- Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature.
- People reveal much more about themselves while lying than when they tell the truth.
- Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
- Most info-Webmedia-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people’s heads.
- Supposedly, if you are uncompromising or intolerant with BS you lose friends. But you will also make friends, better friends.
- True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.
- Another marker for charlatans: they don’t voice opinions that can get them in trouble.
- You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.
- Even the cheapest misers can be generous with advice.
- Trust those who are greedy for money a thousand times more than those who are greedy for credentials. [Curious what people think about this. In some cases credentials can mean reputation.]
- When conflicted between two choices, take neither.*
- They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
- In twenty-five centuries, no human came along with the brilliance, depth, elegance, wit, and imagination to match Plato—to protect us from his legacy.
- For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
- The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.
More from Taleb’s own website
