Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

ignoramus et ignorabimus—we are ignorant and will remain so. Somehow

Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher

Do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their necks they are putting on the line.

Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.

Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.

we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small. If you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand. Nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men, small men, those who don't risk anything, are similar to barks by non-human animals. You can't feel insulted by a dog.

It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—not including risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.

Know how to rank your beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science.

If you can't put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity

Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.

Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists, as we saw with GMOs, the Syrian wars, etc. You say something unpopular in that profession about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, and you become history. This is the opposite of business where me-tooism is penalized.

Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.