Here's my favorite aphorisms by Nassim Taleb.
- Your brain is most intelligent when you don't instruct it on what to do - something people who take showers discover on occasion.
- It is harder to say no when you really mean it than when you don't.
- The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain why you did something.
- There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
- Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
- Under opacity, incomplete information, and partial understanding, much of what we don't understand is labeled "irrational".
- Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
- What I learned on my own I still remember.
- The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
- You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.
- To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
- Knowledge is subtractive, not additive - what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).
- When someone starts a sentence with "simply", you should expect to hear something very complicated.
- The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.
- It is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.
- You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
- When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.
- Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
- Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.
What's your favorite?
