Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Uncertainty did occasionally pay off there.

empirically, complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.

knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.

because the interactions are not necessarily linear.

Los hallazgos de Popper y de Poincaré limitan nuestra capacidad para ver en el futuro, haciendo de éste un reflejo muy complicado del pasado, si es que existe tal reflejo.

have made the claim that most of history comes from Black Swan events, while we worry about fine-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks.

Karl Marx, a visionary figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee The sacred is all about unconditionals ; the profane is all about conditionals

The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As

My point is that wisdom in decision making is vastly more important—not just practically, but philosophically—than knowledge.

My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like "recognition" and "credit" warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy.

to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself.

should avoid engaging in an action with a big downside if one has no idea of the outcomes.

I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity.

Anyone who listens to news is one step below sucker.

when you have a very limited loss you need to get as aggressive, as speculative, and sometimes as "unreasonable" as you can be.

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

the more nonlinear the response, the less relevant the average, and the more relevant the stability around such average.

At the limit, you can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave.

Nunca pergunte, a quem quer que seja, qual é sua opinião, previsão ou recomendação. Simplesmente pergunte o que a pessoa tem — ou não — em seu portfólio de investimentos.

We are most motivated to help those who need us the least.

Many are forced by peer and social pressures to do so

Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.

do not seem to be taken into account.

More than a third of the residents in London are foreign-born, and, in addition to immigrants