Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....

It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for theera. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb world

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb world

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb war

Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb advice

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb failure

Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb people

Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb success

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb light

Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb reality

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb good

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb light

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb mind

I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb money

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

At no point during his ordeal didthink of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb self

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb belief

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb person

's ruler: "Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler." (page 224)

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb confidence

[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb knowledge

[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb age

[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb knowledge

Random House, 2008,

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb random

I disagree with the followers ofand those of : the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb war

If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb god

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb people

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb confidence

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb knowledge

Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb confidence

The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known,(i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb man

Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb political

Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb age

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb anxiety

The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb death

One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb knowledge

While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb random

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb belief

This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb living

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating . We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb work

Article published in Financial Times (). Article .

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb time

The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb war

Onlyshould depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb men

Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb sin

Economic life should be . We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their(which they do not control).

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb love

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb science

Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb failure

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb soul

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb advice

It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb you

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb you

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb day

The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb book

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb religion

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb reading

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb dream

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb need

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb wisdom

What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best .

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb time

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb man

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb money

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb person

Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb people

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb men

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb work

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb logic

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, .

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb history

What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb work

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb pain

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb philosophy

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb self

The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb focus

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb courage

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb intelligence

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb art

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb men

Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb belief

Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb men

When conflicted between two choices, take neither.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb choices

For the robust, an error is information.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb information

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb wisdom

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb intelligence

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb life

We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb gratitude

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb wise

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