Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
Wittgenstein's ruler: "Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler." (page 224)
Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.
What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.