Top 100 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
#1. it did not so much judge the quality of a trader's performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups - like
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#3. The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#5. Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#6. The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#7. Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#9. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#11. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#12. Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#13. You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#15. Loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#16. True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#17. 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
#18. Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#20. It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#22. If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. Such
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#23. It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#24. 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
#26. A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#27. It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#28. If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#29. It is generally accepted that harm from doctors - not including risks from hospital germs - accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#30. There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent - and most conspicuous - and that is the world of markets. By
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#32. Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#33. Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#34. A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#35. that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#36. The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#37. We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#38. Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#39. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#41. Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#43. And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#44. If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#46. It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#47. I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#48. If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#51. We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#52. I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#53. I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#54. You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#55. Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#56. Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it - books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#57. Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#58. Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#59. But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#60. Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#62. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#63. Keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#65. The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#66. For Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don't count; surviving is what matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#67. Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#68. It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor,inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#69. Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#70. ...the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#71. To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#72. A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#73. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#74. Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#75. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#78. We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#79. Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#80. You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#81. So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#82. 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
#83. The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#84. Common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#85. We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#86. Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#87. The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#89. There is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#90. The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#91. The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#92. The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#93. Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#94. The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#95. In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#96. Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#97. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#98. The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story - to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#99. 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
#100. Now for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the role of Black Swans in increasing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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