Brano Beres

“Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic—even then—your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or twenty would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the school (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the difference between top ten and top two thousand schools). The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on the repository site arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low-quality fields like academic finance (where papers are usually some form of complicated storytelling), the “prestige” of the journal is the sole criterion.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde