Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.

A BS DETECTION HEURISTIC The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the person had to succeed in spite of the credentialization of his competitors and overcome more serious hurdles. In addition, people who didn’t go to Harvard are easier to deal with in real life.

Religions are not quite religions: some are philosophies, others are just legal systems.

be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.

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.

Public companies, like human cells, are programmed for apoptosis, suicide through debt and hidden risks. Bailouts invest the process with a historical dimension.

Newspapers used to be written by journalists; they are now written for journalists.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.

My point: life is not about outcomes, it's how you handle adversity. Suffering doesn't prevent you from being a role model, to the contrary --depends how you handle it. Popping pills does disqualify you.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (one of the doer-Stoic authors), “fire feeds on obstacles.

for Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don’t count; surviving is what matters.

I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.

The path to mediocrity is paved with platitudes.

We tend to define "rude" less by the words used (what is said) than by the status of the recipient (to whom it is addressed).