Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono già morte.

On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our

so your mood is propped up by visible continuous feedback.

Your life came under a serious threat but, having survived it, you retrospectively underestimate how risky the situation actually was.

10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.

Median means roughly that 50% of the people die before eight months and 50% survive longer than eight months. But those who survive would live considerably longer, generally going about life just like a regular person and fulfilling the average 73.4 or so years predicted by insurance mortality tables. There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long.

It is hard to resist discussion of artificial history without a comment on the father of all pseudothinkers, Hegel. Hegel writes a jargon that is meaningless outside of a chic Left Bank Parisian café or the humanities department of some university extremely well insulated from the real world.

In other words, it was a much more linear economy—less complex—than today. And we have more nonlinearities—asymmetries, convexities—in today's world.

taking the other side of fragility makes you antifragile.)

the only effective judge of things is time

He was mad at Henry for not having figured out that these events could happen.

It is very difficult to isolate a single cause when there are plenty around.

Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.

why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?

You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.

Mathematics is not just a "numbers game," it is a way of thinking. We will see that probability is a qualitative subject.

soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives

Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the beastly thing called "efficiency" that makes people now sail too close to the wind.

Even the apples we see in the stores are to be regarded with some suspicion: original apples were devoid of sweet taste and fruit corporations bred them for maximal sweetness—the mountain apples of my childhood were acid, bitter, crunchy, and much smaller than the shiny variety in U.S. stores said to keep the doctor away.

So what counts is the payoff from success.

Lindy" is what ages in reverse, i.e., its life expectancy lengthens with time

it took seven years to make John a hero and just seven days to make him a failure.

But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not prospectively.

a) The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. If traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situations: 90,000, then 110,000 cars on the one hand, or 100,000 cars on the other.