Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I came to discuss Black Swans, and I intended to tell them that the only thing I know is that we know precious little about them, but that it was their property to sneak up on us, and that attempts at Platonifying them led to additional misunderstandings. Military people can understand such things, and the idea became recently prevalent in military circles with the expression unknown unknown (as opposed to the known unknown).

had I not known his profession I would have thought

What did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because i am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone.

is paid according to some metrics that do not necessarily reflect the health of his company; these he can manipulate, hide risks, get the bonus, then retire

As shown from the track record of the prophets: before you are proven right, you will be reviled; after you are proven right, you will be hated for a while, or, what's worse, your ideas will appear to be "trivial" thanks to retrospective distortion.

The work itself was a secondary consideration.

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools—by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

They may hate McDonald's, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.

benefits from volatility and variability.

Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions) very long sample paths would end up resembling each other. The properties of a very, very long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones.

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

as the sum becomes increasingly different from the parts.

Do not question his procedure, only his confidence.

we would see that their wishes and hopes are almost invariably at someone else's expense.

This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test.

Mother Nature destined us to derive enjoyment from a steady flow of pleasant small, but frequent, rewards.

focusing on the rationality of a belief rather than its consequences

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky

cualquier cosa atrapada en la planificación tiende a fracasar, precisamente, a causa de estos atributos: es un mito que la planificación ayude a las grandes empresas porque, como hemos visto, el mundo es demasiado aleatorio e imprevisible para basar una política en la visibilidad del futuro. Lo que sobrevive surge de la interacción entre la adaptabilidad y algunas condiciones del entorno.

People can't predict how ong they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as limits of prediction. They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.

if you need to be continuously on the watch, doesn't that cause fatigue?

that there is no evidence of the possibility of large events, i.e., Black Swans. You are likely to confuse that statement, however, particularly if you do not pay close attention, with the statement that there is evidence of no possible Black

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure