“ The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and mo… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, a… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn’t mean that details are not relevant, only that those we te… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants.… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The central point: had Stiglitz been a businessman with his own money on the line, he would have blown up, terminated. Or had he been in nature, his genes would have been made extinct—so people with s… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mist… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The beast in this book is not just the bell curve and the self-deceiving statistician, nor the Platonified scholar who needs theories to fool himself with. It is the drive to focus on what makes sense… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The Federal Reserve bank protected them at our expense: when conservative bankers make profits, they get the benefits; when they are hurt, we pay the costs. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Technothinkers tend to have an engineering mind—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook cha… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Some people do not know their own interest—just consider addicts, workaholics, people trapped in a bad relationship, people who support large government, the press, book reviewers, or respectable bure… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, fo… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us (say with advice) but rather those who have actively… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Robust is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who dislike it (artists); fragile when you care more about the few who dislike your work than the multitude who like it… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all … just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches. For revolutions feed on repression, growin… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
