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People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Doesn
Order
Even
Much
People
Impose
Dislike
Uncertainty
Exist

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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.
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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
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All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.
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Donald Trump got almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton! He happened to get more in some of the right places. It was just like one of those things where a stock going up and people impose a false sense of order on it. It's really more intellectually honestly viewed as a disorderly process.
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Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.
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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
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He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
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Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.
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Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
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