Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet.

aside from deriving conclusions from static measures of inequality—the methods he used were flawed:

thanks to the literature on cognition—that, counter to what everyone believes, not theorizing is an act—that theorizing can correspond to the absence of willed activity, the "default" option.

Diagoras asked, "Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?" The drowned worshippers, being dead, would have a lot of trouble advertising their experiences from the bottom of the sea.

how we tend to generalize from what we see.

via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition

The worst punishment was his state of helplessness in the face of risks and unfairness.

Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.

regretted not having insisted on speaking in Arabic

Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.

Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much—but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.

Just as those who live by the sword die by the sword, those who earn their living taking risks will lose their livelihood taking risks.

I will retire on these profits

We call this the problem of silent evidence.

There are two possible ways to approach phenomena. The first is to rule out the extraordinary and focus on the "normal." The examiner leaves aside "outliers" and studies ordinary cases. The second approach is to consider that in order to understand a phenomenon, one needs first to consider the extremes—particularly if, like the Black Swan, they carry an extraordinary cumulative effect.

We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn.

Remember that for an event to be a Black Swan, it does not just have to be rare, or just wild; it has to be unexpected, has to lie outside our tunnel of possibilities. You must be a sucker for it.

the tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge, not our ignorance)

while the bulk of their risks came from outside their models.

Not understanding that doing nothing can be much more preferable to doing something potentially harmful.

best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.

the truth came out eventually, and his mission ended up paying off, with some delay.

Otherwise they become fragile. That, I completely missed.* Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does.

Carlos was getting jumpy and losing some of his composure.