Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
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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.
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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.
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The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
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When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
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All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
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Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
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I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
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At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.
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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.
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Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
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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.
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You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
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Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
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I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
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Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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Randomness works well in search-sometimes better than humans.
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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.
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We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes -fragile otherwise.
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.