Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure."

"Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory."

"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...."

"You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race."

"[H]istory cannot lend itself to experimentation. But... is potent enough... to eventually bury the bad guy. Bad trades catch up with you... Mathematicians of probability give that a... name: . [R]oughly... properties of a very... long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. ...Those unlucky... in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool... would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each ...would revert to his long-term properties."

"Much of the research into humans risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave."

"There are hordes of thoughtful journalists... [I]t is just that prominent media journalism is a thoughtless process of providing the noise that captures peoples attention and there exists no mechanism for separating the two."

"A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable..."

"Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns. ...[O]ne sees the variance, little else. ...Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. ...I deal with it by having no access to information. ...I prefer to read poetry."

"Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance."

"Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category."

"My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup..."