Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Or take the health category. Adding is on the left, removing to the right. Removing medication, or some other unnatural stressor—say, gluten, fructose, tranquilizers, nail polish, or some such substance—by trial and error is more robust than adding medication, with unknown side effects, unknown in spite of the statements about "evidence" and shmevidence.

Indeed, Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent "doing nothing." He published more than two hundred novels.

Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.

enjoy our blessings, and try to preserve, by becoming more conservative

Lembre-se também do que vimos no capítulo 2: a sobrecompensação, para funcionar, exige algum nível de dano e estressores como ferramentas de descoberta

There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation

The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain why you did something.

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal);

Winner-take-all effects are worsening:

In practice, it is done by threshold, for ease of execution, not complicated rules: you start betting aggressively whenever you have a profit, never when you have a deficit, as if a switch was turned on or off. This method is practiced by probably every single trader who has survived.

in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking in the same place twice.

who benefited from a market cycle.

They refuse the notion of design by a creator who knows everything, while, at the same time, want to impose human design as if they knew all the consequences. In general, the more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. The more they believe in their ability to forecast, the more they hate skin in the game. The more they wear suits and ties, the more they hate skin in the game.

enjoy our blessings, and try to preserve, by becoming more conservative, what we got by luck.

To understand progress: all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern, never natural or historical.

I believe that risk aversion does not exist: what we observe is, simply, a residual of ergodicity. People are, simply, trying to avoid financial suicide and take a certain attitude to tail risks.

Their strength is extremely domain-specific

we are led to the excessive use of specific products. This concentration is harmful.

3) The regulator's incentive to make complicated regulations in order to subsequently sell his "expertise" to the private sector.

Since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.

People who are not morally independent tend to fit ethics to their profession, rather than find a profession that fits their ethics.

You betrayed those who had high hopes for you

I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability

Because deprivation is a stressor—and we know what stressors do when allowed adequate recovery.