Nicholas Nassim Taleb Quotes

#1. We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#2. Don't look for the precise and local. Simply; do not be narrow minded.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#3. Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#4. Author discussed what he calls the "narrative fallacy." This refers to our "limited ability" to look at a sequence of facts "without weaving an explanation into them.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#5. Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#6. Seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#7. Beware of precise plans by government. Let government predict: it makes them feel better about themselves and justifies their existence.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#8. Make a distinction between positive contingencies, and negative. Learn to distinguish between those human undertakings in which a lack of predictability has been extremely beneficial, and those where failure to understand the future has caused harm.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#9. Being an executive doesn't require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrowing schedules.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#10. Always remember that, in a modern environment, wars last longer and kill more people than is typically planned.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#11. Our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#12. Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work and thus cliques are formed of people who quote one another. It's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#13. Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#14. Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#15. There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them.
As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra once said, Don't waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists, except to play pranks on them.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb