Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The tension between education, which loves order, and innovation, which loves disorder.

Why can’t we do things we can’t explain, and why do we have to explain things we do?

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.

The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

Black Swans hijack our brains, making us feel we “sort of” or “almost” predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable. We don’t realize the role of these Swans in life because of this illusion of predictability. Life is more, a lot more, labyrinthine than shown in our memory—our minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness.

it is hard to see how things work by looking at single parts

Indeed, the political discourse is lacking a concept.