It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending
A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion.
Know how to rank your beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.
Half of the people lie with their lips, the other half with their tears
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
