Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The most privileged were sent to school in France, as both my grandfathers were

People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody's fall can drag others down—for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

As Sherlock Holmes noted in the Silver Blaze case—the curious thing was that the dog did not bark. More problematic, there are plenty of scientific results that are left out of publications because they are not statistically significant, but nevertheless provide information.

How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside.

they can cherry-pick from statements they've made in the past, many of them contradictory, and end up convincing themselves of their intellectual lucidity

even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

If you want strangers to help you, smile. For those close to you, cry.

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things look like.

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.

Just raise the hurdle of medical intervention in favor of cases that are most severe, for which the iatrogenics effect is very small.

There is no absolute measure of good or bad. It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.

they may never become noticeable.

make a distinction between positive contingencies, and negative. Learn to distinguish between those human undertakings in which a lack of predictability has been extremely beneficial, and those where failure to understand the future has caused harm.

I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the "intellectual" profession who bothers me.

we have a tendency to underestimate the role of randomness in human affairs

Today academics in abstract disciplines depend on one another's opinion, without external checks, with the severe occasional pathological result of turning their pursuits into insular prowess-showing contests.

the project managers incur only small errors and can adapt to them.

are supposedly underpaid because of their emotional reward from serving society.

Does the book industry suffer from the classical "expert problem" with the buildup of rules of thumb that do not have empirical validity? More than half a million readers later I am discovering that books are not written for book editors.

my wish is for people in general to remain fools of randomness (so I can trade against them), yet for there to remain a minority intelligent enough to value my methods and hire my services.

didn't care what my parents (and grandfather) thought of me.

When constrained systems, those hungry for natural disorder, collapse, as they are eventually bound to, since they are fragile, failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting.

What they call play (gym, travel, sports) looks like work; the harder they try, the more captive they are.