Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I started to see the consequences of the idea.

So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small "affects" across time as evenly as possible.

Excess wealth, if you don't need it, is a heavy burden.

The freer Nero's time, the more compelled he felt to compensate for lost time in filling gaps in his natural interests

Compendiaria res improbitas, virtusque tarda—the villainous takes the short road, virtue the longer one. In other words, cutting corners is dishonest.

People are scared of the alternative.

provided one is acting for the benefit of the collective.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.

The way to remedy this is through meta-analyses of scientific studies, in which an überresearcher peruses the entire literature, which includes the less-advertised articles, and produces a synthesis.

it depends on how the choices are presented to you.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.

Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.

We see flaws in others and not in ourselves.

In other words, history teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. It can teach us a lot outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson. In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied

The sea gets deeper as you go further into it

Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness, particularly the Black Swan type of randomness.

And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.

It qualified as a Black Swan, but I did not know the expression then.

But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it. Heuristics

When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.

Less is more and usually more effective.

traditions provide an aggregation of filtered collective knowledge

Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations.