“ If both the positive and the negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast. But often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visi… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealt… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness—very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. S… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because;… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I once procrastinated and kept delaying a spinal cord operation as a response to a back injury—and was completely cured of the back problem after a hiking vacation in the Alps, followed by weight-lift… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obt… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I don’t mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all social scientists who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the intellectual profession who bothers me. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the intellectual profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a s… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ How much you truly believe in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ He is often involved in a strange ritual, something commonly called a meeting. Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not unde… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.* Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terr… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will su… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ For The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves Nassim Nicholas Taleb
