Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

they remained fragile to the emotional toll from the compliments they did not get

Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don't formally understand anything.

except to make fun of them or provide a historical reference.

to show people how lacking in clarity they were in their thoughts, how little they knew about the concepts they used routinely

Much progress comes from the young because of their relative freedom from the system and courage to take action that older people lose as they become trapped in life.

the talker versus the doer.

Ainoa asia, jota onnetar ei säätele, on käyttäytymiseni.

try to benefit from rare events, events that do not tend to repeat themselves frequently, but, accordingly, present a large payoff when they occur.

I would not be the first to say that this optimization set back social science by reducing it from the intellectual and reflective discipline that it was becoming to an attempt at an "exact science." By "exact science," I mean a second-rate engineering problem for those who want to pretend that they are in the physics department—so-called physics envy. In other words, an intellectual fraud.

the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles. Equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context.

Realism can be punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse. It is difficult to go about life wearing probabilistic glasses, as one starts seeing fools of randomness all around, in a variety of situations—obdurate in their perceptional illusion. To start, it is impossible to read a historian's analysis without questioning the inferences:

withhold judgment in the absence of evidence

A man is morally free when Ã¢â'¬Â¦ he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).

but because most unseasoned ideas are fragile.

la acción del Cisne Negro se sitúa en Extremistán, no es más que una mera aproximación; les ruego que no la platonifiquen, no la simplifiquemos más de lo que sea necesario.

skin in the game is necessary to understand the world.

will side in favor of Rav Safra's action in the debate.

gives me some form of advantage.

The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

It has been difficult for people to understand that, historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favour of others being religious).

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.