Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.
Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.
The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.
The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.
Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.