Nicholas Nassim Taleb Quotes

Being an executive doesn't require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrowing schedules.

Always remember that, in a modern environment, wars last longer and kill more people than is typically planned.

Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes,and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born, and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule?
Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?

Seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity.

Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work and thus cliques are formed of people who quote one another. It's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business.

Beware of precise plans by government. Let government predict: it makes them feel better about themselves and justifies their existence.

Our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught.

Many people confuse the statement "almost all terrorists are Moslems" with "almost all Moslems are terrorists." Assume that the first statement is true, that 99 percent of terrorists are Moslems. This would mean that only about .001 percent of Moslems are terrorists, since there are more than one billion Moslems and only, say, ten thousand terrorists, one in a hundred thousand. So the logical mistake makes you (unconsciously) overestimate the odds of a randomly drawn individual Moslem person (between the age of, say, fifteen and fifty) being a terrorist by close to fifty thousand times!

[...]Our inferential machinery, that which we use in daily life, is not made for a complicated environment in which a statement changes markedly when its wording is slightly modified. Consider that in a primitive environment there is no consequential difference between the statements "most killers are wild animals" and "most wild animals are killers". There is an error here, but it is almost inconsequential. Our statistical intuitions have not evolved for a habitat in which these subtleties can make a big difference.

Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk.

Don't look for the precise and local. Simply; do not be narrow minded.

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.

Author discussed what he calls the "narrative fallacy." This refers to our "limited ability" to look at a sequence of facts "without weaving an explanation into them.

Make a distinction between positive contingencies, and negative. Learn to distinguish between those human undertakings in which a lack of predictability has been extremely beneficial, and those where failure to understand the future has caused harm.