Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists

If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.

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

We humans scorn what is not concrete. We are more easily swayed by a crying baby than by thousands of people dying elsewhere that do not make it into our dining room. The one case is a tragedy, the other a statistic.

The problem lies in the structure of our minds:

Lembre-se da assimetria fundamental: o antifrágil beneficia-se com a volatilidade e a desordem; o frágil é prejudicado. Bem, tempo e desordem são a mesma coisa.

humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger.

it had gotten France and Britain heavily in debt; they incurred at least ten times what they thought their financial costs would be

We saw that bureaucrats (whether in government or large corporations) live in a system of rewards based on narratives

those who don't take risks should never be involved in making decisions.

Even trial and error are a form of barbell.

Stay human, take as much as you can, under the condition that you give more than you take.

whatever they are guessing has about a 2 percent chance to fall outside their range.

causing it to become heavily indebted, mostly to the United States.

It is often said that "is wise he who can see things coming." Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed.

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.

In fact we humans are very bad at filtering information, particularly short-term information, and procrastination can be a way for us to filter better, to resist the consequences of jumping on information, as we discuss next.

we should first make things more robust to defects and forecast errors, or even exploit these errors, making lemonade out of the lemons.

Lo único que digo aquí es que no debemos estar ciegos a la antifragilidad natural de los sistemas ni a su capacidad para cuidarse solos, y que debemos reprimir la tendencia a dañarlos y fragilizarlos negándoles la ocasión de hacerlo.

People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are hard-headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them, like spending eighteen hours a day perfecting their doctoral thesis.

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: