Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

the decision maker focuses on the payoff, the consequence of the actions (hence includes asymmetries and nonlinear effects).

encouraging traders to make steady money at the expense of hidden risks of Black Swans, consequential losses.

I wonder why people don't realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon

show how some degree of unpredictability (or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It

It is true that 1,000 days cannot prove you right, but one day can prove you to be wrong.

This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists—because these professions are more immune to randomness.

The convex (left) is antifragile, the concave (right) is fragile (has

the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

My declared approach was to try to make money infrequently.

This little bit of uncertainty might make the diner relax and forget the time pressures.

Sadly, it may be even worse for you to make $10 million, then lose back nine, than to making nothing at all! True, you may end up with a million (as compared to nothing), but it may be better had you got zilch. (This assumes, of course, that you care about financial rewards.)

Events that are nonrepeatable are ignored before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while). After

But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.

You feel less guilty for not having avoided certain events; you feel less responsible for it. Things appear as if they were bound to happen.

The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and "learning," not economic growth (they were not suckers at the time)—a point also made by Alison Wolf.

In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.

What the French call "the caviar left," la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias.

Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.

that an evaluation causes you to be judged not by the end results, but by some intermediary metric that invites you to look sophisticated, brings some distortions.

Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy.

He would be forced to act as a satisficer instead of a maximizer

George Soros, cuando hace una apuesta financiera, no deja de buscar ejemplos que demuestren que su teoría inicial es falsa. Tal vez sea esto la auténtica confianza en uno mismo: la capacidad de observar el mundo sin necesidad de encontrar signos que halaguen el propio ego.*

All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.