Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situations.

There are two categories in which random events fall: Mediocristan and Extremistan. Mediocristan is thin-tailed and affects the individual without correlation to the collective. Extremistan, by definition, affects many people. Hence Extremistan has a systemic effect that Mediocristan doesn't. Multiplicative risks—such as epidemics—are always from Extremistan. They may not be lethal (say, the flu), but they remain from Extremistan.

history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers)

Too much success is the enemy (think of the punishment meted out on the rich and famous); too much failure is demoralizing. I would like the option of having neither.

Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers;

occasional starvation produces some health benefits and

Medieval medicine was also based on equilibrium ideas when it was top-down and similar to theology. Luckily its practitioners went out of business, as they could not compete with the bottom-up surgeons, ecologically driven former barbers who gained clinical experience, and after whom a-Platonic clinical science was born. If I am alive, today, it is because scholastic top-down medicine went out of business a few centuries ago.

because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable

Had it not been for the discovery of antibiotics, only a few decades earlier, I would not be here today.

You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence.

At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.

his conversation becomes mere chitchat around the point, never getting to the central idea.

So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process, or the role of such a process, a loop:

The doer wins by doing, not convincing.

The resulting measure of future uncertainty satisfies our ingrained desire to simplify even if that means squeezing into one single number matters that are too rich to be described that way.

Empirically, if you want an author to cross a few generations

If people were rational, their rationality would cause them to figure patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

Tales tinha o direito — mas não a obrigação — de usar as prensas caso houvesse um súbito aumento na demanda; a outra parte tinha a obrigação, mas não o direito. Tales pagou um preço pequeno por esse privilégio, com uma perda limitada e um grande resultado possível. É a primeira opção de que se tem registro. A opção é um agente da antifragilidade.

I hope I've sufficiently drilled home the notion that, as a practitioner, my thinking is rooted in the belief that you cannot go from books to problems, but the reverse, from problems to books. This approach incapacitates much of that career-building verbiage. A scholar should not be a library's tool for making another library

One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.

We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar "because" no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality).

It was a barbell—play it safe at school and read on your own, have zero expectation from school.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible.

In the days of Suetonius, 60% of prominent educators (grammarians) we slaves. Today the ratio is 97.1%, and growing.