“The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.”
“The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).”
“What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly ImprobableFragility
“I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“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.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.”
“Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Simplicity is not so simple to attain.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“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.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
