“ B) The more volatile the something—the more uncertainty—the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends m… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Today we depend on the press for such essentially human things as gossip and anecdotes and we care about the private lives of people in very remote places. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic para… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The Swiss doctor Claparède had an amnesic patient completely crippled with her ailment. Her condition was so bad that he would have to reintroduce himself to her at a frequency of once per fifteen min… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Second category, practitioners who, instead of studying future events, try to understand how things react to volatility (but practitioners are usually too busy practitioning to write books, articles,… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency. Many Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Randomness in the end is just unknowledge. the world is opaque and appearances fool us Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ My antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It did not so much judge the quality of a trader’s performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups—like Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ If something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it efficient inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Domain-specific I mean that our reactions, our mode of thinking, our intuitions, depend on the context in which the matter is presented, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be ar… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
