I’ve picked out some which provide some insight into innovation. Taleb suggests that aphorisms are devalued when explained, which is probably true, so I won’t expand on them. One of his main themes is that when faced with systems which can neither be understood nor predicted, people will try to frame the situation in a way that provides the illusion of certainty, and that this leads to major problems. Obviously an important point for those who court uncertainty by pursuing innovation.

Here we go:

The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible.

We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.

For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.

Knowledge is subtractive not additive – what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).

They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).

The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

It’s a challenging book, and it’s worth a read.