“ Members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer sim… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical discoveriesare accidental to something else. A… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It took me a lifetime to figure out the second point: implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent), Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In Arabic it is called Shhm—best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ From increasing the number of people in the tails, that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Experiments have shown that players rely on several heuristics. The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, an… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the because and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you s… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are mu… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ But at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Anything locked into planning tends to fail precisely because of these attributes—it is quite a myth that planning helps corporations: in fact we saw that the world is too random and unpredictable to… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ A system that doesn’t have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples—it depends on how the choices are presented to you. The Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerfu… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can w… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager. Why do they do so? Because they accept that this is what people should do with their savings, because… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
