Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

experiments have shown that players rely on several heuristics. The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant.

we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty.

he understood optionality mathematically, but not really outside the equation.

There is no penalty for opinion makers who harm society.

triggers some feeling of bitterness.

You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet we tend to not be aware of this property.

much of the opinions and assessments that we have concerning risks may be the simple result of emotions.

notion of alternative accounting: $ 10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.

that is often associated with classroom knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what's going on in real life.

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

wealth is seen as zero-sum.

Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

Anyone who causes harm by forecasting should be treated as either a fool or a lier. Some forecasters cause more damage to society than criminals.

the lucky surge of interest for reasons completely external to the works themselves.

We'll have lunch on a terrace overlooking Lake Como

from cramming my day with appointments

Este mult mai dificil s? pierzi într-un joc pe care l-ai pus la punct tu însuÈ›i.

By all means, demand certainty for the next picnic; but avoid government social-security forecasts for the year 2040.

They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection.

Notice that close to two centuries ago people had an idealized opinion of their own past, just as we have an idealized opinion of today's past.

I am convinced that there exists a tradable security in the Western world that would be 100% correlated with the changes in temperature in Ulan Bator

For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide. I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs. So

Someone getting rich is doing so at other people's expense