Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Once again, I am not saying that we need to stop globalization and prevent travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the tradeoffs—and few people are. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.

During a radio interview, when I tried explaining to the journalist the nuance and the difference between the two statements I was told that I was "too complicated"; so I simply walked out of the studio, leaving them in the lurch. The depressing part is that those people who were committing such mistakes were educated journalists entrusted to represent the world to us lay persons.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

The fact that you survived is a condition that may weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the shallow notion of "cause.

How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us to figure out their other properties? There

I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.

if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it "efficient" inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking. As Publilius Syrus wrote, nothing can be done both hastily and safely—almost nothing.

If you lose we will be equals and stay friends forever, and if you win you'll take my precious blue flower as a prize and we stay friends forever. How lucky you are!

certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

But we have evidence that collectively society doesn't advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of (formal) education in a country is the result of wealth.*2

An observation that people who live permanently in an adoptive country tend to progressively generalize the bad and particularize the good, that is, attribute the bad traits in people they encounter to the national trait of the natives, and the good things to the individual. This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.

you'd even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between a human and a ghost.

It took me an entire lifetime to find out what my generator is. It is: We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

newspapers do not have to have a screaming headline saying that nothing new is taking place (though the Bible was smart enough to declare ein chadash tachat hashemesh—" nothing new under the sun," providing the information that things just do recur).

What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal

from the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by luck. Note

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop's fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff, but not for the bad.

after the event you start predicting the possibility of other outliers happening locally, that is, in the process you were just surprised by, but not elsewhere. After

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why

Conduct yourself toward your parents as you would have your children conduct themselves toward you.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking—little else.