Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Science isn't the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages.

we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.

You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.

It would be preferable if we were better at understanding cancer or the (highly nonlinear) weather than the origin of the universe. How

interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.

the more lethal the risks, the less visible they will be, since the severely victimized are likely to be eliminated from the evidence. The

Characteristically, Samuelson intimidated those who questioned his techniques with the statement "Those who can, do science, others do methodology." If you knew math, you could "do science." This is reminiscent of psychoanalysts who silence their critics by accusing them of having trouble with their fathers.

The number of cultured people dropped below some critical level. Suddenly the place became a vacuum. Brain drain is hard to reverse, and some of the old refinement may be lost forever.

Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people's feelings. Such restrictions do not necessarily come from the state itself, rather from the forceful establishment of an intellectual monoculture by an overactive thought police in the media and cultural life.

Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

science is about how not to be a sucker.

don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on

When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just

is often a good career move for an author.

And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.

reality does not have the same closed and symmetric laws and regulations as games.

Ex cura theoria nascitur.

reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency. Many

We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.

Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws.

This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation "theory" is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs "chimeras" rather than theories.

If you see a fraud and don't say fraud, you are a fraud.