Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom. –

Even more: dependence on circumstances—rather, the emotions that arise from circumstances—induces a form of slavery.

in spite of how hyped they were at the time of publication.

If the "law of the jungle" means anything, it means collaboration for the most part, with a few perceptional distortions caused by our otherwise well-functioning risk-management intuitions. Even predators end up in some type of arrangement with their prey.

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves.

Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them.

Another case where economists may inspire us but should never tell us what to do

the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality);

Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later turn out to be breakthroughs.

It is not just bailouts: government interference in general tends to remove skin in the game.

The interactions matter more than the nature of the units.

People who are employees for a living don't behave so opportunistically.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all … just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches." For revolutions feed on repression, growing heads faster and faster as one literally cuts a few off by killing demonstrators. There is an Irish revolutionary song that encapsulates the effect: The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become.

é uma grande lenda acreditar que o planejamento ajuda as corporações: com efeito, vimos que o mundo é aleatório e imprevisível demais para que uma política seja baseada na visibilidade do futuro. O que sobrevive vem da interação entre alguma aptidão e as condições ambientais.

regardless of their levels of sophistication and learning.

Things that have worked for a long time are preferable - they are more likely to have reached their ergodic states. At the worst, we don't know how long they'll last.

The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence—yet the rarer the event, the more confident these "scientists" involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferences with equations in multicolor background have become.

There is a category of people, generally finance academics, who, instead of fitting their actions to their brains, fit their brains to their actions. These people go back and unwittingly cheat with the statistics to justify their actions. In my business, they fool themselves with statistical arguments to justify their option selling.

Political parties are hierarchical, they are designed in a way to substitute someone's own decision making with a well-defined protocol.

Lovers of paychecks are lazy…but they would never let you down at times like these.

forcing us to add an extra layer of protection

I am now thinking of the next step: to recreate a low-information, more deterministic ancient time, say in the nineteenth century, all the while benefiting from some of the technical gains (such as the Monte Carlo engine), all of the medical breakthroughs, and all the gains of social justice of our age. I would then have the best of everything. This is called evolution.

Most of the debate between creationists and evolutionary theorists (of which I do not partake) lies in the following: creationists believe that the world comes from some form of design while evolutionary theorists see the world as a result of random changes by an aimless process. But it is hard to look at a computer or a car and consider them the result of aimless process. Yet they are.