The production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool.
The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination, in a tight straitjacket.
I see it from the supply side, the supply of computing power. And this is the miracle story of the microprocessor, where every two and a half years they can make a computer chip that’s twice as fast. If you look at an industry where you have such a rapid increase in supply, usually that’s pretty bad, like when radial tires were invented, people didn’t start driving their cars a lot more, and so it means the need for production capacity went way down, and things got all messed up. The tire industry is still messed up.
A few things have worked out very well for me. And the nice thing about the investment business is that you don’t need very many. You’ll see plenty of times when you get chances to do things that just shout at you. And the thing you have to do is, when that happens, you have to take a big swing. That is no time to be reading a book on the theory of diversification …. When you find something where you know the business is within your circle of competence, you understand it, the price is right, the people are right—then you take your thumb out of your mouth and you barrel in.
It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
To be a disciplined investor you have to be willing to stand by and watch other people make money on things that you passed on.
The capacity for discerning the essential truth, in fact, is as rare among men as it is common among crows, bullfrogs and mackerel. The man who shows it is a man of quite extraordinary quality–perhaps even a man diseased…. All the durable truths that have come into the world within historic times have been opposed as bitterly as if they were so many waves of smallpox, and every individual who has welcomed and advocated them, absolutely without exception, has been denounced and punished as an enemy of the race.
It is perhaps a little humbling to discover that we as humans are in effect computationally no more capable than cellular automata with very simple rules. But the Principle of Computational Equivalence also implies that the same is ultimately true of our whole universe.
So while science has often made it seem that we as humans are somehow insignificant compared to the universe, the Principle of Computational Equivalence now shows that in a certain sense we are at the same level as it is. For the principle implies that what goes on inside us can ultimately achieve just the same level of computational sophistication as our whole universe.