Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars). This would get priestly people into office.

Light control works; close control leads to overreaction

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept.

what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground

Normative Economics is like religion without the aesthetics.

Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For

Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

Paris itself was barely controlled by France—no more than the Rio slums called favelas are currently ruled by the Brazilian central state.

It is always convenient to invoke universalism when you are in the majority.

Problema noastr? nu este numai c? nu cunoa?tem viitorul, ci ?i c? nu cunoa?tem nici trecutul.

Being an executive doesn't require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrowing schedules.

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Yet in spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that "necessity really is the mother of invention.

It turns out, as shown by Karsenty and others who have since embarked on the line of research, that the reverse is also largely true: loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system.

In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.

Luck favors the prepared," Pasteur

Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill.

The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?†

For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator.

Don't look for the precise and local. Simply; do not be narrow minded.

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?