, then we can apply reason to explain it. ========== A Confession (Leo Tolstoy) - Your Highlight on page 58 | Location 888-891 | Added on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 3:56:00 PM I became terrified and began to pray to Him whom I sought, that He should help me. But the more I prayed the more apparent it became to me that He did not hear me, and that there was no one to whom to address myself. And with despair in my heart that there is no God at all, I said: “Lord, have mercy, save me! Lord, teach me!” But no one had mercy on me, and I felt that my life was coming to a standstill. ========== Tao Te Ching (Laozi) - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 30-33 | Added on Thursday, October 5, 2017 11:47:35 AM Always without desire we must be found, If its deep mystery we would sound; But if desire always within us be, Its outer fringe is all that we shall see. ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2735-2736 | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017 12:14:14 AM “For all that let me tell thee, brother Panza,” said Don Quixote, “that there is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.” ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 278 | Location 4260-4261 | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2017 10:56:10 AM for it is still some comfort in misfortune to find one who can feel for it. And if my good intentions deserve to be acknowledged ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 278 | Location 4260-4261 | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2017 10:56:15 AM for it is still some comfort in misfortune to find one who can feel for it. ========== How To Be A 3% Man, Winning The Heart Of The Woman Of Your Dreams (Wayne, Corey) - Your Highlight on page 146 | Location 2238-2238 | Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 4:55:52 PM Remember, it’s a scientific fact that women are more attracted to men whose feelings are unclear. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 106-107 | Added on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 11:12:01 PM “There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on a sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.” ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 107-108 | Added on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 11:13:08 PM What is the purpose behind the search for scientific laws, in any field? Clearly, it’s divination—foretelling the future, and controlling ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 107-108 | Added on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 11:13:14 PM What is the purpose behind the search for scientific laws, in any field? Clearly, it’s divination—foretelling the future, and controlling it. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 117-118 | Added on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 11:15:02 PM The subject is an interdisciplinary mix of physics-inspired models, mathematical techniques, and computer science, all aimed at the valuation of financial securities. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 118-121 | Added on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 11:15:30 PM The best quantitative finance brings real insight into the relation between value and uncertainty, and it approaches the quality of real science; the worst is a pseudoscientific hodgepodge of complex mathematics used with obscure justification. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Note on page 3 | Location 120 | Added on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 11:16:10 PM Beautifully said. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 269-270 | Added on Wednesday, January 3, 2018 11:03:56 PM Market crashes are not randomly occurring lightning bolts; they are the consequence of the madness of crowds who are busy avoiding the last mania as they participate in what will turn out to be the current one. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 358-363 | Added on Wednesday, January 3, 2018 11:21:27 PM The universe does indeed seem to run like some splendid Swiss clockwork: We can predict the orbits of planets and the frequency of light emitted by atoms to eight or ten decimal places. But when a physicist first pages through a graduate economics or finance textbook, he or she begins to feel aghast. The mathematics of economics is so much more formal than the mathematics of physics textbooks—much of it reads like Euclid or set theory, replete with axioms, theorems, and lemmas. You would think that all this formality would produce precision. And yet, compared with physics, economics has so little explanatory or predictive power. Everything looks suspect; questions abound. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 363-371 | Added on Wednesday, January 3, 2018 11:23:45 PM When physicists pursue the laws of the universe, it seems selfless. But watching quants pursue sacred laws for the profane production of profit, I sometimes find myself thinking disturbingly of worshippers at a black mass. What does it signify to use the methods of physics and the language of mathematics to model the economic world? Is it justifiable to treat the economy and its markets as a complex machine? How can traders put their faith in this stuff? Isn’t value determined by people? And how can people be described by equations and predetermined rules? Isn’t this endeavor the misguided consequence of some sort of physics envy, an inappropriate attempt to model messy human systems with the wrong paradigm? Is social science, as the economic historian Robert Skidelsky once observed, merely a compendium of flawed thinking disguised as scientific understanding? If mathematics is the Queen of Sciences, is quantitative finance a science at all? And finally, are quants scientists or cranks? ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 540-542 | Added on Wednesday, January 3, 2018 11:45:15 PM I knew how few were the hours in the day one actually works seriously and undistractedly, and was momentarily tempted to start my own time sheet. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 1041-1044 | Added on Friday, January 12, 2018 12:43:32 AM When trying to discover something new in any field, one has to spend many years thinking, making false starts, wandering down blind alleys and stumbling into ditches, only to emerge again and keep going. For this, a PhD is a good, if painful, training. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 1101-1101 | Added on Friday, January 12, 2018 12:49:42 AM I had imagined postdoctoral life as a sort of priesthood, the blissful apotheosis of a life dedicated to knowledge. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 1269-1271 | Added on Sunday, January 14, 2018 11:28:02 PM I was beginning to become very aware of my limitations. There were people you met in physics who were simply off any scale you could imagine. When I read classic papers by Einstein or Feynman, I realized that though I could understand and utilize their framework, I could never have created it. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 1273-1275 | Added on Sunday, January 14, 2018 11:28:40 PM I have a friend who liked to point out the obviousness of various great discoveries in physics and finance. The obviousness is a delusion. Many things seem clear only once they have been taught to you in a historical context, with all the prejudices, confusion, and competing theories omitted. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 1275-1276 | Added on Sunday, January 14, 2018 11:28:50 PM Every iota of discovery, in finance or theoretical physics, comes at the cost of long immersion, hard labor, and struggle. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 1281-1284 | Added on Sunday, January 14, 2018 11:29:46 PM Ever since, through ups and downs, I have tried to remember that no matter how low you get, about work or life, you can take some solace from the fact that the future is unpredictable. Even in the midst of misery, unexpectedly good things can happen without warning. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 1378-1380 | Added on Sunday, January 14, 2018 11:40:38 PM Once, when he was having a hard time with a woman, he became much more communicative and commented to me, sadly but accurately, that he was one of those people who became much nicer when they had troubles. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1810-1812 | Added on Tuesday, January 16, 2018 12:04:41 AM Everything is interesting when you examine it closely enough to be able to reconcile its quality and its quantity; every field is fascinating when you have sufficient familiarity with its nuances and begin to try to bridge the gap between its form and its implementation. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 2134-2135 | Added on Sunday, January 21, 2018 11:52:51 PM But building a riskless money machine, especially on a large scale, is not that easy. There are not that many riskless profits to be harvested in the world. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 123 | Location 2399-2400 | Added on Monday, January 22, 2018 12:20:27 AM All of Stan’s hires came from a culture in which you did your own dirty work—you developed your own theory, did your own mathematics, and then wrote your own programs. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 135 | Location 2603-2607 | Added on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 12:05:10 AM Ravi instructed me to learn options theory, rewrite the model in C, and construct a friendlier front end. It was a perfect assignment since it immediately exposed me to theory, implementation, and interaction with the business. I spent the next few days making a rapid first pass through the theory of stock options as described in the original Cox-Ross-Rubinstein binomial paper. Then, I studied the FORTRAN version of Ravi’s bond option model and set about rewriting it in C on FSG’s VAX computer. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Note on page 135 | Location 2606 | Added on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 12:05:21 AM Sounds beautifull ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 136 | Location 2633-2634 | Added on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 12:08:33 AM Despite the genuine glories of quantitative modeling, quant groups often have the most dramatic effect by improving the ergonomics of trading and ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 136 | Location 2633-2635 | Added on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 12:08:40 AM Despite the genuine glories of quantitative modeling, quant groups often have the most dramatic effect by improving the ergonomics of trading and sales. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 167 | Location 3174-3176 | Added on Thursday, January 25, 2018 12:22:07 AM A very direct man, he was uncomfortable with small talk. When he had nothing to say, he said nothing; this could be disconcerting on the telephone, where he often simply kept silent for a minute or two without terminating the conversation. Sometimes, ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 3664-3666 | Added on Wednesday, January 31, 2018 11:34:10 PM “Whenever I see something complex and confusing in the investment area,” he retorted, “I see the scope for getting a little extra benefit out of being smart.” ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 250 | Location 4675-4677 | Added on Monday, February 5, 2018 11:45:32 PM The more I look at the conflict between markets and theories, the more that limitations of models in the financial and human world become apparent to me. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 255 | Location 4774-4774 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 7:39:18 AM Like insurance companies, trading desks at investment banks make money by taking calculated risks for a fee. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 256 | Location 4782-4783 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 7:41:03 AM Invented in 1994 by the J. P. Morgan bank, VaR is an unsatisfactory risk metric that has somehow become an industry standard. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 256 | Location 4791-4793 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 7:42:39 AM The aim was to take the appropriate amount of risk for the economic environment, not to eliminate it. No risk, no return. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 257 | Location 4813-4814 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 7:44:52 AM So much of financial modeling is an exercise of the imagination. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 261 | Location 4876-4879 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:03:49 AM I believe that you can summarize the essence of quantitative finance on one leg, too: “If you want to know the value of a security, use the price of another security that’s as similar to it as possible. All the rest is modeling. Go and build.” ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 261 | Location 4879-4880 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:04:12 AM Financial economists grandiosely refer to this law as the law of one price, which states that securities with identical future payouts, no matter how the future turns out, should have identical current prices. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 264 | Location 4941-4950 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:20:33 AM The snows of yesteryear inevitably melt, and there’s nothing sad about it. I was ready for something new. Chapter 16 The Great Pretender Full circle, back to Columbia Physics and finance redux Different endeavors require different degrees of precision Financial models as gedanken experiments A year later, in the fall of 2003, I had come full circle, time present and time past present in time future. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 264 | Location 4941-4941 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:20:40 AM The snows of yesteryear inevitably melt, and there’s nothing sad about it. I was ready for something new. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 265 | Location 4955-4958 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:22:33 AM The tools they used—differential calculus, partial differential equations, Fourier series, Monte Carlo simulations, even Hilbert spaces—at first seemed as appropriate for describing the movements of stocks and yield curves as they did for particles and fields. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 266 | Location 4962-4963 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:23:17 AM Seventeen years on, I say without regret that things aren’t the way I expected. There is no unified theory. Models must necessarily be pragmatic, and traders typically use a variety of similar but slightly inconsistent models— ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 266 | Location 4965-4966 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:23:40 AM The best quants know that it is unattainable. Newcomers to the field find it hard to swallow. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 266 | Location 4970-4972 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:24:18 AM It isn’t really possible. And it’s not a question of computational power—even infinitely fast computers won’t do the trick. The problem is deeper. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 266 | Location 4972-4973 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:24:32 AM The techniques of physics hardly ever produce more than the most approximate truth in finance, because “true” financial value is itself a suspect notion. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 266 | Location 4977-4983 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:25:37 AM As a result, physicists turned quants don’t expect too much from their theories, though many economists naively do. Perhaps this is because physicists, raised on theories capable of superb divination, know the difference between a fundamental theory and a phenomenological toy, useful though the latter may be. Trained economists have never seen a really first-class model. It’s not that physics is “better,” but rather that finance is harder. In physics you’re playing against God, and He doesn’t change his laws very often. When you’ve checkmated Him, He’ll concede. In finance, you’re playing against God’s creatures, agents who value assets based on their ephemeral opinions. They don’t know when they’ve lost, so they keep trying. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 268 | Location 5015-5017 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:34:58 AM In the end, a theory is accepted not because it is confirmed by conventional empirical tests, but because researchers persuade one another that the theory is correct and relevant. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 269 | Location 5027-5031 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:36:34 AM Models are better regarded as a collection of parallel thought universes you can explore. Each universe should be consistent, but the actual financial and human world, unlike the world of matter, is going to be infinitely more complex than any model we make of it. We are always trying to shoehorn the real world into one of the models to see how useful an approximation it is. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 269 | Location 5040-5053 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:38:30 AM A little hubris is good. But then, when you’re done modeling, you must remind yourself that you’re theorizing about I’s, and that, though God’s world can be divined by principles, humanity prefers to remain mysterious. Catastrophes strike when people allow theories to take on a life of their own and hubris evolves into idolatry. Somewhere between these two extremes, a little north of common sense but still south of idolatry, lies the wise use of conceptual models. It takes judgment to draw the line. Meanwhile, fundamental physics and its visions of ten-dimensional strings seem to get steadily more arcane, and quantitative finance becomes progressively more refined and detailed. Being a scientist can sometimes be depressing. Surrounded by younger versions of yourself, you are constantly confronted by the mismatch between the dreams of youth and the facts of maturity. I once read J.P.S. Uberoi’s biography of Goethe,1 one of the last people to make contributions to both art and science. Goethe’s Theory of Colours is a unified examination of the interior and exterior characteristics of light and color, conducted with an awareness of the observer himself. According to Uberoi, scientists tend to regard Goethe as a poet who strayed beyond his proper place. His critics said he mistakenly thought of Nature as a work of art, being qualitative and personal where he should have been quantitative and impersonal. But Goethe was not so naive as to think that Nature is a work of art, wrote Uberoi. Rather, ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 269 | Location 5040-5042 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:38:42 AM A little hubris is good. But then, when you’re done modeling, you must remind yourself that you’re theorizing about I’s, and that, though God’s world can be divined by principles, humanity prefers to remain mysterious. ========== My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (Derman, Emanuel) - Your Highlight on page 270 | Location 5046-5048 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 8:39:15 AM Being a scientist can sometimes be depressing. Surrounded by younger versions of yourself, you are constantly confronted by the mismatch between the dreams of youth and the facts of maturity. ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 607 | Location 9306-9307 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 4:06:56 PM lukewarm water, and anoints him all over with sweet-smelling ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 608 | Location 9322-9324 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 4:10:50 PM for by my faith, señor, the poor man is incapacitated from showing the virtue of generosity to anyone, though he may possess it in the highest degree; and gratitude that consists of disposition only is a dead thing, just as faith without works is dead. ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 614 | Location 9400-9401 | Added on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 4:24:28 PM Her father watched over her and she watched over herself; for there are no locks, or guards, or bolts that can protect a young girl better than her own modesty. ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 646 | Location 9896-9896 | Added on Friday, February 9, 2018 12:28:23 PM him, and ascertain for himself the truth of the matter. Yielding ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 674 | Location 10327-10328 | Added on Tuesday, February 13, 2018 7:33:12 AM I will take it as a great favour; and if he does not give it to me, I was born like everyone else, and a man must not live in dependence on anyone except God; ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 683 | Location 10459-10461 | Added on Tuesday, February 13, 2018 7:47:54 AM being now a thing of the past, has no existence; while the only thing that has any existence is what we see before us; and if this person whom fortune has raised from his original ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 683 | Location 10459-10460 | Added on Tuesday, February 13, 2018 7:48:01 AM being now a thing of the past, has no existence; while the only thing that has any existence is what we see before ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 683 | Location 10459-10460 | Added on Tuesday, February 13, 2018 7:48:07 AM being now a thing of the past, has no existence; while the only thing that has any existence is what we see before us; ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 690 | Location 10566-10567 | Added on Tuesday, February 13, 2018 8:00:16 AM know that the path of virtue is very narrow, and the road of vice broad and spacious; I know their ends and goals are ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 690 | Location 10566-10568 | Added on Tuesday, February 13, 2018 8:00:24 AM I know that the path of virtue is very narrow, and the road of vice broad and spacious; I know their ends and goals are different, for the broad and easy road of vice ends in death, and the narrow and toilsome one of virtue in life, and not transitory life, but in that which has no end; ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 704 | Location 10792-10795 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 8:15:01 AM though we Catholic Christians and knights-errant look more to that future glory that is everlasting in the ethereal regions of heaven than to the vanity of the fame that is to be acquired in this present transitory life; a fame that, however long it may last, must after all end with the world itself, which has its own appointed end. ========== Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) - Your Highlight on page 722 | Location 11057-11058 | Added on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 7:59:52 AM The fact is I was born to be an example of misfortune, and the target and mark at which the arrows of adversity are aimed and directed. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on Location 118-119 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 8:39:45 AM Making politically unpopular decisions for the long-run benefit of the country is the reason the Fed exists as a politically independent central bank. It was created for precisely this purpose: to do what must be done—what others cannot or will not do. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 170-171 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 8:48:37 AM writing to members of Congress pleading for help for her dilapidated ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 587-590 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 10:40:18 AM The first was the length of time the country stuck with the gold standard. (Countries that abandoned gold earlier were able to allow their money supplies to grow and thereby escape deflation.) That finding was in keeping with Friedman and Schwartz’s emphasis on the money supply. The second factor was the severity of the country’s banking crisis, consistent with my view of the importance of credit as well as money. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 604-606 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 10:45:09 AM First, in periods of recession, deflation, or both, monetary policy should be forcefully deployed to restore full employment and normal levels of inflation. Second, policymakers must act decisively to preserve financial stability and normal flows of credit. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 746-748 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 3:51:58 PM calm a panic, Bagehot advised central banks to lend freely at a high interest rate, against good collateral, a principle now known as Bagehot’s dictum. In a panic, depositors and other providers of short-term funding withdraw out of fear that the institution will fail and they will lose their money. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 746-747 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 3:52:07 PM To calm a panic, Bagehot advised central banks to lend freely at a high interest rate, against good collateral, a principle now known as Bagehot’s dictum. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 750-752 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 3:58:50 PM By lending freely against good collateral during a panic—that is, by serving as a “lender of last resort”—a central bank can replace the withdrawn funding, avoiding the forced sale of assets at fire-sale prices and the collapse of otherwise solvent institutions. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 905-908 | Added on Wednesday, March 14, 2018 9:06:25 AM The accuracy of both central bank and private-sector forecasters has been extensively studied and the results are not impressive. Unfortunately, beyond a quarter or two, the course of the economy is extremely hard to forecast. That said, careful projections are essential for coherent monetary policymaking, just as business plans and war strategies are important in their spheres. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 75 | Location 1185-1186 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 11:58:47 AM Inflation targeting, I argued, could help fill the information vacuum. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 75 | Location 1185-1186 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 12:04:39 PM circumstances. Inflation targeting, I argued, could help fill the information vacuum. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 75 | Location 1185-1186 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 12:04:53 PM Inflation targeting, I argued, could help fill the information vacuum. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 86 | Location 1344-1346 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 12:58:10 PM What if house prices fell precipitously and a lot of homeowners defaulted? No one really knew—but it seemed very, very unlikely. Until, of course, it happened. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 90 | Location 1399-1401 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 1:24:13 PM I had argued in my first speech as a Fed governor that, in most circumstances, monetary policy is not the right tool for tackling asset bubbles. That still seems right to me. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1424-1425 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 1:30:55 PM But monetary policy cannot intentionally foster economic instability to guard against future complacency. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1416-1418 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 1:31:04 PM Many who argue that interest rates should have been raised earlier to control house prices implicitly assume that monetary policy that was too loose caused the housing boom in the first place. But it’s easy to identify factors other than monetary policy that contributed to the boom. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1501-1503 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 1:57:21 PM But, in truth, in the years just before the crisis, neither banks nor their regulators adequately understood the full extent of banks’ exposures to dicey mortgages and other risky credit. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1503-1504 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 1:57:29 PM The experience of the Great Moderation had led both banks and regulators to underestimate the probability of a large economic or financial shock. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 121 | Location 1851-1853 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 9:03:10 AM I would sometimes cite the “law of arithmetic,” meaning that, by definition, the government’s budget deficit equals spending minus revenue. Members of Congress sometimes spoke as if it were possible to increase spending, cut tax revenue, and reduce the deficit all at once—a mathematical impossibility. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 130 | Location 1973-1975 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 9:28:34 AM Although Hank earned hundreds of millions of dollars at Goldman, I admired that he and his wife, Wendy, lived modestly, spending much of their free time bird-watching and pursuing conservationist activities. A Christian Scientist, Hank doesn’t smoke or drink. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Note on page 130 | Location 1975 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 9:28:49 AM No need for luxury ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 135 | Location 2017-2018 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 9:35:08 AM Steve’s and my presentation proved wrong because we did not take into account the possibility that losses on subprime mortgages could ultimately destabilize both the U.S. and global financial systems. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 135 | Location 2021-2023 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 9:36:06 AM Even if subprime mortgages defaulted at extraordinarily high rates, we calculated, the resulting financial losses would be smaller than those from a single bad day in global stock markets. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 136 | Location 2033-2035 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 9:38:41 AM Ample capital accordingly implies that the banking system can withstand significant losses and continue to extend credit to households and businesses. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2070-2072 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 10:15:13 AM But when subprime mortgages began to go bad, wholesale funding providers were forced to consider anew the riskiness of the borrowing firms and the complex and opaquely structured securities that they sometimes offered as collateral. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2082-2085 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 10:44:51 AM Just as the bank runs of the Panic of 1907 amplified losses suffered by a handful of stock speculators into a national credit crisis and recession, the panic in the short-term funding markets that began in August 2007 would ultimately transform a “correction” in the subprime mortgage market into a much greater crisis in the global financial system and global economy. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2214-2215 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 6:48:17 PM The second problem, in addition to stigma, was that the financial system had outgrown the discount window. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 150 | Location 2237-2237 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 6:56:04 PM As predicted, bankers remained nervous about the potential stigma of borrowing from the Fed. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 152 | Location 2268-2270 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 7:06:14 PM The value of the suspect mortgages it held had fallen sharply—if buyers could be found at all. To avoid bankruptcy, Countrywide drew $11.5 billion from previously established emergency lines of credit with major banks—every penny that was available to it. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 152 | Location 2270-2273 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 7:06:54 PM On August 10, I had asked Brian Madigan and Roger Cole, director of our Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation, to evaluate whether Countrywide was systemically important. In other words, would the firm’s failure endanger the entire financial system? “What would its failure do to major banks or investment banks? To the mortgage market?” I had asked. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2768-2771 | Added on Tuesday, March 20, 2018 1:13:23 PM On December 18, the Board proposed a rule prohibiting lenders from making loans without considering borrowers’ ability to repay and requiring lenders to verify borrowers’ incomes and assets. These bits of common sense had been discarded in the frenzy of the housing boom, and in a system in which loan originators could effectively pass any problems on to the unwitting purchasers of mortgage-backed securities. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 190 | Location 2832-2833 | Added on Tuesday, March 20, 2018 1:28:36 PM Pessimists wondered if Bank of America, the nation’s largest bank as measured by deposits, wasn’t buying a parcel of ticking time bombs in the form of future losses. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 205 | Location 3048-3050 | Added on Tuesday, March 20, 2018 4:46:22 PM And importantly, 13(3) loans, as with standard discount window loans, must be “secured to the satisfaction” of the lending Reserve Bank. In other words, the borrower’s collateral had to be sound enough that the Federal Reserve could reasonably expect full repayment. This last requirement protected taxpayers, as any losses on 13(3) loans would reduce the profits the Fed paid each year to the Treasury and thus add to the budget deficit. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 223 | Location 3328-3330 | Added on Thursday, March 22, 2018 9:12:58 AM Wall Street and Main Street are interconnected and interdependent, I explained. “Given the exceptional pressures on the global economy and financial system, the damage caused by a default by Bear Stearns could have been severe and extremely difficult to contain,” ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 232 | Location 3444-3445 | Added on Saturday, March 24, 2018 8:25:44 AM Few doubted that lax accounting rules and regulatory standards had allowed the companies to hold very little capital relative to the potential losses on the mortgages they held or guaranteed. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 237 | Location 3521-3524 | Added on Saturday, March 24, 2018 9:02:23 AM Thus far, we had successfully resolved the potential inconsistency by selling a dollar’s worth of Treasury securities from our portfolio for each dollar of our emergency lending. The sales of Treasuries drained reserves from the banking system, offsetting the increase in reserves created by our lending. This procedure, known as sterilization, allowed us to make loans as needed while keeping short-term interest rates where we wanted them. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 256 | Location 3799-3800 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 12:10:01 AM His reaction to the financial storm was to look for bargains rather than to hunker down. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 261 | Location 3866-3870 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 12:23:42 AM Some of the critics were ideologues (the free market is always right) or uninformed (the economy will be just fine if a few Wall Street firms get their just deserts). Some simply railed against the unfairness of bailing out Wall Street giants but not the little guy on Main Street. Personally, I felt considerable sympathy for this last argument. (I would wince every time I saw a bumper sticker reading “Where’s my bailout?”) But it was in everyone’s interest, whether or not they realized it, to protect the economy from the consequences of a catastrophic failure of the financial system. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 273 | Location 4043-4045 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 8:54:09 AM In exchange for regular payments—insurance premiums, essentially—AIG agreed to make good any losses to those securities exceeding specified amounts. This insurance was offered through derivatives called credit default swaps. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 273 | Location 4051-4053 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 8:57:19 AM From an economic point of view, AIG FP was selling insurance, but it was effectively unregulated and its transactions were not subject to rules that governed conventional insurance. Nor did it take precautions on its own, which left it unprepared for the shock of the crisis. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 281 | Location 4167-4168 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 10:20:48 AM The marketable securities available to AIG were not nearly sufficient to collateralize the size of the loan it needed. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 281 | Location 4174-4175 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 10:21:45 AM In particular, the requirement that AIG cede a substantial part of its ownership was intended to ensure that taxpayers shared in the gains if the company recovered. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 284 | Location 4219-4221 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 11:06:50 AM Barney Frank wanted to know where the Fed was going to get the $85 billion to lend to AIG. I didn’t think this was the time to explain the mechanics of creating bank reserves. I said, “We have $800 billion,” referring to the pre-crisis size of the Fed’s balance sheet. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 286 | Location 4247-4249 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 11:33:39 AM Looking back now, I am only partly consoled by the fact that the government ultimately recouped all that it invested in AIG, and more. The Fed and the Treasury realized a combined gain of nearly $23 billion. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 287 | Location 4262-4266 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 11:39:04 AM Yet the Fed and the Treasury did not choose to let Lehman fail. Lehman was not saved because the methods we used in other rescues weren’t available. We had no buyer for Lehman, as we’d had for Bear Stearns—no stable firm that could guarantee Lehman’s liabilities and assure markets of its ultimate viability. The Treasury had no congressionally approved funds to inject, as they’d had in the case of Fannie and Freddie. Unlike AIG, which had sufficient collateral to back a large loan from the Fed, Lehman had neither a plausible plan to stabilize itself nor sufficient collateral to back a loan of the size needed to prevent its collapse. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 289 | Location 4295-4297 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 11:49:58 AM Would it have been better for market confidence to have admitted that we were unable to save Lehman? Or was it better to maintain ambiguity, as we did, which suggested we still had the capacity to carry out future interventions? I don’t know. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Note on page 290 | Location 4296 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 11:53:44 AM You had congress men and the public against bailouts, so why not speak the truth and tell the public that saving Lehman was going beyond the FEDs ability to make collateralized loans? ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 296 | Location 4388-4391 | Added on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:24:23 PM Not surprisingly, the close connections have led to concerns about undue influence. I understand the concern. On the other hand, it seems unrealistic to expect government agencies to effectively regulate markets or industries if no one in the agency has relevant experience in that market or industry. I can only say that the Goldman alumni with whom I worked brought not only substantial financial expertise to their government duties, as one would expect, but also a strong dedication to the public interest. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 301 | Location 4452-4456 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 5:56:11 PM We needed to stop the bleeding. The Board, the New York Fed, and the Boston Fed had been working on a new facility to provide the money market funds with the cash they needed to pay off their investors. But it was technically and legally complicated. Rather than lending directly to the money funds, we would lend to banks on favorable terms, on the condition that they purchase less liquid asset-backed commercial paper from money funds—a significant share of the assets held by the funds. That would funnel cash to them, without violating legal restrictions on the Fed’s purchasing securities directly from the money funds. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4467-4469 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:16:38 PM We continued to discuss what we should request from Congress. By now, everyone agreed that the crisis had become too big for the Fed and Treasury to handle without money appropriated by Congress. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Note on page 302 | Location 4469 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:17:10 PM Seems like the FED is not almighty as they say ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4474-4476 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:18:37 PM The economic logic of putting public capital into financial institutions aside, Hank had serious reservations. He feared that partial government ownership of banks would look socialistic, or like more bailouts, and thus would prove a political nonstarter. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 303 | Location 4486-4488 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:32:47 PM His idea had its origins in a Treasury staff memo entitled “‘Break the Glass’ Bank Recapitalization Plan.” Quietly circulated in April, the memo discussed several strategies for bank stabilization but focused on buying $500 billion of mortgage-backed securities from financial institutions via auctions. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 303 | Location 4488-4489 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:34:49 PM Professional asset managers would be hired to manage the purchased securities and eventually resell them to private investors, with the goal of getting the best possible return for the taxpayers. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Note on page 303 | Location 4489 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:35:59 PM But buying bad assets would eventually create losses for the government and essentially for the tax payers, wouldn't it? ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 305 | Location 4519-4520 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:51:05 PM Every Thursday afternoon the Fed reports on its balance sheet. Once a boring, under-the-radar release, it had become newsworthy for the information it provided on our lending. This Thursday, the report reflected deepening stress in the financial system. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 306 | Location 4539-4540 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 6:55:25 PM As I spoke, I remember feeling quite calm. The only way forward, I believed, was to be as focused, deliberate, and methodical as possible. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 310 | Location 4596-4598 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 7:19:46 PM This change in legal status would have only one effect of consequence: Goldman would now be supervised by the Fed instead of the SEC. Goldman’s executives believed that they could reduce the risk of a run on their short-term funding simply by announcing that the Fed would oversee their activities. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 312 | Location 4628-4631 | Added on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 7:39:54 PM The problem was gigantic, and the response would have to be proportionate. On the other hand, the $700 billion would not be government spending in the usual sense but rather the acquisition of financial assets. If all went well, the government would eventually sell the assets and recoup most or all of the money. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 314 | Location 4642-4644 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:41:42 AM “Let me start with a question,” I said. “Why are financial markets not working? Financial institutions and others hold billions in complex securities, including many that are mortgage-related. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 315 | Location 4648-4650 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:43:41 AM Asset purchases could help, I continued, if the government paid prices somewhere between the fire-sale and hold-to-maturity prices—that is, prices that were low but nevertheless closer to what sellers could obtain in a properly functioning market. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 317 | Location 4679-4682 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:48:37 AM Developments on Wall Street, remote as they might seem, had the potential to choke off credit to small businesses and entrepreneurs and cripple the economy, I said. But most of the legislators were skeptical. I worried that Congress would act decisively only when the economic damage was apparent, large, and in all likelihood irreversible. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 339 | Location 4994-4995 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 9:08:39 AM But they ultimately concluded that, given the difficulty of establishing fair prices for complex, diverse assets, an effective program might take the Treasury many weeks to set up. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 338 | Location 4979-4982 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 9:08:57 AM The TARP legislation was written broadly enough to permit either strategy or both, and Hank was keeping his options open. But, within a week after the president signed the TARP, Hank had clearly shifted away from asset purchases. Whatever the merits of the strategy in the abstract, it was becoming clear that financial markets and the economy were deteriorating too quickly. There just wasn’t enough time to design and implement an effective asset-purchase program. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Highlight on page 351 | Location 5182-5189 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 10:13:37 AM The principles resonated with the ideas that others brought to the table. In the final statement issued by the G-7, my initial list was shortened to five points. First, the member nations promised to prevent more Lehmans—that is, to prevent more failures of systemically important institutions. (The United States could credibly make this promise after the enactment of TARP.) Second, we pledged to work to unfreeze funding markets (the Fed’s commercial paper facility being an example of such an attempt). Third, we committed to recapitalizing banks to promote the flow of credit. Fourth, we said we would put deposit insurance in place to protect ordinary depositors and maintain confidence in banks. (This point was not on my original list because the United States had long had federal deposit insurance. But it was an issue for Europe, where most countries lacked comprehensive deposit insurance.) And, fifth, we promised to work to restart securitization, so that mortgages and other types of credit could be funded by investors. ========== The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath (Bernanke, Ben S.) - Your Note on page 352 | Location 5189 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 10:14:29 AM Basically what needs to be done in financial panics. ==========