Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

a free person does not need to win arguments—just win.

It costs a lot of energy to fake that you're not bored.

Just look at how different the large stone is from the pebbles:

People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention.

blame his successor for subsequent results.

La narratividad nace de una necesidad biológica innata conforme a la cual tendemos a reducir la dimensionalidad;

An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly

First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule. Languages travel; genes less so.

just avoiding being hurt by them would have been sufficient.

they would not buy my ideas on robust risk management because "everyone uses these textbooks.

Can be generalized to politics, anything where the penalty is weak and the victims are abstract and distributed (say taxpayers or shareholders).

Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War.

that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let

There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

Sanallinen uhka on aidon voimattomuuden sertifikaatti.

Poison is drunk in golden cups

as self-interest can be the driver of growth.

system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode

people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)

It hit me that the rich were natural targets;

The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.

A higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection;