Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it

organic food is in higher demand, thanks to the minority rule, distribution costs decrease and the minority rule ends up accelerating in its effect.

We saw the trade-off between the interests of the collective and those of the individual.

La maldición de la modernidad es que cada vez estamos más colonizados por una clase de personas cuya capacidad para explicar las cosas supera a su capacidad de comprensión. O cuya capacidad explicativa supera a sus acciones.

Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief.

we have never been richer in the history of mankind. And we have never been more in debt

An insight into how the mechanisms of religion and the transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws—and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority.

I find it scandalous that in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it, using tools and methods that exclude rare events. Prediction is firmly institutionalized in our world. We are suckers for those who help us navigate uncertainty, whether the fortune-teller or the "well-published" (dull) academics or civil servants using phony mathematics.

Heikot toimivat tarpeidensa mukaan, vahvemmat velvollisuutensa.

The larger the event, the larger the difference.

his showing up during a battle was the equivalent of adding twenty-five thousand troops.

politeness without warmth

let governments predict (it makes officials feel better about themselves and justifies their existence) but do not set much store by what they say. Remember that the interest of these civil servants is to survive and self-perpetuate—not to get to the truth.

everything is "organized" with optimizing intent

Karl Marx, un visionario, entendió que podemos controlar mejor a un esclavo convenciéndolo de que es un empleado.

All pieces of information are not equal in importance.

they rarely run into each other.

the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived "chaos of human experience."*

They will find something he did before when he was successful that he has subsequently stopped doing, and attribute his failure to that. The truth will be, however, that he simply ran out of luck.

yet he gets little or no credit for it.

Option = asymmetry + rationality

Note that in traditional societies even those who fail—but have taken risks—have a higher status than those who are not exposed.

Every man believes himself to be quite different