Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible." "Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system." "This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing." "Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

many were occasionally crushed, and a few did bounce back repeatedly.

We certainly know a lot, but we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we actually do

Bent Flyvbjerg (do capítulo 18) mostrou, em seu Black Swan Management [Gerenciamento do Cisne Negro], a

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom

suckers try to be right, nonsuckers try to make the buck, or: Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

We use reference points in our heads, say sales projections, and start building beliefs around them because less mental effort is needed to compare an idea to a reference point than to evaluate it in the absolute (System 1 at work!). We cannot work without a point of reference.

My motto is "my principal activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.

Unreliable people carried less weight than reliable ones. You can't fool people more than twice.*1

Consider the situation where the dentist examines his portfolio only upon receiving the monthly account from the brokerage house. As 67% of his months will be positive, he incurs only four pangs of pain per annum and eight uplifting experiences. This is the same dentist following the same strategy. Now consider the dentist looking at his performance only every year. Over the next 20 years that he is expected to live, he will experience 19 pleasant surprises for every unpleasant one!

Proclus was known to repeat the metaphor that statues are carved by subtraction.. Michelangelo was asked how he carved the statue of David, his answer as: It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David.

c) If the function is convex (antifragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).

He also dropped out of the scene and is no longer to be found among other flambeurs.

So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing.

all we need is the ability to accept that what we have on our hands is better than what we had before

trusting that Nero would be able to read his mind.

lose. His personal confidence was wiped out.

Le processus de la découverte (ou de l'innovation, ou du progrès technologique) dépend lui-même d'un bricolage antifragile, d'une brusque prise de risques plutôt que d'une culture formelle.

Los sucesos que son no repetibles se ignoran antes de que se produzcan, y se sobreestiman después (durante un breve tiempo).

Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This

the blindness of hope

Now run the idea in reverse:

our knowledge does grow, but it is threatened by greater increases in confidence, which make our increase in knowledge at the same time an increase in confusion, ignorance, and conceit.