Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious. Any

In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.

One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist.

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.

Options like dispersion of outcomes and don't care about the average too much.

fragility is in the dosage: falling from the 20th floor is not in the same risk category as falling from your chair.

we need to shift some of our worries to bigger things.

what they have is skill in getting promoted within a company rather than pure skills in making optimal decisions—we call that "corporate political skill.

The same applies to the conventional values of persistence, doggedness and perseverance: necessary, very necessary. One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip to the store caused the winning? Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.

Como veíamos antes, los casos de desconfirmación tienen mucha más fuerza para establecer la verdad. Sin embargo, tendemos a no ser conscientes de esta propiedad.

later—unlike gardeners, who understand rather well that pruning trees strengthens them. Likewise peace—some kind of forced, constrained, non-natural peace—may be costly in lives: just

Such businesses only care about the pool of funds available to the very rich.

Friedrich Nietzsche got the point: Sympathy for all would be tyranny for thee, my good neighbor.

It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

One should give more weight to research that, while being rigorous, contradicts other peers, particularly if it entails costs and reputational harm for its author. Further, Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bull***t vendor.*4

Someone paid a price for the system to improve.

Every additional glass of wine harms you more than the preceding one

longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event.

Furthermore, people who make forecasts professionally are often more affected by such impediments than those who don't.

most successes are caused by very few "windows of opportunity," failing to grab one can be deadly for one's career.

One of the attractive aspects of my profession as a quantitative option trader is that

Most of the examples used in this book were created with my Monte Carlo generator, which I introduce in this chapter. Yet it is far more a way of thinking than a computational method. Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.

Greenspan's actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost.

narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations