Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).

To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.

keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

Contra the prevailing belief, success isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.

We ingest probiotics because we don't eat enough "dirt" anymore.

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

An idea stats to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

Rational flâneur (or just flâneur): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called "looking for optionality.

When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.

It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations--Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.

So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you'll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don't be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan.

You are rich if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.

So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.