If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.