Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In the complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.

Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one's external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won't affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad.

If you want to accelerate someone's death, give him a personal doctor. I don't mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.

You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.

Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.

If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.

Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.

whenever I hear work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity).

Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

Bir treni kaç?rmak ancak peÅŸinden koÅŸarsan?z ac? verici olur.

bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce a precise, unbiased understanding of reality.

Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

Our aversion to variability and desire for order, and our acting on those feelings, have helped precipitate severe crises. Making something artificially bigger (instead of letting it die early if it cannot survive stressors) makes it more and more vulnerable to a very severe collapse-as I showed with the Black Swan vulnerability associated with an increase in size.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.

When the person is highly intelligent, he can astonish you with the most far-fetched, yet completely plausible interpretations of the most innocuous remark. If

Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate.

What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.

Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-deceit machines.

awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.

Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.

I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me. Then

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.