Quotes About Taleb

Counterfactuals highlight how radically open the possibilities once were and how easily our best-laid plans can be blown away by flapping butterfly wings. Immersion in what-if history can give us a visceral feeling for Taleb's vision of radical indeterminacy.

The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

Taleb likes to invoke Popper: 'No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species' tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.

Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t. Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.

It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.

Almost all people answer that the opposite of fragile is robust, resilient, solid, or something of the sort. But the resilient, robust (and company) items that neither break nor improve, so you would not need to write anything on them--have you ever seen a package with robust in thick green letters stamped on it? Logically, the exact opposite of a fragile parcel would be a package on which one has written please mishandle or please handle carelessly.

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.

respect for the weak being, after intellectual courage, the second most attractive quality to this author)

As Yogi Berra said, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.

And, as expected, via negativa is part of classical wisdom. For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it—particularly in intellectual life. The

An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park. It is under such an oversensitive bull***t detector that I have been writing this book.

we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.