Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck.

once asked Einstein if he carried a notebook to write down ideas. "I never have ideas" was the reply

We sacrifice ourselves in favor of our genes, trading our fragility for their survival.

summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree.

The fact that you got heads or tails on the previous flip does not change the odds of your getting heads or tails on the next one.

Forecasting (in words) bears no relation to speculation (in deeds).

Learning from the Mistakes of Others

always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action.

So, a heuristic: if someone has a long bio, I skip him

Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.

that he felt proud of his sticking to his strategy for so long

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise.

These may seem irrational to an outsider who defines rationality in terms of what he can explain.

He will be resisted by the older ones

This visible tension between individual and collective interests is new in history…

But he left us with a good lesson: never trust the words of a man who is not free.

others paid by the hour are not there yet.

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And

but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it.

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

they unarguably saved more lives than were lost.

fragility and absence of skin in the game.

They will act as if they deserved the money.

You want to avoid being disliked without being envied or admired