Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
-
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
-
The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
-
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
-
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.
-
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.
-
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
-
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
-
Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
-
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
-
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
-
The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.
-
Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
-
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
-
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
-
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
-
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
-
Randomness works well in search-sometimes better than humans.
-
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
-
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
-
Only Ponzi schemes should 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.