Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nero should have felt just as proud—and satisfied—had the envelope contained statements of losses.

I wanted to become a flaneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafes, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to anybody. I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea

The future is in the past.

shame-free policy is maximal transparency, even transparency of intentions.

When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total.

90 percent of all options expire as losses.

There is actually a law in statistics called the law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

We cannot teach people to withhold judgment; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects.

In the end this is a trivial decision making rule: I am very aggressive when I can gain exposure to positive Black Swans -- when a failure would be of small moment -- and very conservative when I am under threat from a negative Black Swan. I am very aggressive when an error in a model can benefit me, and paranoid when an error can hurt.

in Tony's case, free time was the result of productive insights.

he who does not have a past has no future.6

those hidden asymmetries that do not immediately come to mind

I suspect that there would be a species for which our ethical rules would be relaxed or possibly lifted.

Look at the implication for the Black Swan. Extremistan can produce Black Swans, and does, since a few occurrences have had huge influences on history. This is the main idea of this book.

that meant that 90 percent of all short option positions make money. If I want to use options to be bearish, I sell calls.

Pero hay otros problemas que surgen de nuestra ceguera ante el Cisne Negro: a) Nos centramos en segmentos preseleccionados de lo visto, y a partir de ahí generalizamos en lo no visto: el error de la confirmación.

Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it's denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it's a structural one. We need rehab.

so she could read it in the original.

El arte es una conversación unilateral con lo no observado.

Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias.

poverty makes experiences

investors are led to overestimate their chances of success.

commitment and signaling

Academic work, because of its attention-seeking orientation, can be easily subjected to Lindy effects: think of the hundreds of thousands of papers that are just noise, in spite of how hyped they were at the time of publication.