Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

When a principle is strong and (you feel) imperative, everything you do to justify it or rationalize it makes it weaker. Everything.

When immigration is done by single individuals, it is immigration. When done by groups, it is invasion.

Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her. The first-order information is the intensity: what matters is the effort the critic puts into trying to prevent others from reading the book, or, more generally in life, it is the effort in badmouthing someone that matters, not so much what is said. So if you really want people to read a book, tell them it is “overrated,” with a sense of outrage (and use the attribute “underrated” for the opposite effect).

Psychologists have the illusion that I am writing this critique of IQ for them. No. Never argue theology w/a Salafi Sheikh. Psychologists are the losers in & out of campus. I am writing to expose the lack of rigor of these "metrics" to "intelligent" scientists & Fat Tonies.

Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel — just as fire does.

The sucker problem is to think that those for whom you feel compassion would also feel compassion for those weaker and more afflicted than they are.

Those who aren't in it for the money won't tell you that they aren't in it for the money.

The idea of is that nobody shd cause risk to others without impunity.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare.

never trust the words of a man who is not free.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.

A very useful heuristic, a potent filter: When someone criticizes you, train to immediately ask yourself: "Would I rather be him/her, or I'd rather be me?" before taking the remark at face value. It works wonders.

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.

we are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.