Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I will only very briefly discuss the crisis of 2008 (which took place after the publication of the book, and which was a lot of things, but not a Black Swan, only the result of fragility in systems built upon ignorance—and denial—of the notion of Black Swan events. You know with near certainty that a plane flown by an incompetent pilot will eventually crash).

mi heurística me sugiere que cuanto más pagano sea alguien, más brillante es su mente, y mayor capacidad tiene para gestionar matices y ambigüedades.

One of life's machinations is to make some people both rich and unhappy, that is, jointly fragile and deprived of hope.

Tengo la esperanza de que algún día la ciencia y quienes toman las decisiones redescubran lo que los antiguos siempre supieron, concretamente que la moneda de mayor valor es el respeto.

Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy

yet people do it out of the foolish risk-taking trait that pushes us to jump into such adventures blinded by the outcome.

their intuition getting in the way and blinding them.

I do not consider that resisting new technology is necessarily irrational: waiting for time to operate its testing might be a valid approach if one holds that we have an incomplete picture of things.

Besides narrative and causality, journalists and public intellectuals of the sound-bite variety do not make the world simpler. Instead, they almost invariably make it look far more complicated than it is.

in the long term, social and economic evolution nastily takes place by surprises, discontinuities, and jumps.

which a loss is more painful than a gain is pleasant):

the person who made a false accusation was punished as if he committed the exact crime.

Those who go the extra mile are rewarded.

Why was the change so abrupt?

We inherited the taste for uncalculated risk taking. Should we encourage such behavior?

parties are great for optionality).

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

He speaks with minimal effort, as if what he is discussing is "not a big deal.

anything that takes you away from the doctor and allows you to do nothing (hence gives nature a chance to do its work) will be beneficial.

Most people give up before the rewards.

many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change.

In fact, economic growth comes from such risk taking.

we are simply not wise enough to be trusted with knowledge.

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units.