Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A correspondent, Jean-Louis Rheault, wrote, "I have noticed that the more people glorify the entrepreneur as an abstraction, the more they will scorn an actual one they meet.

Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time.

in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.

Optionality is Promethean, narratives are Epimethean—

Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.

Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)

After things got bad for him, they somehow recovered by some invisible hand, and he was led to believe that it was his intrinsic property to recover from hardships by running every time into a new opportunity. He

but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

Before the "enlightenment" and the age of rationality, there was in the culture a collection of tricks to deal with our fallibility and reversals of fortunes. The elders can still help us with some of their ruses.

Groups are units on their own. There are qualitative differences between a group of ten and a group of, say, 395,435. Each is a different animal, in the literal sense, as different as a book is from an office building

It is hard to stick to a good discipline of mental write-off when things are going well, yet that's when one needs the discipline the most.

Conversely, when you think you know more than you do, you are fragile (to error).

I was pleasantly surprised by what turned out to be the best lunch I ever had in my entire life.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

or "what are the ten best books

Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.

All you have to do is mitigate the consequences.

the power of optionality as an alternative way of doing things, opportunistically, with some large edge coming from asymmetry with large benefits and benign harm. It is a way—the only way—to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.

Indeed we rarely look at religion's benefits in limiting the intervention bias and its iatrogenics: in a large set of circumstances (marginal disease), anything that takes you away from the doctor and allows you to do nothing (hence gives nature a chance to do its work) will be beneficial. So

that classroom education does not lead to wealth as much as it comes from wealth

The Discovery of France

the distance between opinions is remarkably narrower than the distance between the average of opinions and truth.

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future—but this is not necessarily bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!