Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The central point: had Stiglitz been a businessman with his own money on the line, he would have blown up, terminated. Or had he been in nature, his genes would have been made extinct—so people with such misunderstanding of probability would eventually disappear from our DNA. What I found nauseating was the government hiring one of his coauthors.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended.

what you see is likely to be less Black Swannish than what you do not see.

Uma das contingências da vida: não existe estabilidade sem volatilidade.

Having spent a couple of decades in this mind-set, I am convinced (but cannot prove) that training and education can help us avoid its pitfalls.

just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.

We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.

What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be black-and-white, binary rules.

People can only be social friends if they don't try to upstage or outsmart one another.

We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion

Large animals are more fragile to shocks than small ones—

blindness to fragility, selective memory, and absence of skin in the game.

it just meant not deriving your personal and emotional identity from your work, and viewing work as something optional, more like a hobby.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them.

because we take what we know a little too seriously.

We remember the martyrs who died for a cause that we knew about, never those no less effective in their contribution but whose cause we were never aware of—precisely because they were successful.

Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace, or the later French so-called "moralists" (La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.

the total losses for the ten banks would be close to nothing.

If you want to become antifragile, put yourself in the situation "loves mistakes"—to the right of "hates mistakes"—by making these numerous and small in harm. We will call this process and approach the "barbell" strategy.

Many of them blindly believe in it.

Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.

establishing the principle that you need to eat what you feed others.

our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical.

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call "negative utility.