Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

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

Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events. So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.

Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence

The rationality part lies in keeping what is good and ditching the bad, knowing to take the profits