Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

and news shared with millions gives you no real advantage.

I have gotten closer to my dream life thanks to the

the tendency not to reverse opinions you already have.

the drastic changes brought about by unpredictable discoveries

He provides the example of a philosopher who puzzles about the reality of time, but who nonetheless applies for a research grant to work on the philosophical problem of time during next year's sabbatical—without doubting the reality of next year's arrival.

1) how a collection of units doesn't behave like a sum of units

I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time

looks half my age though he is only slightly younger than I

Luck favors the prepared

It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions.

Nunca pergunte às pessoas o que elas querem, ou para onde querem ir, ou para onde pensam que deveriam ir, ou, pior ainda, o que elas pensam que desejarão amanhã. A força do empreendedor do ramo da computação Steve Jobs estava, precisamente, em desconfiar das pesquisas de mercado e dos grupos de foco — aqueles com o objetivo de perguntar às pessoas o que elas querem — e seguir sua própria imaginação.

They had all the means to develop a spinning machine, but "nobody tried"—another example of knowledge hampering optionality. They probably needed someone like Steve Jobs—blessed with an absence of college education and the right aggressiveness of temperament—to take the elements to their natural conclusion. As we will see in the next section, it is precisely this type of uninhibited doer who made the Industrial Revolution happen.

A random series will always present some detectable pattern. I

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life)

Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.

One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Émile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense.

the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns. Ten days in fifty years. Meanwhile, we are mired in chitchat.

too high a rate of mutation prevents locking in the benefits of previous changes: evolution (and progress) requires some, but not too frequent, variation.

They seem to be excited about something terribly unimportant

way too many cooks in the same tiny kitchen, most of whom never have to taste the food.

The dream of having computers behave like humans is coming true, with the transformation, in a single generation, of humans into computers.

I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what's done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics.

good news is good news first; how good matters rather little.

this was his most significant insight, but it remains his least known.