Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Da mesma forma, quando trabalhava como trader, uma profissão repleta de altas doses de aleatoriedade, com contínuos danos psicológicos que perfuram até as profundezas da alma do indivíduo, eu punha em prática o exercício mental de aceitar, todas as manhãs, que a pior coisa possível já havia acontecido

Unless something moves by more than its usual daily percentage change, the event is deemed to be noise. Percentage moves are the size of the headlines. In addition, the interpretation is not linear; a 2% move is not twice as significant an event as 1%, it is rather like four to ten times. A 7% move can be several billion times more relevant than a 1% move!

One has the illusion of stability, but is fragile; the other one the illusion of variability, but is robust and even antifragile.

Adding the because makes these matters far more plausible, and far more likely.

perishable) food costs in America are largely, up to about 80 or 90 percent, determined by distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level.

but errors are costlier and delays are considerably longer than in the past.

Love without sacrifice is theft (Procrustes).

People can't predict how long they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as "limits of prediction." They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.

The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider

people look for books that support their mental program.

Other professions allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income), if you do well, at little or no extra effort.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

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.

that professionals are significantly influenced by numbers that they know to be irrelevant to their decision

Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan–prone it is.

To our great excitement, we had proof after proof that traders had vastly, vastly more sophistication than the formula. And their sophistication preceded the formula by at least a century.

the probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters.

Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death? Would you like to know who committed the crime before the beginning of the movie? Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer's Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Even popular opinion warns that bad information is worse than no information at all.

Wouldn't that be stifling?

sometimes life requires compromises:

It was of course picked up through natural selection, survivorship, apprenticeship to experienced practitioners, and one's own experience.