Academics, when they leave academia become at best back-office support staff, not decision-makers. Not like the grocery store owner who owns his own … - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.

The opposite of success isn't failure; it is name dropping.

This book is the synthesis of, on one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated with probabilistic outcomes and, on the other, the aesthetically obsessed, literature-loving human being willing to be fooled by any form of nonsense that is polished, refined, original, and tasteful. I am not capable of avoiding being the fool of randomness; what I can do is confine it to where it brings some aesthetic gratification.