Antifragile by Nassim Taleb - Quotes
June 2025 (308 Words, 2 Minutes)
(…) Let us not confuse rationalizing with rational — the two are almost always exact opposites.
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance — the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance.
Debt always (…) fragilizes economic systems.
Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We humans have two kidneys (this may even include accountants), extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say, lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus), while human design tends to be spare and inversely redundant, so to speak — we have a historical track record of engaging in debt, which is the opposite of redundancy (fifty thousand in extra cash in the bank or, better, under the mattress, is redundancy; owing the bank an equivalent amount, that is, debt, is the opposite of redundancy). Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens — usually.
You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
(…) The mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, a mistake that we will see tends to prevail in intellectual circles and one that is grounded in the social sciences.
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion - in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to.
I wonder why people don’t realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking.
Clearly, it is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking. My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible — they do not have to put much energy into turning their insights and internal coherence into elegant style and narratives.
History has been written by those who want you to believe that reasoning has a monopoly or near monopoly on the production of knowledge.
Indeed, the most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent - something Nietzsche figured out.
Since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.
Religion has invisible purposes beyond what the literal-minded scientistic-scientifiers identify - one of which is to protect us from scientism, that is, them.