.. . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.
I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same...
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Baruch Spinoza
If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.
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Neal Stephenson
Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.
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Brian Greene
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.
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G.k. Chesterton
This is the team. We're trying to go to the moon. If you can't put someone up, please don't put them down.
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NASA
More Quotes By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things always become obvious after the fact
Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a...
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.
