"What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in onel's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Mathematics See all quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb →

React to this quote

More by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

“Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo ... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory.”

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.”

“Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Every specific semiotics is concerned with general epistemological problems. It has to posit its own theoretical object, according to criteria of pertinence, in order to account for an otherwise disor…"

— Umberto Eco

Literature1932–2016

#philosophy

"Overdrafts on aquifers are one reason some of our geologist colleagues are convinced that water shortages will bring the human population explosion to a halt. There are substitutes for oil; there is n…"

— Paul R. Ehrlich

Literature1932–2026

#philosophy

"I don't want to change my music, but I like to play around with my style of music. I've always been a big fan of guitars. The beats are still quite hard and the riffs are still Basshunter, but I wante…"

— Basshunter

Music1984

#music