My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into under… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

It took 5 volumes to get the main point: "The main thread is that while there is inordinate uncertainty about what is going on, there is great certainty about what one should do about it."

Maximizing the probability of winning does not lead to maximizing the expectation from the game when one's strategy may include , i.e., a small chance of a large loss and a large chance of a small win. If you engaged in a Russian Roulette-type strategy... you are likely to show up as the winner in almost all samples—except in the year when you are dead.

In most disciplines... asymmetry does not matter. ...People in most fields ...do not have problems eliminating extreme values from their sample, when the difference in payoff between different outcomes is not significant ...A professor ...removes the ...s, and takes the average of the remaining ones, without ...being ...unsound. A casual weather forecaster does the same ...So people in finance borrow the technique and ignore infrequent events, not knowing that the effect ...can bankrupt a company.