“ Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating i… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situation… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their b… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Ca… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story—to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a sh… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?† Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something s… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is g… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that’s what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their nec… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
