If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read? and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Love without sacrifice is like theft
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
What I learned on my own I still remember
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.
Things always become obvious after the fact.
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up.
Remember that you are a Black Swan.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this nerdification, to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.
The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.
Trial and error is freedom.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
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.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
If you hear a prominent economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of absence.
The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative low risk game.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children's natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning . . . . Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the victims of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries,
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Only the autodidacts are free.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Ideas come and go, stories stay.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George
W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and experts without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though....
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.
I don’t run for trains. Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
If you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.
― Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
You need a story to displace a story.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.
― Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race looking out for its best interests, as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call positive effect, then on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first. How good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread those small effects across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news. The same is property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period, rather than have it spread out over a long time.
You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions.
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.
Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing--rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read--tend to be frustrated when they can't rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor,inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.
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 short-term cure.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO
There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.
It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.
You say, But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle. Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest. But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.
Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says f*** you to fate.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Scars signal skin in the game.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call the caviar left, la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs. Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
More data means more information, but it also means more false information.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.
When things go our way we reject the lack of certainty.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.
Finally, when young people who want to help mankind come to me asking, What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world, and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is good for you while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal sobs (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Never trust the words of a man who is not free.
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Luck is the grand equalizer.
No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
He tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
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.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly predict the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry's computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions!
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
An idea stats to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum.
How much you truly believe in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Let us return to pathemata mathemata (learning through pain) and consider its reverse: learning through thrills and pleasure. People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none. Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.
― Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.
So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire a man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and to him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
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 fitting the beds of rational models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.
― Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding effect). To take an obvious example, think about how many people divorce. Almost all of them are acquainted with the statistic that between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, something the parties involved did not forecast while tying the knot. Of course, not us, because we get along so well (as if others tying the knot got along poorly).
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads.
I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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 likes to overinsure itself.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don’t count—there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book,
― Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells and prevent diabetes.
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations--Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.
― Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a solution and creates a problem.
― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff or a rude reception. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance of occurrence of monstrous proportions. Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking at the gift horse in the mouth – remember you are a Black Swan.