Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...
[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)