Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Justice

"Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant."

"ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it."

"I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns."

"In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio."

"It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

"You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative."

"I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price."

"There are hordes of thoughtful journalists... t is just that prominent media journalism is a thoughtless process of providing the noise that captures people's attention and there exists no mechanism for separating the two."

"Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky... free of the evolutionary rare event, the "best" operators in a given business can... One vicious attribute is that the longer these... can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it. ...hould one extend time to infinity, then by, that event will happen with certainty—the species will be wiped out! For evolution means fitness to... only one time series, not the average of all possible environments."