Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Salespeople are experts in the art of psychological manipulation, making the client trade, often against his own interest

The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models

emotions depended on how frequently he checked his portfolio.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called "observational," ones in which the researcher finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data, can therefore fall into the trap of an invented narrative.

Mi idea es que algunos resultados científicos no sólo son inútiles en la vida real, porque infravaloran el impacto de lo altamente improbable (o nos llevan a ignorarlo), sino que es posible que algunos de ellos estén creando en realidad Cisnes Negros.

Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalized; whatever does not need a bailout should be free, small, and risk-bearing. We got ourselves into the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France, in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the United States in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

Some books cannot be summarized; some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.

qué humanista no desea minimizar la discrepancia entre los seres humanos?

An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid cancers (eradication of white blood cells). But

I did not feel ill, Symmache; now I do (after your ministrations)." (Non habui febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo).

The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

in the event of its going down, it could go down a lot. Suddenly

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to do this. I confess that I am not one of them; it does not come naturally to me.fn2

It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period rather than have it spread out over a longer one.

It is not your skills that are to blame.

So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.

So, "giving advice" as a sales pitch is fundamentally unethical—selling cannot be deemed advice.

Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest

Whenever your survival is in play, don't immediately look for causes and effects.

mistaking what we don't see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

I am simplifying numbers here for clarity.

My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.

and the two need to be kept separate.