Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

fluency without content

but I am free to choose a profession where I am not a slave to external pressure.

but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

A nerd is simply someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box.

Needless to say they were usually sleep-deprived. Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.

He can also formulate a hypothesis after the results of the experiment—thus fitting the hypothesis to the experiment.

The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

users of these machines gain no strength beyond an initial phase.

religion without tolerance

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances.

you can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave.

Monsieur de Norpois is made to be ashamed of the fact that he expressed a different opinion. Proust did not consider that the diplomat might have changed his mind. We

you may be committing an injustice to others by favoring him.

we don't recognize it in other places, where these options tend to remain underpriced or not priced at all.

my ideas on redundancy in systems.

Mother of all harmful mistakes - mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

with skills that do not transfer outside of the very machine that they trained on.

La pequeño es hermoso en muchos otros aspectos. Quedémonos, por ahora, con que lo pequeño (como agregado, es decir, como conjunto de unidades pequeñas) es más antifrágil que lo grande: en realidad, lo grande está condenado a caer, una propiedad matemática que explicaré más adelante y que, por desgracia, parece ser universal porque se aplica a las grandes empresas, a los grandes mamíferos y a las grandes administraciones.

I experienced a loss of pleasure in writing!

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before.

Have you ever wondered why so many of these straight-A students end up going nowhere in life while someone who lagged behind is now getting the shekels, buying the diamonds

People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the real world can't afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane. Unlike