Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are some risks we just cannot afford to take. And there are other risks (of the type academics shun) that we cannot afford to not take.

I am not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one's own career—but such effect washes out at the country level.

Una teoria è come una medicina (o un governo): spesso inutile, a volte necessaria, sempre interessata e occasionalmente letale. Per questo dev'essere usata con attenzione, moderazione e sotto la supervisione di un adulto.

the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.

few want to jeopardize their jobs and reputation for the sake of change.

you can practice your freedom of religion so long as you allow me to practice mine; you have the right to contradict me so long as I have the right to contradict you.

have some element of loss aversion.

He will die with the impression of having done nothing useful.

it is hard to disentangle ethics on one hand, from knowledge and competence on the other ...

You argue with her to no avail (she is supposed to be the "expert").

The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin.

The simple one-way relationship which so entrances our politicians and commentators—education spending in, economic growth out—simply doesn't exist

it makes them much less dependent on economic forecasts. This allowed them to shrug off later crises.2

One needs to be intelligent in recognizing the favorable outcome and knowing what to discard.

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice.

many people become long-term investors after they lose money, postponing

I would like the option of having neither.

Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human. The converse should be true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human.

crave some form of attention

We are gliding into disorder, but not necessarily bad disorder. This implies that we will see more periods of calm and stability, with most problems concentrated into a small number of Black Swans.

This argument is not against adopting governmental educational policies for noble aims such as reducing inequality in the population, allowing the poor to access good literature and read Dickens, Victor Hugo, or Julien Gracq, or increasing the freedom of women in poor countries, which happens to decrease the birth rate. But then one should not use the excuses of "growth" or "wealth" in such matters.

Wealth does not count so much into one's well-being as the route one uses to get to it.

it looks like this is because of overmedication and excessive medical care.