Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. So I will expose the transfer of fragility, or rather the theft of antifragility, by people "arbitraging" the system. These people will be named by name. Poets and painters are free, liberi poetae et pictores, and there are severe moral imperatives that come with such freedom. First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to these tasks the "duty" of attending opera performances. The

Talvez a ideia por trás do capitalismo seja um efeito iatrogênico inverso, as consequências involuntárias-mas-não-tão-involuntárias: o sistema facilita a conversão de objetivos egoístas (ou, para ser correto, não necessariamente benevolentes) no nível individual para resultados benéficos ao coletivo.

Modernity provides too many variables (but too little data per variable), and the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information, as noise is convex and information is concave. Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.

Stay robust to how others treat you.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know.

Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.

Take this simple heuristic—does the scientific researcher whose ideas are applicable to the real world apply his ideas to his daily life? If so, take him seriously. Otherwise, ignore him.

the worst pain inflicted on you will come from someone who at some point in your life cared about you.

Imagine what might have happened had you not missed your train

Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.

called the lending rate, the interest rate in the economy (and has proved to be good at it). The libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul was called a crank for suggesting the abolition of the Federal Reserve, or even restricting its role. But he would also have been called a crank for suggesting the creation of an agency to control other prices.

La tesis central de Popper es que, para predecir los sucesos históricos, es necesario predecir la innovación tecnológica, algo en sí mismo fundamentalmente impredecible.

Given that it was not predictable, you are not to blame.

Someone with optionality—the right to pick and choose his story—is only reporting on what suits his purpose.

he has no clue as to what he was talking about.

His argument was criticized for being rather incomplete.

Laws come and go; ethics stay.

How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts.

how rich you'd be today had you liquidated your portfolio at the height of the NASDAQ bubble).

the notion of incentives as limited to financial gain cannot otherwise explain the very existence of an economics academia that promotes the idea of self-interest.

People don't walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.

with unknown side effects