Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.

This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was—or is.

we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness.

central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining

Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters—those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.

Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of "skin in the game." Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm.

we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers. Once

It is often with the most noble intentions that we do so, as we are pressured to "fix" things, so we often blow them up with our fear of randomness and love of smoothness.

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of

When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you.

Mother Nature is not perfect, but has so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists. So my approach is to combine evidence-based research (stripped of biological theory), with an a priori that Mother Nature has more authority than anyone.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates—and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let

As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive affect," than on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small "affects" across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.

Usually, what we call a "good listener" is someone with skillfully polished indifference.

Atheism or materialism means treating the dead as if they were unborn, I won't.

you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad—at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment.

domain-specific I mean that our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented, what

In addition, there seems to be curious evidence of a link between leadership and a form of psychopathology (the sociopath) that encourages the nonblinking, self-confident, insensitive person to rally followers.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.

We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical

innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity

And, what's worse, we didn't get where we are today thanks to policy makers—but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.