Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung

take advantage of a valuable alternative that is superior to what precedes it

However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds.

To put it again in other words: it is rather a good thing to lose arguments.

This subtle but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. We misunderstand the logic of large deviations from the norm.

Aside from the misperception of one's performance, there is a social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.

And as a risk taker, only time counts—for I could fool my accountant with steady earnings with a lot of hidden risk, but time will eventually reveal them.

you never cure structural defects; the system corrects itself by collapsing.*2

Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri—either children or books, both information that carries through the centuries.

was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.

Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. The dentist did better when he dealt with monthly statements rather than more frequent ones. Perhaps it would be even better for him if he limited himself to yearly statements. (If you think that you can control your emotions, think that some people also believe that they can control their heartbeat or hair growth.)

Separé la persona «idea», que vende un producto intelectual en forma de una transacción o un determinado trabajo, de la persona «trabajo», que te vende su trabajo. Si se es persona «idea», no hay que trabajar duro, sólo pensar con intensidad. Se hace el mismo trabajo tanto si se producen cien unidades como si se producen mil.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal and sermonizing proverb, the harder it is to implement.

there is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event.

to figure out why ethics, moral obligations, and skills cannot be easily separable in real life, consider the following when you tell someone in a position of responsibility, say your bookkeeper, I trust you. Do you mean that one you trust his ethics?

but we always came back more resilient than before. We are now invincible.

did not cost him anything—except the emotional drain.

to accept the fact that I am rather emotional.

Es la misma llamada telefónica, el mismo proceso de computación, el mismo documento legal, el mismo gasto de células cerebrales, el mismo esfuerzo por verificar que la transacción es correcta.

The benefits of procrastination apply similarly to medical procedures: we saw that procrastination protects you from error as it gives nature a chance to do its job, given the inconvenient fact that nature is less error-prone than scientists.

I consider straw man no different from theft.

the time difference between formal discovery and first implementation

separating some people from their fortune would simplify their lives and bring great benefits in the form of healthy stressors.

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!