Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

provérbio de Sêneca no Tratado sobre a clemência a respeito do efeito reverso das punições. Ele escreveu: "O castigo repetido, enquanto esmaga o ódio de alguns, incita o ódio de todos […] assim como as árvores que foram podadas fazem brotar novamente incontáveis galhos". Pois

No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.

I have had the privilege to work with colleagues who have hidden paranoid disorders that come to the surface on occasion.

Ora, em vez de apresentar aqui minha lista de medicamentos (seria muito deselegante), indico ao leitor, além do livro de Meyers, Fabuleux hasards, histoire de la découverte des médicaments [Acasos fabulosos, história da descoberta dos medicamentos], de Claude Bohuon e Claude Monneret, e Laughing Gas, Viagra and Lipitor [Gás hilariante, Viagra e Lipitor], de Jie Jack Li.

Sacrifice for the sake of the group is behind the notion of heroism:

Much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy.

Now I am punished by privilege and comfort—and I can't resist comfort.

Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur?

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results and one's role in them.

people fit their beliefs to actions rather than fit their actions to their beliefs.

Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success—but it is also necessary for failure.

some of those who traded options (I called them option buyers) had remarkable staying power and I wanted to be one of those.

that really successful people say no to almost everything

2. No socialization of losses and privatization of gains.

Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*

could not understand what made one explanation more likely than the other

Let us remember that economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

Antifragile shows how people confuse risk of ruin with variations and fluctuations—a simplification that violates a deeper, more rigorous logic of things.

In fact for most people except those that are very ill, the risks outweigh the benefits. Except that the long-term medical risks are hidden; they will play out in the long run, whereas the legal risk is immediate. This is no different from the Bob Rubin risk-transfer trade, of delaying risks and making them look invisible.

growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the "tails," that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own

as they are hedging the possibility of their falling into the same situation some day.

The dentist did better when he dealt with monthly statements rather than more frequent ones.

Your mind keeps playing alternative scenarios branching out of a main tree: