“Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Remember that you are a Black Swan.”
“If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.”
“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“To bankrupt a fool, give him information.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
“They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“What I learned on my own I still remember”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.”
“Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Love without sacrifice is like theft”
“The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”
“I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.”
“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.”
Source: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
“By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Luck is the grand equalizer.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
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; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”
“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”
Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile
“I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.”
“Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.”
“Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.”
Source: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
