Nassim Taleb

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.

Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.

In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined — another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.

When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.

If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.

I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff or a rude reception. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance of occurrence of monstrous proportions. Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking at the gift horse in the mouth – remember you are a Black Swan.

The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden — just as Germans still pay for war crimes — would immediately add consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a true disincentive, without imparting any sense of heroism or martyrdom to the families in question.

I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about — and the reader is no fool.

Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.

Consider a more extreme example than the casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars — this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money. If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis, he would have claimed that one has an 83.33 percent chance of gains, for an “expected” average return per shot of $833,333. But if you keep playing Russian roulette, you will end up in the cemetery. Your expected return is … not computable.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth — remember that you are a Black Swan.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Further, skin in the game creates diversity, not monoculture. Economic insecurity worsens the condition. Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists, as we saw with GMOs, the Syrian wars, etc. You say something unpopular in that profession about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, and you become history. This is the opposite of business where me-tooism is penalized.