"The Black Swan" was written by N.N. Taleb. Highly recommended book! This presentation contains some of the remarkable quotes and insights. (! images are from www.sxc.hu)

1. My favorite
Black Swan
quotes
Images: www.sxc.hu – “The Black Swan” was written by N.N. Taleb

2. Nobody
Knows
What’s
Going
On

3. We don’t learn
rules, just
facts
We tend to learn the precise, not the general…

4. The Platonic fold is the explosive
boundary where the Platonic mindset
enters in contact with the messy
reality, where the gap between what
you know and what you think you
know becomes dangerously wide.

5. Ideas come and go –
stories stay
Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than
ideas; they are easier to remember and more fun to read.

6. We tend to treat our knowledge
as personal property to be
protected and defended.

7. The minds of the gods
can not be read by just
watching their deeds.

8. Categorizing always produces
reduction in true complexity

9. There is nothing interesting
about the details of the
business world, which is
inelegant, dull,
pompous, greedy,
unintellectual,
selfish and
boring

10. The great strength of the free-
market system is the fact that
company executives
don’t
need to know
what’s
going on

11. Most [financial] traders are
“picking pennies in front of a
steamroller”
exposing themselves to the high-impact
rare event yet sleeping like
babies, unaware of it.

12. minimal but
[Organize yourself] to do
intense work, never attend business
“meetings”, avoid the company of “achievers” and
people in suits who don’t read books.

13. America is currently far more creative
than these nations of museumgoers and
equation solvers.
It is also far more tolerant of
bottom-up tinkering and
undirected trial and error.

14. Mediocristan is where we must
endure the tyranny of the
collective, the routine, the
obvious and the predicted;
Extremistan is where we are
subjected to the tyranny of
the singular, the
accidently, the unseen and the

15. For their lending business,
dull
banks hire people and
train them to be even more dull.

16. crippling
We harbor a
dislike for the
abstract.

17. The media seem to
want to be
wrong with
infinite
precision
(instead of
accepting being
approximately
right)

18. A nerd is simply someone who
thinks exceedingly
inside the box

19. Information is
BAD
for knowledge

20. When you are employed, hence
dependent on other people’s
judgment, looking busy can help
you claim responsibility for the
results in a random environment.

21. News shared with
no
millions has
added value
Additional knowledge of
the minutiae of daily
business can be useless,
even actually toxic.

22. The problem with experts
is that they do not know
what they do not know.

23. It is often said that
“is wise who can see
things coming”
Perhaps the wise one
is the one who knows
that he can not see
things far away.

24. Discoverers are
sleepwalkers
stumbling upon
results and not
realizing what they
have in their hands.

25. We build toys.
Some of those toys
change the world.

26. … a strange activity called the business
meeting, in which well-fed, but
sedentary, men voluntarily restrict
their blood circulation with an
expensive device called a necktie.

27. Don’t ask the barber whether
you need a haircut…
and don’t ask an
academic if what he
does is relevant.

28. Maximize the
serendipity
around you

29. American culture encourages the process of
failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and
Asia where failure is met with
stigma and embarrassment

30. The electricity blackout
experienced in the States
in 2003 is a perfect
example of what could
take place if one
of the big banks
went under today

31. In the last 50 years, the
ten most extreme days
in the financial markets
represent
half the returns

32. Worry less about
embarrassment than
about missing an opportunity