Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

La persona a quien se atribuye la difusión de esta idea del semiescepticismo tendencioso es sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper, posiblemente el único filósofo de la ciencia a quien leen y de quien hablan los actores del mundo real (aunque es posible que los filósofos profesionales no lo hagan con tanto entusiasmo).

bottom-up political systems, and

My idea is that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans. These

robust" is certainly not good enough. In the long run everything with the most minute vulnerability breaks, given the ruthlessness of time—yet our planet has been around for perhaps four billion years and, convincingly, robustness can't just be it: you need perfect robustness for a crack not to end up crashing the system.

am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and harm to some of its individual parts.

The situation is even more lopsided with book sales. If I told you that two authors sold a total of a million copies of their books, the most likely combination is 993,000 copies sold for one and 7,000 for the other. This is far more likely than that the books each sold 500,000 copies. For any large total, the breakdown will be more and more asymmetric. Why

our successes depend on randomness).

It took five years for Yevgenia to graduate from the "egomaniac without anything to justify it, stubborn and difficult to deal with" category to "persevering, resolute, painstaking, and fiercely independent

we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.

People with an engineering-oriented mind will tend to look at everything around as an engineering problem. This is a very good thing in engineering, but when dealing with cats, it is a much better idea to hire veterinarians than circuit engineers…

not accepting other people's wisdom as gospel.

What survives must be good at serving some (mostly hidden) purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can't capture.

And many of the problems of society come from the argument "other people are doing it.

disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet

Per lo studioso e leader religioso arabo 'AlÄ« ibn AbÄ« T?lib (che non è un mio parente), mantenere le distanze da una persona ignorante equivale a stare in compagnia di un saggio.

There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries do the grunt work and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the noncreative technical grind

the antifragile benefits from volatility and disorder, the fragile is harmed.

ideas do not truly sink in when emotions come into play;

naïve empiricism—successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone

el mayor y más acuciante objetivo humano es comprender cómo actuar en condiciones de información incompleta.

Steve Jobs: «La gente pensa che essere concentrati significhi dire sì alla cosa sulla quale ci si deve focalizzare. Ma non è affatto così. Significa dire no ad altre cento buone idee. Dovete scegliere con cura. Di fatto io sono orgoglioso delle cose che non abbiamo fatto tanto quanto lo sono di quelle che ho fatto. Innovazione significa dire no a mille cose».

Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.

since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes.