Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The question remains whether optimizers are unhappy because they are constantly seeking a better deal or if unhappy people tend to optimize out of their misery.

it does not come naturally to me.*

in fact, they are so blind to the odds that they treat odds of one in a thousand and one in a million almost in the same way.

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists—or anyone.

perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized

some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of "heuristics," these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.

complication without depth

For Seneca, the Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction

by persons squeezed by life.

Everything nonstable or breakable has had ample chance to break over time.

The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn't mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend (IYI-style) to believe are important can distract us from more central attributes of the price mechanism.

blinding people to the odds of success when engaging in ventures.

As we saw, nature has a filter to keep the good baby and get rid of the bad.

When we think of tomorrow, we just project it as another yesterday.

Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.

Dr. John thinks entirely within the box

The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform.

The word sample stresses that one sees only one realization among a collection of possible ones. Now, a sample path can be either deterministic or random, which brings the next distinction.

The fragile has no option. But the antifragile needs to select what's best—the best option.

He paid no price for the mistake.

the researcher has the incentive to select the experiment that corresponds to what he was looking for, hiding the failed attempts.