Nassim Nicholas Taleb Details

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....

You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.