“ So I disagree with the followers of Marx and and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This inverse proble… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-decei… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Popper’s falsificationism is intimately connected to the notion of an open society. An open society is one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter-ideas to emerge. Karl… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Pero las ventas de un libro o la magnitud de los sucesos sociales no siguen este tipo de restricciones. Cuesta mucho más de mil días aceptar que un escritor carece de talento, que no se producirá un c… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding e… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotio… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.* Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the pub… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the non… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Now for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nation… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right—the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flâneur. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment,… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
