Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin.

just to show that you can walk the walk.

since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside.

Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it.

Indeed much of the work of investment banks in my day was to play on regulations, find loopholes in the laws. And, counterintuitively, the more regulations, the easier it was to make money.

the "planning fallacy," in which they try to explain the fact that projects take longer, rarely less time, using psychological factors.

That awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.

time is equivalent to disorder, and resistance to the ravages of time, that is, what we gloriously call survival, is the ability to handle disorder.

The effect of the leverage is that a small loss would be compounded and would wipe him out.

in absence of much additional information it is preferable to reserve one's judgment.

or it can be just plain randomness, nothing else.

Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio: only when the words outperform silence

your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive affect," than on their intensity when they hit. In

The larger the role of the Black Swan, the harder it will be for us to predict.

It's much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you.

Web-shaming is much more powerful than past reputational blots, and more of a tail risk.

That second is not in itself significant enough for someone to draw conclusions.

Si veo a una mujer embarazada, el sexo del niño que lleva en su seno es para mí una cuestión puramente aleatoria (un 50% para cada sexo); pero no para el ginecólogo, que podría haber hecho una ecografía. En la práctica, la aleatoriedad es fundamentalmente información incompleta.

the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If

Brain drain is hard to reverse

My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafés away from information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silence is far better.

The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation. Again, the insiders are the enemies of the less-is-more rule.

Remember that Socrates was put to death because he would not compromise his standards.