“ 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 nonexistent. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's spleen, Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenc… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Frano Barović reading this chapter wrote to me: Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it. Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone—… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the b… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not of… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ English manners were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression rich as Croesus to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to be visited… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas S… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky. Luck is the grand equalizer, because almost everyone can benefit from it. The socialist govern… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ But one needs to be careful not to overgeneralize the Drachten effect, as it does not imply the effectiveness of removing all rules from society. As I said earlier, speed on the highway responds to a… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
