Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....
[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
We tend to use knowledge as therapy.