Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

the benefits promised in the book seem grossly overstated.

One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: "much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.

As much as it is ingrained in our habits and conventional wisdom, confirmation can be a dangerous error.

And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones.

how they use public office as a means to satisfy personal greed.

Stern was part of the conference but absent from the dinner.

The very same desire for order, interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits-it is just that, unlike art, 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.

I count myself one of those).

If you believe that witnessing an additional white swan will bring confirmation that there are no black swans, then you should also accept the statement, on purely logical grounds, that the sighting of a red Mini Cooper should confirm that there are no black swans.

Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk.

But we don't easily translate this to other domains and remain victims of scientism

repeated serial exposure.

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

A história mostra que, para a sociedade, quanto mais ricos nos tornamos, mais difícil é viver dentro de nossas próprias posses. Temos mais dificuldade em lidar com a abundância do que com a escassez.

Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education—not an optical illusion. We

complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today.

The fact that he did not experience John's success was the reason he did not suffer his downfall.

in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy.

Nor did the point escape Machiavelli. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: "It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused

narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and

one can be easily substituted for the other.