Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile (2012)

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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What is non-measurable and non-predictable will remain non-measurable and non-predictable... no matter how much hate mail I get.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb