“ The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) thos… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono già morte. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Bob Rubin Trade: payoff in a skewed domain where the benefits are visible (and rewarded with some compensation) and the detriment is rare (and unpunished owing to absence of skin in the game). Can be… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: It’s simple.… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold—it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction—that innovation and sophistication spark from initial… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Contrary to conventional wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Consider a more extreme example than the casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars—this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. A… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
