Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.
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.
Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.
Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.