“ One cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way). Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. E… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and erro… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Yet in spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comf… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us f… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We can discuss this point from different angles. Experts call one manifestation of such denigration of history historical determinism. In a nutshell we think that we would know when history is made; w… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We are not naïve enough to believe that someone will be immortal because we have never seen him die, or that someone is innocent of murder because we have never seen him kill. The problem of naïve gen… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Those who think religion is about belief don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The persecution of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, n… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The story of the exquisite cadavers is as follows. In the aftermath of the First World War, a collection of surrealist poets—which included André Breton, their pope, Paul Eluard, and others—got togeth… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly pr… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitt… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
