When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.
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The Bed of Procrustes
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series is an investigation of luck, uncertainty, probability, opacity, human error, risk, disorder, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand, in nonoverlapping and standalone books. All four volumes—An
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The rules you explain are less convincing than the ones you don’t explain—or have to explain.
Never take investment advice from someone who has to work for a living.
Money corrupts those who talk (and write) about it more than those who earn it.
They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
It takes a lot of intellect and confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.
Trust those who are greedy for money a thousand times more than those who are greedy for credentials.
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.
Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not.
Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.
Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.
Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature.
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.
When people say, 'I am investing for the long term,' it means they are losing money.
Paganism is decentralized theology.
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.