Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio.

Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent—he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.

Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcomes that counts.

Per il robusto un errore è informazione, per il debole un errore è solo un errore

For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).

illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.

an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the

So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It

We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We

The best way to prove the arbitrary character of these categories, and the contagion effect they produce, is to remember how frequently these clusters reverse in history. Today's alliance between Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby would certainly seem puzzling to a nineteenth-century intellectual—Christians used to be anti-Semites and Moslems were the protectors of the Jews, whom they preferred to Christians. Libertarians used to be left-wing. What

This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say, some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed

A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But

Their focus becomes to play politics

The source of the tragic in history is in mistaking someone else's unconditional for conditional—and the reverse.

80 to 90% of people think that they are above the average (and the median) in many things.

The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect—our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone

Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer…

Outliers are increasingly unlikely. You

In a nutshell, the survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realization will be the most visible. Why? Because the losers do not show up.

survival pressures within the organism play a role in its overall improvement under external stress.

Simply consider that close to 80 or 85 percent of the cost of a tomato can be attributed to transportation, storage, and waste