Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If it were known and obvious, then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic.

Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.

At the time of writing, most big recent successes (Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google) were started by people with skin and soul in the game and grew organically—if they had recourse to funding, it was to expand or allow the managers to cash out; funding was not the prime source of creation. You don't create a firm by creating a firm; nor do you do science by doing science.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much.

Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies.

He is not you, not a member of your family, so he has no direct emotional loss should your health experience a degradation.

they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity.

The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict.

You were wrong for years, right for a moment, losing small, winning big, so vastly more successful than the other way

In the United States they have the implicit, never mentioned, promise to go work for a bank at a later date with a sinecure offering, say $5 million a year, if they are seen favorably by the industry.

more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.

To value a person consider the difference between how he or she was impressive at the first encounter and the most recent one.

b) The more volatile the something—the more uncertainty—the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade if there is unevenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100,000 cars for both time periods; 80,000 then 120,000, would be even worse than 90,000 and 110,000.

Had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did

and, although it was a less ambitious version than initially envisioned

we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living

what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

they have what is lacking in the young:

Another recent event is the almost-instant bankruptcy, in 1998, of a financial investment company (hedge fund) called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which used the methods and risk expertise of two "Nobel economists," who were called "geniuses" but were in fact using phony, bell curve–style mathematics while managing to convince themselves that it was great science and thus turning the entire financial establishment into suckers.

I found luck in the most unexpected of places. It is as if there were two planets: the one in which we actually live and the one, considerably more deterministic, on which people are convinced we live.

The dip in the market was not very large. It was just that his leverage was enormous.

The mechanism is a probabilistic method called conditional information: Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him.

Cuál es la probabilidad de morir en un accidente aéreo?», por ejemplo, las personas aumentan el grado de probabilidad. Sin embargo, Slovic y sus colegas descubrieron, en patrones del mundo de los seguros, que en las pólizas la gente se olvidaba de esos sucesos altamente improbables. Dichos investigadores llaman a este fenómeno «la preferencia por asegurarse contra pequeñas pérdidas probables», a expensas de las menos probables pero de mayor impacto.