Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.

I've looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any.

You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself.

Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.

So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

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.

Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.

Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence. If people were rewarded strictly according to their abilities, things would still be unfair—people don't choose their abilities. Randomness has the beneficial effect of reshuffling society's cards, knocking down the big guy.

It is often said that is wise he who can see things coming. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

behavioral problem; we like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not necessarily enjoy this execution. Strange as it sounds, this point has only been discovered very recently (we will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally; we are merely fit for the maximum probability of transmitting our genes in some given unsophisticated environment).

Consider that all the wealth of the world can't buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst.

it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything," he said.

Our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick.

Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bullshit vendor.

you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant

as societies gain in complexity, with more and more "cutting edge" sophistication in them, and more and more specialization, they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work.

The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.