Bryant

“Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the “normal,” particularly with “bell curve” methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I have not forgotten about the REO Speedwagon incident. No more of that. Never.”
― Ace Atkins, The Revelators

“As former physicist Al Slawsky put it in the early 1990s, “It was a bad year for value investing. In my former life, there was never a ‘bad year’ for gravity.”
― Richard R. Lindsey, How I Became a Quant: Insights from 25 of Wall Street's Elite

“Bodies were piling up too fast in some places for medical examiners and coroners to keep up. Morgues were filled to capacity, and corpses had to be stored for days in rented refrigerated tractor-trailers until space became available. Many of the dead were not autopsied. It is standard procedure in a drug-overdose case to conduct an autopsy. But even if medical examiners had had time to autopsy every victim, some stopped themselves from doing so. Professional groups that accredit medical examiners set a limit on the number of autopsies that a doctor can competently perform in a year, and examiners in areas with large numbers of overdose deaths would have exceeded that number and risked losing their accreditation. As a result, when overdose victims were discovered near hypodermic needles or pill bottles, they went straight to their graves, unexamined.”
― Barry Meier, Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic