Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. Hence, laws come and go; ethics stay.

every search has incrementally a higher probability of yielding a result

there is no way to derive profits from traded securities since these instruments have automatically incorporated all the available information. Public information can therefore be useless

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

Needless to say they were usually sleep-deprived.

Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.

What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.

they are explicitly designed to benefit from market volatility.

So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. All pieces of information are not equal in importance.

We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence

to how deep the author wants to go into a topic

the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish.

otherwise the odds would be too low to get here just by luck.

I have gotten closer to my dream life thanks

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off.

Even Fleming lost faith in the idea before it was subsequently revived.

a system that doesn't have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives.

Risk and ruin are different tings.

than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of French lovers.

You may not know in your mind where you are going, but you know it by doing.

Change for the sake of change, as we see in architecture, food, and lifestyle, is frequently the opposite of progress.