Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What a contrast with the other traders who lacked polish!

the behavior of the total is dictated by the preferences of a minority.

The laser is a prime illustration of a tool made for a given purpose (actually no real purpose) that then found applications that were not even dreamed of at the time. It was a typical "solution looking for a problem.

We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see.

that the world is less random than it actually is.

Diversity here has to do with the degree of uncertainty inherent in the process.

The glass is dead; living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.

The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the 1 percent.

One should give more weight to research that, while being rigorous, contradicts other peers, particularly if it entails costs and reputational harm for its author. Further, Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bull***t vendor.

if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you're doing it wrong.

The gains from size are visible but the risks are hidden

Luckily, I had some skin in the game for my opinions

that we depend on them for what information we need to obtain.

The first of the problems of human nature that we examine in this section, the one just illustrated above, is what I call the narrative fallacy.

I was told that a scientist managed the company and that he had the instinct, as a scientist, to just let scientists look wherever their instinct took them. Commercialization came later.

Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will.

The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one

And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don't risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can't feel insulted by a dog.

Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule—the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to emerge independently across separate populations.

This example not only gives us an idea of harm done by those who intervene, but, worse, it illustrates the lack of awareness of the need to look for a break-even point between benefits and harm.

Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and appearances fool us.

once a man crossed the forty-year mark, he had shown that very few ailments could harm him.

Just as one day some primitive tribesman scratched his nose, saw rain falling, and developed an elaborate method of scratching his nose to bring on the much-needed rain, we link economic prosperity to some rate cut by the Federal Reserve Board, or the success of a company with the appointment of the new president "at the helm.

Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.