Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile (2012)

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Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is something more severe than the problem with Thomas Friedman, which can be generalized to represent someone causing action while being completely unaccountable for his words.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don't have—in their portfolio.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb