Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It will take a lot of statistical information to override your hesitation.

that a casino was precisely the venue not to pick for such a discussion

One vicious attribute is that the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them to "fail early" (so they can start again) and minimize the long-term damage to the system.

you are excited about how cheap it

Actions are symmetric, do not allow cherry-picking, remove the free option.

Being nice counts the most when you are nice to people ignored by others, deprived of attention, or devoid of friends. The rest is largely theater.

Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute. That is the most common Procrustean bed.

You can effortlessly look up accident statistics on the Web, but they do not easily come to mind. Note

I said that taking a "scalable" profession is not a good idea, simply because there are far too few winners in these professions.

I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives.*

Never have people who talk and don't do been more visible, and played a larger role, than in modern times.

Historians should stay away from chaos theory and the difficulties of reverse engineering except to discuss general properties of the world and learn the limits of what they can't know.

Most mistakes get worse when you try to correct them.

No single observation can meaningfully affect the aggregate.

these "computable" risks are largely absent from real life!

research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.

size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.

Never have people who talk and don't do been more visible, and played a larger role, than in modern times. This is the product of modernism and division of tasks.

one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one.

Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets.

What do they seem to have in common?

Ele percebeu que algumas coisas precisam se quebrar para que o sistema se aperfeiçoe — o que é denominado de destruição criativa —, uma noção desenvolvida, entre muitos outros, pelo filósofo Karl Marx, e um conceito descoberto, como mostraremos no capítulo 17, por Nietzsche.

seem to ignore the bad economic aspect of the transaction.