Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail.

A squeeze occurs when people have no choice but to do something, and do it right away, regardless of the costs.

Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it.

Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.

In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, though perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust a ruler's reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.

How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable—but ultimately harmful—modernity.

One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*

Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction.

Frano Barovi? reading this chapter wrote to me: "Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone—a point we will visit in our discussion of annealing. But

the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).

In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.

it took me a lifetime to figure out the second point: implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances.

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized.

cocksure prophet. Where I beg to differ with the great

The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story—to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.

It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't.