Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

the potential costs are much worse than the cumulative gains.

For instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.

The agency problem (or principal-agent problem) also manifests itself in the misalignment of interests in transactions: a vendor in a one-shot transaction does not have his interests aligned to yours—and so can hide stuff from you.

the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him.

In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under "rational" scrutiny.

would not have been strongly drawn to such pursuits anyway.

Note that art, because of its dependence on word of mouth, is extremely prone to these cumulative-advantage effects.

We cannot teach people to withhold judgment; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects. I do not see a "tree"; I see a pleasant or an ugly tree. It is not possible without great, paralyzing effort to strip these small values we attach to matters. Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias. Something in our dear human nature makes us want to believe

Avoid optimization; learn to love redundancy.

and I wondered whether he might have stayed alive had he gone to New York instead.

the learning of life is about what to avoid.

Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome

could cause a loss of business

A book review, good or bad, can be far more descriptive of the reviewer than informational about the book itself.

There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike

Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.

Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.

Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.