Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.

anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.

there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

Thirty-nine percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent.

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them.

for Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don't count; surviving is what matters.

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author's nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

At the end, what matters is the strength of the string—not the wealth and power of the dining party.

In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.

The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.

A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.

Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving.

T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.

Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.

Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker's life while convincing him that it is becoming more "efficient." - The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free. - You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. - With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying. -

And, talking about radiation, few wonder why, after hundreds of million of years of having our skins exposed to sun rays, we suddenly need so much protection from them—is it that our exposure is more harmful than before because of changes in the atmosphere, or populations living in an environment mismatching the pigmentation of their skin—or rather, that makers of sun protection products need to make some profits?

It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And

it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.