Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.

Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside

my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.

The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators

Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.

No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.

Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.

the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.

A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

The only definition of rationality that I've found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one's survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.

Luck is the grand equalizer.