Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The first error lies in taking a projection too seriously, without heeding its accuracy.

On alternative histories, a probabilistic view of the world, intellectual fraud, and the randomness wisdom of a Frenchman with steady bathing habits. How journalists are bred to not understand random series of events.

and I should base my decisions around that.

I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong.

You can easily tell a Northener: he/she feels guilty doing nothing. Even doing nothing for them is programmed, labeled, and has to be learned using some Yoga instructor.

because they want to make sure it is available if they decide they want to use it on a whim.

get a profession that is "scalable," that is, one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor.

Não ser um peru" começa quando descobrimos a diferença entre estabilidade verdadeira e fabricada. O leitor pode facilmente imaginar o que acontece quando sistemas, sufocados pela volatilidade, explodem. Temos um bom exemplo: a remoção do Partido Baath em 2003, com a abrupta derrubada de Saddam Hussein e seu regime por obra dos Estados Unidos. Mais de 100 mil pessoas morreram e, dez anos mais tarde, o lugar ainda é um caos.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number.

An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace.

Los emprendedores son unos héroes en nuestra sociedad. Fracasan por el resto de nosotros

I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion

First, fractal objects, as we have seen, can be generated with a simple rule applied to itself, which makes them ideal for the automatic activity of a computer (or Mother Nature). Second, in the generation of visual intuitions lies a dialectic between the mathematician and the objects generated.

people don't learn so much from their—and other people's—mistakes; rather it is the system that learns by selecting those less prone to a certain class of mistakes and eliminating others.

Never buy when you can rent the three Fs

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?

gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The

because it requires a combination of belief, a capacity for delayed gratification

Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

So I have, accordingly, except for eight years, been self-employed.

I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical.

what is absent from the data should be taken into account—absence of Black Swans in the record doesn't mean these were not there.

Los Cisnes Negros que imaginamos, de los que hablamos y nos preocupamos no se parecen a los que previsiblemente son Cisnes Negros. Como veremos a continuación, nos preocupamos de los sucesos «improbables» equivocados.

The bias lowers our perception of the risks we incurred in the past, particularly for those of us who were lucky to have survived them. Your