Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.

Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability. For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out.

You are a lucky man; you presented in such a comprehensive way the effect of chance on society and the overestimation of cause and effect. You show how stupid we are to systematically try to explain skills.

people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If

If you want to understand how vapid are the current modernistic arguments (and understand your existential priorities), consider the difference between lions in the wild and those in captivity. Lions in captivity live longer; they are technically richer, and they are guaranteed job security for life, if these are the criteria you are focusing on …

A doctor is pushed by the system to transfer risk from himself to you, and from the present into the future, or from the immediate future into a more distant future.

Being reviewed or assessed by others matters if and only if one is subjected to the judgment of future—not just present—others. And recall that, a free person does not need to win arguments—just win.*2

Also consider that lobbyists—this annoying race of lobbyists—cannot exist in a municipality or small region.

Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

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

A king, angry at his son, swore that he would crush him with a large stone.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I

Hire the successful trader, conditional on a solid track record, whose details you can understand the least.

I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the intellectual profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park.

we are effectively not skilled at intuitively gauging the impact of the improbable, such

second fallacy lies in failing to take into account forecast degradation as the projected period lengthens. We

Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand.

It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.

It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them—even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the university campuses and some philosophaster who has never taken real risks in his life, or, worse, never had a life, would inform you that "they are clearly not the same thing.

And, just as it is harder to have good qualities when one is rich than when one is poor, it is harder to be a Stoic when one is wealthy, powerful, and respected than when one is destitute, miserable, and lonely.

but at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset.

Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again;

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.