“ 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 tried—but eventually failed—to harm u… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is often with the most noble intentions that we do so, as we are pressured to fix things, so we often blow them up with our fear of randomness and love of smoothness. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It hit me right there and then that these antifragile hormetic responses were just a form of redundancy, and all the ideas of Mother Nature converged in my mind. It is all about redundancy. Nature lik… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In that sense the description coming from journalism is certainly not just an unrealistic representation of the world but rather the one that can fool you the most by grabbing your attention via your… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In that sense harboring superstitions is not irrational by any metric: nobody has managed to build a criterion for rationality based on actions that bear no cost. But actions that harm you are detecta… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In his book The Nature of Rationality he gets, as is typical with philosophers, into amateur evolutionary arguments and writes the following: Since not more than 50 percent of the individuals can be w… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observation… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national spo… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking in the same place twice. In Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad'. U… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
