Felipe

“After all, it so happens that someone needs to pay the salaries of macroeconomists and post-colonial gender “experts.” And university education needs to compete with professional training workshops: once upon a time, studying postcolonial theories could help one get a job other than serving French fries. No longer.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Forecasting, especially when done with “science,” is often the last refuge of the charlatan, and has been so since the beginning of times”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains.
The IYI has been wrong, historically, about Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, trans-fats, Freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, HFCS (HighFructose Corn Syrup), Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, marathon running, selfish genes, election-forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup), and p-values. But he is still convinced that his current position is right.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“If you say something crazy you will be deemed crazy. But if you create a collection of, say, twenty people who set up an academy and say crazy things accepted by the collective, you now have “peer-reviewing” and can start a department in a university.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life