To understand "progress": all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome). - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness — for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won’t affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad.

Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

An economist is a mixture of 1) a businessman without common sense, 2) a physicist without brain, and 3) a speculator without balls.