Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The biotech company seemed to follow implicitly, though not explicitly, Louis Pasteur's adage about creating luck by sheer exposure. "Luck favors the prepared," Pasteur said, and, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities—on that, later.

Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work and thus cliques are formed of people who quote one another. It's an I quote you, you quote me type of business.

I have an enormous faith in Time and History as eventual debunkers of fragility. Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")

which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can't reach got to be sour).

things are starting to be brought under control today;

Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the "rationality" of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.

as he mistook me for someone else and had no clue about what I was discussing.

without penalty to themselves from having been wrong in the first paper

someone who cannot be squeezed into doing something he would otherwise never do.

Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. "The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.

So class envy doesn't originate from a truck driver in South Alabama, but from a New York or Washington, D.C., Ivy League–educated IYI (say Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz) with a sense of entitlement, upset some "less smart" persons are much richer.

His losses were mounting

via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by additionfn1).

Always remember that, in a modern environment, wars last longer and kill more people than is typically planned.

only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle.

The wealth process is dominated by winner-take-all effects. Any form of control of the wealth process—typically instigated by bureaucrats—tends to lock people with privileges in their state of entitlement. So the solution is to allow the system to destroy the strong, something that works best in the United States.

the long-term harm is largely unaccounted for.

threats of the dagger-by-your-bed variety are even better for bloodless control.

What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they "think" about them, or the various possible reasons they give you or themselves for that.

It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don't move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem (with the exception of the weather and businesses involving short-term physical processes, not socioeconomic ones).

Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people's feelings.

envy is something you are more likely to encounter in your own kin: lower classes are more likely to experience envy toward their cousins or the middle class than toward the very rich.