“innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“A Solution Waiting for a Problem Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not prospectively.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us)… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%).” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
