Now This Is A Quote Worth Remembering

Though not memorized.

But its content is pretty much easy to remember. Man, I used to hate University and the corporate world for this. Even I'm guilty of this at times and hopefully moving forward I can avoid this on the blog. This comes by way of Nassim Taleb. An interesting feller to say the least. In all honesty, I did not know that what I instinctively felt and experienced was actually a philosophy. Taleb's expertise comes in dealing with randomness and knowledge and author of The Black Swan. Here's a review. I pulled this quote out from Wikipedia:

We love tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (bullshit), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.

Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters – we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial – and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort.

I know we hear a lot of this in sports. All the experts standing before us with ridiculous reinvented terms. Neo-athletic terminology stinks.