Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

And, as expected, via negativa is part of classical wisdom. For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.

The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.

We are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

Mathematics is not just a numbers game, it is a way of thinking.

Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its

We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it—particularly in intellectual life. The

The difference between a trader and an investor lies in the duration of the bet, and the corresponding size. There

it is not so easy to "falsify," i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections

Technothinkers tend to have an "engineering mind"—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don't usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture.

Mine was the only job you could do if you thought of yourself as risk-hating, risk-aware, and highly ignorant.

Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right—the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flâneur.

What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don't have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and

Further, we are victims to a new disease, called in this book neomania, that makes us build Black Swan–vulnerable systems—"progress.

never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact—and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings." Likewise, never ask a trader if he is profitable; you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: "It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues.… A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom.

why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?" Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself—and no doubt his peers.*

scholars—scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.

The supply of information to which we are exposed thanks to modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow into the neurotic first one. […] the second fellow reacts to real information, the first largely to noise. The difference between the two fellows will show us the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.

Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise.

People try to impress you with the things they have done ... You should be more impressed with things they would never do.